Two Poems by Lucille Clifton
if i should
to Clark Kent
enter the darkest room
in my house and speak
with my own voice, at last,
about its awful furniture,
pulling apart the covering
over the dusty bodies: the randy
father, the husband holding ice
in his hand like a blessing,
the mother bleeding into herself
and the small imploding girl,
i say if i should walk into
that web, who will come flying
after me, leaping tall buildings?
you?
from The Book of Light (1993)
a song of mary
somewhere it being yesterday.
i a maiden in my mother’s house.
the animals silent outside.
is morning.
princes sitting on thrones in the east
studying the incomprehensible heavens.
joseph carving a table somewhere
in another place.
i watching my mother.
i smiling an ordinary smile.
from Two-Headed Woman (1980)
***
Meredith Martin Writes:
Lucille Clifton is one of those poets who blew my mind when I was first reading poems as a young woman. My mentor at the time, poet Paulann Petersen, gave me Good Woman, a collection of her earlier books and a memoir. I had never read any voice like this, and it was a voice, in a way that I’ve since trained myself to think against. Her “homage” poems (”to my hips” especially) carried fierce feminist salvos — and humor. Hers was a world of sisters and mothers and women who had to make it on their own in a man’s world. Re-telling biblical tales alongside tales of “ordinary” women, I learned that the ordinary and extraordinary were almost always intertwined. She’s more interested in Clark Kent than Superman, and her Mary is a regular woman with some intense dreams. Her “two-headed woman” has “one face turned outward / one face / swiveling slowly in.” I see these poems as those two sides: the first giving us a sense of what happens when the gaze is fixed inward and the second teaching us something new, something ordinary, through a differently imagined perspective.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I’ve always liked the title-running-into-first-line device Clifton uses here (I associate it with Marianne Moore, though I’m sure she wasn’t the first to do it), and I like the way Clifton plays with it here, breaking in with the dedicatee’s name. Now that I think about it, it’s really a pretty strange maneuver: wouldn’t it have made more sense to title the poem “to clark kent,” and have the first line be “if i should”? Does anyone have any theories about why she might have wanted to present it this way?
April 8th, 2008 at 12:21 am
No revelations here, but I’ve been thinking about this practice as I read through Ted Berrigan. For him, addressing a lyric to a certain person allows him to enter a private landscape with personal memories the only landmarks and orientation points.
Here, for instance, is his sonnet “Innocents Abroad.” I suspect the blog will break the spacing. It should be in two columns, except for lines 8 (with “(Change)” in a third column to the right of the existing two) and 14 (with”(Bag.)”).
Innocents Abroad
to Gordon Brotherston
Fluke Holland: -The Tennessee Third
Stew Carnall: He was horrified: The Little Pill.
Coy Bacon: A nincomparable nanimal:
Hunk Jordan: His Ghost.
Margo Veno: Pigtails : ink
Rugby Kissick: “Sally Bowles”
Helen Keller: “Nuff said.”
Sue Bear: Car Crash. (Change)
Joe Don Looney: Rexroth’s Tune
Cream Saroyan: “Her first is a song.”
Trane DeVore: Hands Up!
Kid Dorn: I am dog.
Ava Smothers: Defies calipers
St. Paul. (Bag.) Still. Say it ain’t so
Now that I type all that, I realize I’m taking a long way around, but Berrigan’s practice has reminded me that one of the things that is dedicated, when a poem is dedicated, is that poem’s effect on its readers. Our bafflement–at least, my bafflement–is part of this poem’s point.
Thinking about Clifton’s sonnet, I wonder if the “you?” is inevitably Clark Kent. Could not the process of misidentification, in which each successive (or simultaneous) reader fails to come to the rescue be written into the decision to dedicate the poem rather than entitle it to Kent.
Calling the poem “To Clark Kent” might, for me at least, make the poem turn on the hope for help from a fictitious being, rather than that ongoing process of querying each new individual. Then again, maybe not..
April 8th, 2008 at 12:21 am
No revelations here, but I’ve been thinking about this practice as I read through Ted Berrigan. For him, addressing a lyric to a certain person allows him to enter a private landscape with personal memories the only landmarks and orientation points.
Here, for instance, is his sonnet “Innocents Abroad.” I suspect the blog will break the spacing. It should be in two columns, except for lines 8 (with “(Change)” in a third column to the right of the existing two) and 14 (with”(Bag.)”).
Innocents Abroad
to Gordon Brotherston
Fluke Holland: -The Tennessee Third
Stew Carnall: He was horrified: The Little Pill.
Coy Bacon: A nincomparable nanimal:
Hunk Jordan: His Ghost.
Margo Veno: Pigtails : ink
Rugby Kissick: “Sally Bowles”
Helen Keller: “Nuff said.”
Sue Bear: Car Crash. (Change)
Joe Don Looney: Rexroth’s Tune
Cream Saroyan: “Her first is a song.”
Trane DeVore: Hands Up!
Kid Dorn: I am dog.
Ava Smothers: Defies calipers
St. Paul. (Bag.) Still. Say it ain’t so
Now that I type all that, I realize I’m taking a long way around, but Berrigan’s practice has reminded me that one of the things that is dedicated, when a poem is dedicated, is that poem’s effect on its readers. Our bafflement–at least, my bafflement–is part of this poem’s point.
