Volume 4, No. 16: Poetic Languages & Lineages

Reading Lucille Clifton & Naomi Shihab Nye

Greetings, book and treat people! I’m struggling to get through my endless lists of tasks these days. Maybe you are too. There are daffodils coming up in my yard. There’s a lot of inspiring, principled protest happening on college campuses across the US. Meanwhile, more mass graves are being discovered in Gaza. I just donated what I could to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla—you can read about it here. The other day, this bit of joy appeared in my feed. The other day, one of the most beautiful birds swooped low, right in front of me, as I was walking in the woods. PEN America canceled their upcoming awards ceremony because so many of the nominated authors withdrew their books in protest of PEN’s failure to take a stance against genocide. A tiny win. Here is a poem that remakes me every time I read it.

It’s spring, and it’s a lot. So I’m reading poetry and trying to live the poetry I read.

If you’re curious, the mystery books I blurbed in last week’s newsletter, are, in order: Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda, The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia, Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison, Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, tr. by Mara Faye Lethem (out this week and SO GOOD!), 19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye, Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh (out in June), She of the Mountains by Vivek Shraya, An Ordinary Woman by Lucille Clifton, They Called me a Lioness by Ahed Tamimi, and Whale Aria by Rajiv Mohabir.

I picked two of them to review today—the two that are currently speaking to me the most, that feel the most urgent. It’s been a while since I actually just reviewed some books for you in a newsletter, so let’s get to it.

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The Books

19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye (2002)

I buddy-read read this collection with my book pal Surabhi (who reviewed it here), and one thing she brought up in our conversation was whether or not these poems are simple, and if they are, what genre of simpleness they adhere to. I loved these poems, and yet they share some qualities with poems I often dislike. They have an easy, lyrical, straightforward flow. They trace expected patterns, following the title’s theme through to the poem’s end. The line breaks are direct. But they are full of moments that cut and spark. It got me thinking about what it means to tell a simple story. How do you tell a story directly and without fanfare, and still braid so much emotional heft into its rhythms?

Nye uses simplicity to purpose. These are story poems. They are mostly made up of images, but a lot of the images are quite banal (though devastating)—people going about their lives despite war and occupation. They take place in the U.S. and in Palestine, and they’re full of longing, and loss, and joy. Her grandmother in her garden. People talking in a cafe. Someone cooking dinner and missing their family. A lemon tree, a fig tree, a remembered song. Nye tells these stories with simple language, but it’s specific language. She lets the smallness of these intimate scenes tell big stories about violence, colonialism, displacement, exile, resistance, and deep, abiding joy. This, I think, is why this collection resonates with me so deeply. It’s not a book of statements, e.g. “colonialism is evil,” which is true, but doesn’t tell a story. It’s a book of people.

There are also lots of places where Nye blends big sweeping ideas and themes with images (something Clifton does as well, which we’ll get to momentarily!) and the mixing of these two ways of doing poetry took my breath away. Like this passage, the way it flows from the declarative “I support all people on earth” to the gorgeous and imaginative “may light feed our leafiest veins.”

I support all people on earth
who have bodies like and unlike my body, 
skins and moles and old scars, 
secret and public hair, 
crooked toes. I support
those who have done nothing large, 
sifter of lentils, sifter of wisdoms, 
speak. If we have killed no one 
in the name of anything bad or good, 
may light feed our leafiest veins.

A lot of the poems are long and looping. It feels like Nye is continually searching for Palestine, for what her family has lost by leaving, by staying. It feels like she’s looking back, writing her way back, writing to find herself and her homeland again, through simple but singular details: mint tea, the sound of a word in Arabic, a lemon tree. This is a collection steeped in rage and loss, but what’s most fiercely present, what’s clearest, is love.

An Ordinary Woman by Lucille Clifton (1975)

Note: I got this from the library, but it appears to be out of print, so I linked to her Collected Poems instead.

I read this book in one sitting; I could not stop reading it. Clifton’s rhythm is incredible. It not only carried me through each poem, but from poem to poem. I don’t know how to describe the way she plays with language—it’s music but more than music. There’s something both simple and magical in the way she repeats lines and phrases and words, the way she builds images and breaks them apart and then builds them again. She rarely uses punctuation and capitalization, which creates a space in the poems that feels like a river.

I’m also amazed by how she blends images and ideas. It’s easeful to read, and it’s also surprising. She often just comes out and says whatever it is she means, no flourishes. But then she’s like: “i am running into a new year / and the old years blow back / like a wind”

Or this extraordinary sequence: “light / on my mother’s tongue / breaks through her soft / extravagant hip”

I mean. I will never be done with “soft / extravagant hip”.

Or this: “sometimes / the whole world of women / seems a landscape of / red blood and things / that need healing”

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetic language, about what it means to have one. This collection has a clear and singular poetic language. The poems feel honey and warm and ocean-drenched; they feel like soil and earth, rooted and warm. They’re shapes without sharp edges, they’re all dripping flow and smooth and glide. Roundness, yes, that’s what they feel like—like phases of the moon, waning and waxing, but underneath, always whole.

Clifton writes about Blackness and being a woman. She writes little odes to her friends. She writes about aging and becoming and parenting, about the Black goddess Kail, about magic, about healing and new beginnings and being strong and getting through hard stuff. She writes about nature and about being a sister. There are spells in this book, and so much light, and tiny domestic moments, and running through it all, love. She pours love onto the page in a thousand different ways—love for her people and herself and her flaws and where she’s been and where she’s going.

I’m still thinking about the idea of simple poetry and what that might mean, and these poems certainly aren’t simple—the rhythms are intricate and masterful. But they do share a kinship with Nye’s work, and with Ross Gay. All of these poets refuse to ignore joy, and that refusal is sometimes interpreted as unserious. It isn’t, of course. It’s just so light, so floating, so buoyant that it breaks out of every container of celebration. It spills. It feels like poetry that’s meant to be passed around, shared.

And Beauty

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: The daffodils I planted last fall are coming up all over my yard. I am utterly in love with them and not even a little bit sorry about it.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!