Introduction: Mentor and Muse 1. I have been reading and thinking and talking about Lucille Clifton's work for a long time. One of the first poems I read by her was "the thirty-eighth year." Its closing lines haunted me all that cold and lonely year: i had expected more than this. i had not expected to be an ordinary woman.1 Though I was barely turning twenty myself, the regret that the older poet felt at unfulfilled possibilities in her own life felt fresh and real to me: I was young, gay, and Muslim, unsure whether I would ever be able to live openly, let alone have love in my own life. This older Black woman, a mother of six, to the outside world appearing to have every success, was able to write a poem very specific to her own circumstances that nonetheless spoke to me with the greatest of clarities. Clifton's emotions are so deeply felt and her mode of expression so clear and musical, that this poem and countless others of hers have become touchstones for me throughout my life. So many other readers feel the same. I met Lucille Clifton for the first time the day before my twenty-fourth birthday, and I saw her for the last time fifteen years later to the day--as it happens, the last day of my own thirty-eighth year. Lucille was magic like that, equally connected to the physical and material world and to the mystical and spiritual one. She was a "two-headed woman," as she referred to herself in a poem, and anyone who knew her well can tell you about their own experiences with Lucille, coincidences and occurrences that are far stranger than fiction, including, for example, that Clifton passed away on the anniversary of her own mother's passing. One way I thought about this book as I was writing it was as a conversation with Lucille herself. Understudied then as now, Clifton's work engenders such personal responses from her readers that the intentions of critical or analytical attention might feel like obfuscation. Poets who did write about Clifton often did so with effusive praise for the feeling in her work, without much care or attention for her artistic achievement, or contextualizing her within critical or literary frameworks. As Toni Morrison pointed out in her introduction to Clifton's Collected Poems: Accolades from fellow poets and critics refer to her universal human heart; they describe her as a fierce caring female. They complement her courage, vision, joy--unadorned (meaning "simple"), mystical, poignant, humorous, intuitive, harsh and loving. I do not disagree with these judgments. Yet I am startled by the silence in these interpretations of her work. There are no references to her intellect, imagination, scholarship or her risk-taking manipulation of language. To me she is not the big mama/big sister of racial reassurance and self-empowerment. I read her skill as that emanating from an astute, profound intellect--characteristics mostly absent from her reviews."2 While there have been numerous articles and book chapters on her work--including some that I engage with in this book--there are only two monographs, both published during her lifetime, between fifteen and twenty years ago, and one of those appeared before her final two (groundbreaking) books were published. Black Buffalo Woman aims to look at Clifton as a poet, a thinker, even as philosopher and theologian. I want to examine her poetic craft as well as her intellectual interests. For my own part I do remember one particular time right before I was supposed to deliver a lecture on Clifton's use of traditional prosody to a room full of students and teachers and writers. I panicked, imagining that I was making it all up, that none of the dactyls and trochees I was planning to talk about were intentional, that someone would tell me I was projecting my own interest in formal poetry onto a poet who wrote in free verse. I ducked into a side room and called Lucille up on the phone to tell her what I was about to do. She laughed and said, "Oh thank god you're doing that! I'm tired of people thinking I'm like Grandma Moses or something!" Toni Morrison went on in her introduction to confess, "I crave a book of criticism on Lucille Clifton's work that scours it for the meanings therein and the stone-eyed intellect on display."3 With respect to the esteemed Ms. Morrison, I'm not sure I "scour" here, but I do try to sift, turn over, listen to, tune in, sound out. At any rate, in the last ten years or so a number of brilliant scholars and critics have been working on Lucille Clifton's oeuvre in new and compelling ways, including Marina Magloire, William Fogarty, Omar Miranda, Sumita Chakraborty, Bettina Judd, Sylvia Hennenberg, and Scarlett Cunningham. My interest in this book here is not as a scholar per se, but rather as a passionate and devoted reader. Or maybe these are two aspects of the same condition, after all. The title of this book, Black Buffalo Woman , has multiple meanings: Clifton herself identified strongly with her own Black womanhood, even using the word "woman" as part of the title for three different books of hers, and had planned on using the words again as part of the title for a fourth book that she ended up deciding not to publish. Buffalo, NY, was her hometown, and it was a hometown that was extremely important to her on a personal level; it also resonated throughout her poetry. Finally, there is the historical figure of Black Buffalo Woman , a Lakota woman who was associated with Tasunka Witko, the indigenous leader better known as Crazy Horse, who had captivated Clifton's imagination. Clifton--who was interested in mystical and spiritual practices including past life regression--felt a kinship and affinity with the historical figure of Black Buffalo Woman , and regarded her name as a sign of relationality of some kind. Excerpted from Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton by Kazim Ali All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
