Tag Archives: Lucille Clifton

Using Lucille Clifton to Defend the Arts

There’s a decline in English majors at elite universities. We use a Lucille Clifton poem to respond.

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Keeping the Civil Rights Dream Alive

Great Civil Rights moments are great. Movements are better.

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Poetry in the Commencement Ceremony

Our Commencement was jolted by a reading of Martin Espada’s “Imagine the Angels of Bread.”

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Answer the Door, the Truth Is Knocking

Willa Cather and Lucille Clifton were quoted in our end-of-the-year awards ceremony last week.

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Lessons of a Bird Killed by a Window

Encountering a dead bird outside my window, I recalled a Lucille Clifton poem on the subject that draws a powerful social message.

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It Is Your Own Lush Self You Hunger For

In her Garden of Eden poems, Lucille Clifton sees heaven as a stifling morality that both Eve and Satan are trying to break through. Apples in this drama are symbols of female sensuality.

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Leadership 101: Grade Obama

Andrew Sullivan says that we should not look for a savior in gay rights issues because, in America, “we save ourselves.” The sentiment also appears in a Lucille Clifton poem that appeared following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

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Golf Suddenly Seems Green Again

Something happened in the course of the recent U. S. Open tournament. Lucille Clifton’s poem is about the “damn wonder” of renewal, and golf is catching a whiff of something fresh in the boy-faced Rory McIlroy.

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The Green of Jesus Is Breaking the Ground

According to the church calendar, we are still in the Easter season,and the hope of the resurrection continues to be mirrored in beautiful May days. Lucille Clifton intermingles the spirituality of religion and the sensuality of life as well as any poet I know. Here’s a poem in her Jesus series. As far as she’s concerned, there’s no conflict between religious ecstasy and the sights and sounds of spring or the wonderful smells emanating from people’s kitchens and the music from their radios.

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