Lucille Clifton

How do I also... see myself in solidarity with, see myself connected to, while also thinking in this collective Marxist, like, very active tradition, it's a struggle.

But one thing I would say as, and I'm not good at advice, is that for people to, you know, you don't, one does not have to be a And Lucille Clifton, who was an African-American poet and had many children, the reason her poems are so short is because she would just write them in between feeding them.

And they're beautiful.

Or June Jordan was a mother and so forth.

And for the next hour, I'll be reading from the Sunday, September 13th, 2026 issue of the Viewpoint section of the Buffalo News and the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service.

Remembering the Buffalo Days of Poet Lucille Clifton.

This is by Ishmael Reed.

I'm 88 years old.

I was joined by Ray Smith, who was called the Harry Belafonte of Buffalo, as a tribute to his excellence as a folk singer.

He and I shared an apartment on Verblank and later on Northampton.

I first saw Lucille Clifton, then Lucille Sales, walking with Ray across Jefferson Avenue and Ferry Street.

She'd dropped out of Howard University.

I'd like to think that mostly it's really simple, which is not to say that the simple isn't complicated.

Do you have the Lucille Clifton poem? Could we, this is part of me deflecting.

Great American poet, Lucille Clifton, her 1991 collection, Quilting.

So the poem from that collection It's untitled, but it's often called Reply.

You'll see why.

When I teach the poem, I split the two because I'm more interested in what comes after and what comes before in the paratext has a little bit of intensity in it.

I'm not trying to undermine the intensity as much as I wanna talk about the thing that's on the other screen.

So this is a poem by Lucille Clifton.

And I and I think, yeah.

And I really, I'm working on a, this is very recent, but I'm working on a critical reader of Lucille Clifton.

I want to collect all the scholarship done on her and make a book out of that.

And hopefully have a companion book of the poems discussed in that book, you know? That's wonderful.

Who is your favorite poet?

Lucille Clifton.

Name a poet you think people don't know enough.

Janice Miller.

And so it really resonates for us to think about this idea of a ship, even though we don't live in a houseboat.

But our sacred text for today comes from Lucille Clifton, who has a beautiful poem called Blessing the Boats, which says, May the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear.

May you kiss the wind, then turn from it, certain that it will love your back.

May you open your eyes to water, water, waving forever.

question.

I think because poetry is an oral art form, one of the people who I admire most is Lucille Clifton.

And Lucille Clifton was a fantastic poet.

And she basically said that a poem isn't finished until you've read it out aloud to yourself at least three or four times.

And then the cadence sounds right in your voice.

... that came before us, poets that came before us.

And recently, I was looking into how Toni Morrison was such an archivist of amazing poets like June Jordan and Lucille Clifton-

Mm

... and how she preserved their work.

And because of her, and because of them, I am the writer that I am because I read June Jordan and Lucille Clifton as a teenage girl.

I wanna also ask a little bit about self-definition.

It's this kind of concept that I've started asking the, the novelists that come onto the podcast because I have this real resistance towards the segmentation of the bookstore, right? This idea of like, um, where publishing puts us versus where we would put ourselves, how we are-