Thinking about Clifton’s sonnet, I wonder if the “you?” is inevitably Clark Kent. Could not the process of misidentification, in which each successive (or simultaneous) reader fails to come to the rescue be written into the decision to dedicate the poem rather than entitle it to Kent.
Calling the poem “To Clark Kent” might, for me at least, make the poem turn on the hope for help from a fictitious being, rather than that ongoing process of querying each new individual. Then again, maybe not..
April 8th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I love Matthew’s reading of the dedication. Here, the dedication interrupts the syntactical unity of the title and the first line (this is, I think the origin of Evan’s question). For me, the effect of this is to allow me to read the first line–maybe the first few lines–as an imperative. At first, it seems, to the you, inviting Clark Kent but also, as Matthew points out, each reader, to “enter the darkest room/ in my house and speak.” By the third line, the imperative points inward. Nonetheless, I wonder if we can read this as an invocation, so that the command to “speak/ with my own voice, at last” resembles “through me tell the story.” So, does the condition imposed by the title (but interrupted by the dedication) place the possibility of poetic inspiration alongside the fantasy of “rescue”?
On another note, I think it’s interesting that in this poem, as with Mayer’s, we have another problematic sonnet…
April 10th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Well, plus: Clark Kent ain’t the one that will fly to save you. There’s a somewhat aggressive reveal of the addressee’s “secret identity” even as the speaker’s identity, or prospect of speaking within some Fortress of (imposed) Solitude, is shown to be bound up in pained allegiances, gestures of implosion. Another form of imperative, another call to speak in one’s own name. (well, technically that would be “To Kal-El,” but…)
I also like the play of “ordinary” in the last line of the second poem. The poem, as Meredith notes, works by making the mundane perspective give a sheen of newness to scenes that ‘come before’ where all the myths and religion begin. The word “ordinary” hovers between the adolescent testament and the realized one, the one we are asked to reconsider: “Ordinary” in the colloquial sense of “everyday” recalls but also staves off “ordinary” in the sense of ecclesiastical law, of rites that will come after this archaic smile, of Herbert’s “Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest”.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:13 am
What’s the deal with the uneven diction in “a song of mary”? I like the conceit of Mary speaking in a sort of pidgin Gertrude Stein (”somewhere it being yesterday. / i a maiden …” etc.) instead of official King James English. But then it seems to me Clifton kind of ruins it with that slightly Stevensian “incomprehensible heavens.” Can somebody justify this moment to me? Right now it just feels like she was worried the poem wasn’t “lyrical” enough.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
That’s a good question, Evan. I had stumbled over that moment before, but I wasn’t sure quite why.
It may be because it’s not yesterday anymore, even in the poem. Though the poem describes the moment before the miraculous moment, when Mary could still smile an ordinary smile and was still a maiden in her mother’s house, it does so from the point of view of a today after the intervention of the divine.
(Matthew 1:24–When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.)
The wise men’s search is a similar moment, marking another point where the “today” intrudes into the poem. Mary can only know of their experience after Epiphany, and”incomprehensible” only becomes meaningful because we know that the heavens will soon become comprehensible.
As such, I think the simple diction refers not so much to the cognitive capacity or speech patterns of Mary, but to the simplicity of her life before.
The wise men have a different sort of life before, and receive a different sort of revelation.
In a sense, then, what is incomprehensible is partially the relation between this past and the present.
I’m still not thoroughly convinced, though. Maybe somebody else has a more compelling answer.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I read this poem sort of along the lines that Matthew has explored, but I also see it as a sentence with interruptions and erased parentheses, so that place, somewhere (it being yesterday) and subject, i (a maiden in my mother’s house / animals silent outside) both become temporal in “is morning.” She is also, probably, “mourning,” in retrospect, all that is to come.
About “Superman” (bless Sonya’s tab-mastery!): the dedication in the poem is off to the side quite a bit so that it doesn’t, as it does here, appear as part of the poem.
April 13th, 2008 at 12:21 am
i think the first poem is so curious in its exploration of the calling up of identities of contingency, which I think we all keep hidden in all sorts of rooms for all sorts of occasions. the conditional in the title itself is a summoning of a super hero, a braver self that can boldly rush into an awful memory and finally confront the “dusty bodies” of the past. clark kent enters a phone booth to transform into superman, and so it seems here that a space is required to step into the self necessary for a specific calling. but, the problem that the poem poses is how to get out of this room (or the phone booth) once you are in. i want to resist reading this poem as an affirmation of strength and instead think about what it might be saying about our vulnerability even when the suit comes on; in other words, no matter how strong we may become in asserting a more powerful “i”, can we ever rescue ourselves from our past selves without confronting cryptonite on the way?
also, is the poem commenting on the assumption of voice in poetry as a contingent identity that tries to recover and rescue a self that the past holds captive? i wonder whether the “i say” in Line 11 (i’m perplexed by it) is trying to pull out of the logic of the conditional to do real work outside of this world of contingency; i think it gets sucked back into this world by another conditional, “i say if i should walk..” I hear a voice that wants to speak, but can’t stop performing her contingency identity.
this may sound like rambling, but nevertheless i offer it.