Amy Hildreth Chen

Everett Anderson's Year, by Lucille Clifton

  Share

The Lucille Clifton Exhibition "She Sang So Sweet:" Lucille Clifton's Children's Literature is currently on display on the 2nd Floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. The exhibit is curated by Amy Hildreth Chen, Emory PhD student in English. The following is the essay which accompanies the exhibition, written by Amy Hildreth Chen.

Beloved mother to six, popular poet Lucille Clifton first began writing children's literature around 1968, when she published What Watches Me? A Writing and Drawing Book for You for the Central Atlantic Regional Education Laboratory (CAROL) in Washington D.C., an organization that sought to develop new strategies to improve academic achievement. What Watches Me? employs riddles to prompt young readers to draw within the pages of the book.  Anyway Thisaway, another project for the Laboratory, features Clifton as a "recorder" of children's poems from the Madison School. In 1969, her short story "Mae Baby" appeared in Highlights, a popular children's magazine still in circulation today and famous for its frequent appearance in doctor's offices nationwide.

Following these early pieces, Clifton began publishing her award-winning books of poetry alongside full-length children's books that often concentrated on African American heritage and daily life. Her first hardcover children's book, The Black B C's (1970) taught history by using the abcedarium poetic form, which uses the alphabet as a mnemonic device to emphasize significant places, events, and people. Her character Everett Anderson starred in eight picture books from 1974 through 2001, proving popular enough that many young readers wrote to him.

 

Along the way, Clifton was awarded an Emmy in 1976 for her work with "Marlo Thomas and Friends" on Free to Be…You and Me, a book, record, and television special that helped raise a generation. Toward the end of her life, Lucille Clifton began a manuscript called "Jump Rope Rhymes," a collection of calls and verse that capture the wordplay and whimsy of childhood games. Throughout her work, Clifton's warm and unflinching representation of the joys, fears, and questions that arise in childhood made her writing beloved by beginning readers.
 
While this show concentrates on Lucille Clifton's writing for children, a larger exhibition, "Come Celebrate with Me: The Work of Lucille Clifton," curated by Amy Hildreth Chen and Kevin Young, is on display on the tenth floor in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Showcasing her career as a poet and author, both exhibitions are based on Clifton's archive housed at MARBL.

  Share

The Lucille Clifton Exhibition Come Celebrate With Me: The Work of Lucille Clifton is currently on display in the MARBL gallery on the 10th Floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. The exhibit is co-curated by Kevin Young, Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at MARBL, and Amy Hildreth Chen, Emory PhD student in English.

A second exhibit which focuses on Clifton's work as a children's book author, She Sang So Sweet: Lucille Clifton's Children's Literature, and curated by Amy Hildreth Chen, will be available on the 2nd Floor of the Woodruff Library in mid-September. The following is the essay which accompanies the exhibition, written by Kevin Young.

National Book Award winner, Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Emmy Award-winner, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, children's books author, mother, memoirist, Jeopardy champion, survivor, poet, and national treasure, Lucille Clifton was at the height of her poetic powers when she died in February 2010.

Born Lucille Sayles in 1936, just outside Buffalo in Depew, New York, Sayles would meet her future husband through Ishmael Reed. Reed, Sayles, and Fred Clifton performed in the Buffalo Community Theater Workshop. Later, Clifton herself would attend the historically black Howard University.  Howard in the 1950s was a very fruitful time for African American letters; her cohort included fellow writers Toni Morrison, later to be her editor at Random House, as well as teachers like Sterling Brown. Clifton's mature work began in earnest later, in the early sixties, yet even before her first book, we can see her distinctive voice in poems whose line and music suggest her future development.

After the appearance of her first full-length book of poetry, Good Times, in 1969, Clifton wrote steadily and assuredly, publishing poetry, children's books, and even prose. In tracing the roots and telling the tales of a black family, her groundbreaking memoir Generations (1976) could be said to forecast the rise in the attention paid to black genealogy. But Clifton's poetry also critiques family and country, mourns and makes known what one book of hers calls "the terrible stories." She's as interested in soul as body, her poetry paying "homage to my hips" and providing "wishes for sons"; biblical in her lines as Whitman, she invites an American "I," this time lowercase.

To mention Clifton's winning Jeopardy is not to say that Clifton is interested in trivia, but rather, in knowledge. Like Pablo Neruda, she writes of love, politics, loneliness, and justice. Like Neruda, she crafts odes to her elements (cooking greens), the body (hair, hips), spirit, and a large-scale idea of America. One of these includes what it means to be a black woman, something Clifton names, implies, connects with, and calls out from—often to her fellow women poets, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Margaret Walker to the late Adrienne Rich. One of her earliest poems, from the 1950s, is "To E.D."—Emily Dickinson, whose short lines and unique punctuation, or lack thereof, Clifton would seem to call kin.

In Clifton's hands, the ordinary, including punctuation, is transformed—like Superman, who figures in some of her poems, she leaps and soars, crossing bridges as one poem has it, "between starshine and clay." She is also a poet often engaged with the mystic, whether in receiving "messages from the Ones" or writing as the "two-headed woman," that soothsayer and homemade prophet. If Whitman's poetic self contained a multitude, Clifton embraces the multicultural multitude by writing through the fact and metaphor of family.

Curated with Amy Hildreth Chen, Emory PhD student in English, this exhibition includes a family reunion of writings by Clifton taken from her archive in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library—ranging from her earliest poems with their delicate penmanship, to poems composed on her beloved Videowriter word-processor, to last works composed at writer's workshops, dashed off in an email, or found in her many daybooks. All are on view here in an exhibition that only hints at the breadth of her work and the richness of Emory's holdings.