Tag Archives: Lucille Clifton

Victims of White Supremacist Exoticizing

In “When I Was Growing Up,” Nellie Wong speaks to how American whites have long exoticized Asian-Americans.

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Abandon the Shoes That Brought You Here

David Whyte and Lucille Clifton both have poems about Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee. For both it means stepping into uncharted paths.

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Scraping One’s Knees on Jacob’s Ladder

Denise Levertov draws on the Jacob’s dream about a stairway to heaven to capture poetry’s transcendent qualities.

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Black Lives, Durable as Daisies

This previously unpublished Lucille Clifton is perfect for our tumultuous time.

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What Would Lucille Clifton Say?

How would Lucille Clifton have responded to the death of George Floyd and the subsequent turmoil? I comb through her collected poems to find out.

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Elizabeth Warren, Lucille Clifton

Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the race yesterday. Her upbeat spirit can be found in the poetry of Lucille Clifton.

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You Are the Salt of the Earth

Jesus telling the disciples they “the salt of the earth” reminds me of Clifton’s poem “salt.”

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Trump Uses Genocidal Language

Trump’s use of the language of ethnic cleansing regarding the Kurds is not new. Clifton’s poem about cockroaches shows how dangerous it is.

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What Trump Means by Infestation

Tuesday Following Donald Trump’s latest racist tirade, this one targeting Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings and his “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” of a Baltimore district, I’m reposting an essay I wrote a year ago May. At the time, commentators had begun noticing that Trump frequently opts for images of infestation when talking about brown […]

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