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Textual Teasers: Tantalizing Tid-Bits to Taunt Your Literary Taste

Textual Teasers: Tantalizing Tid-Bits to Taunt Your Literary Taste

September 16, 2008 by Jena Send to a Friend Send to a Friend

Every week I’ll sample the goods and spit out the juiciest pieces of prose and poetry for you—heavy on flavor, light on fat. This week, just for you, some voluptuous verse to diversify your vernacular.

Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980—Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions Ltd., 1987)

 

for the bird who flew against our window one morning and broke his natural neck

my window
is his wall.
in a crash of 
birdpride
he breaks the arrogance
of my definitions
and leaves me grounded
in his suicide.

 

Basic Ingredients:

Lucille Clifton is one of my personal favorites in the poetry world. While perhaps not the most prevalent household name, her popularity among poets is wide and long standing. You might recognize her poem “homage to my hips”–favored by poetry anthologists and AP Lit teachers:

 

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

 

This poem and the poem above can both be found in her Pulitzer-prize nominated collection Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980. The collection includes all four of the books she had published by 1980 and a prose memoir that flows just as sonorously as her poetry. What first attracted me to Clifton’s work was her precise usage of punctuation and capitalization. By precise I don’t mean proper, I mean purposeful, effective. This allows the reader to take notice of periods, commas, capital letters, etc.–they have a use beyond grammar. Neither of the above poems use capitalization, but the effect of her particular use is evident in this poem from the same collection:


lane is the pretty one

her veins run mogen david
and her mind just runs.

the best looking colored girl in town
whose eyes are real light brown.
frowns intro her glass;

I wish I’d stayed in class.

i wish those lovers
had not looked over
your crooked nose
your too wide mouth

dear sister
dear sister           love*
*”love” is actually supposed to fit on a line between the two “dear sister”s so that it could be read after the first “dear sister” or after both “dear sister”s. Unfortunately I’m not that technologically gifted. 

 

Clifton’s short verse is captivating in its ability to encompass ages of philosophy, politics, pain, and love within so few lines. “for the bird who flew against our window one morning and broke his natural neck” leaves me haunted by its seemingly simple statements. It reads like a fact, but resonates worlds of questions on perception, meaning, and more.

 

Consider yourself succulently served.

 

Next Week: Chef’s choice–market value price.

 

 

 

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jim Says:

“homage to my hips” could be a great hip-hop song

September 16, 2008 at 1:04 pm
tomwin Says:

thanks. I’m always looking for a good read and this looks like a nice one. again, thanks. I’m going to get this book.

September 16, 2008 at 7:34 pm