February 17, 2010
Lucille Clifton, Poet Who Explored Intricacies of Black Lives, Dies at 73
By MARGALIT FOX
Lucille Clifton, a distinguished American poet whose work trained lenses wide and narrow on the experience of being black and female in the 20th century, exploring vast subjects like the indignities of history and intimate ones like the indignities of the body, died on Saturday in Baltimore. She was 73 and lived in Columbia, Md.
The precise cause of death had not been determined, her sister, Elaine Philip, told The Associated Press on Sunday. Ms. Clifton, who had cancer, had been hospitalized recently with an infection.
Ms. Clifton received a National Book Award in 2000 for “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000,” published by BOA Editions. In 2007, she became the first African-American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a $100,000 award that is one of American poetry’s signal honors.
Her book “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980” (BOA, 1987) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1988.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/arts/17clifton.html?pagewanted=printLucille Clifton, one-time poet laureate of Md., dies at 73
February 14, 2010|By Nick Madigan | nick.madigan@baltsun.com
Former state poet laureate Lucille Clifton, a National Book Award winner whose work was lauded for its "moral quality," died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a long battle with cancer and other illnesses. She was 73.
With a mix of profundity, earthiness and humor - amply evident in her 11 books of poetry - Ms. Clifton often defied conventional notions of poetic expression, but in many ways her themes were traditional, Wallace R. Peppers wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
"She writes of her family because she is greatly interested in making sense of their lives and relationships; she writes of adversity and success in the ghetto community; and she writes of her role as a poet," according to Mr. Peppers.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-02-14/news/bal-md.ob.clifton14feb14_1_fred-clifton-poet-laureate-lucille-cliftonLucille Clifton, Md. poet laureate and National Book Award winner
By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 21, 2010
When she was a girl, Lucille Clifton sat on her mother's lap and listened to her recite poetry. Her mother never made it through elementary school, but she knew the power of language, and her poems stayed in her daughter's head forever.
But another memory seared itself in young Lucille's memory, too: when her father said no wife of his would be a poet. She watched as her thwarted mother threw her pages of verse into a burning furnace.
Years later, Ms. Clifton would remember this moment in a poem of her own, which she called "fury":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/20/AR2010022003419.htmlClifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies
By Jay Rey
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: February 14, 2010, 12:14 pm / 7 comments
Published: February 15, 2010, 1:34 am
Lucille Clifton, born and raised in the Buffalo area before going on to achieve some of the literary world's highest honors as a major American poet, died Saturday morning at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore at age 73, her sister told The Buffalo News.
Clifton had been ill for some time with some type of infection, and had undergone surgery to remove her colon Friday, but her exact cause of death is still uncertain, Clifton's sister, Elaine Philip said today.
"We really don't know," Philip said, "she had an infection throughout her body, and we don't know yet where it was coming from."
Clifton, who lived in Columbia, Md., and was the former poet laureate of the state, was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.
She won the National Book Award in 2001 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000," and in 2007, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded one of the literary world's highest honors — the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Foundation.
http://www.buffalonews.com/2010/02/13/955670/clifton-honored-poet-from-buffalo.htmlLucille Clifton dies at 73; award-winning poet
The descendant of slaves and former Maryland poet laureate who won the National Book Award in 2000, she was known for spare, elegant and frequently autobiographical poems.
February 21, 2010|By Elaine Woo
When Lucille Clifton was a girl in the 1940s, she saw her mother burning poems in their furnace. A grade-school dropout who loved words and wrote traditional verse, her mother had an offer to publish her work in a book, but her husband and children scorned the idea of a poet in the family.
Their rejection was so stinging that she turned the cherished words to cinders in a fit of fury and sorrow that Clifton never forgot:
her hand is crying.
her hand is clutching
a sheaf of papers.
poems.
she gives them up.
they burn
jewels into jewels.
her eyes are animals.
each hank of her hair
is a serpent's obedient
wife.
she will never recover.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/21/local/la-me-lucille-clifton21-2010feb21