(Feeling) at Home in America with Lucille Clifton
This week, as the third in a five-part series of blog posts on “what home might and might not mean,” Camille Dungy explores a poem by Lucille Clifton (1936–2010).
[in the inner city]
in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
we think a lot about uptown
and the silent nights
and the houses straight as
dead men
and the pastel lights
and we hang on to our no place
happy to be alive
and in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
—Lucille Clifton
From The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
BOA Editions, 2012
The poet Lucille Clifton used to say she intended for her poems to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” She began (and also ended) the first poem in her first book with the lines:
in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
I. Love. Those. Lines.
I love how Clifton casts nets of inclusion and exclusion simply by naming and then renaming her place in the world. And, also, her line breaks! I love her line breaks.
To make us look at the “inner city” all by itself.
To make us linger on that “or.” Making us pay attention to her coming refutation, pay attention to the possibilities inherent in the liminal moment before we learn the outcome of the contradiction. Making us think for the beat of the line break about what we might be about to discover.
To introduce the “we,” and to give that “we” a voice both with the mildly vernacular styling of the phrase “like we call it” and with the very fact that “we” are empowered with the ability to name or to “call” something what “we” choose. To write a “we” that is not a general collective first person, but is a specific plural first person that houses a particular set of bodies. To make it clear that some people feel welcomed into the space housed by this “we.” To set “home” off by itself. To establish that individual and singular home as that which “we” are empowered in naming.
To repeat those four lines twice in a 15-line poem, meaning those lines take up more than half of the poem. Meaning I am that much closer to not being allowed to ignore her.
And then to do what she does in those seven fresh lines. (Fresh here meaning both new and sassy).
we think a lot about uptown
That line break gives us a moment to think that maybe the speaker is going to start wishing they lived in a different part of town.
and the silent nights
Nope. Maybe there’s neither regret nor envy here.
and the houses straight as
“Straight as…” what!!!?
dead men
Not sure I saw that coming!
and the pastel lights
Workshop talk often warns you against the use of adjectives. But “lights” are NOT the same as “pastel lights.” “[P]astel” is doing crucial work to open out this line!!!!
and we hang on to our no place
happy to be alive
Who wants to be one of those dead men!? Remember how we started this uptown section wondering about envy? Without repeating herself, Clifton makes me think about that other part of town again, but with a different set of perceptions.
To do all that she does (and more) in ten words (12 syllables), to move into the other parts of the poem (which occupy seven lines, concluding with the line “happy to be alive”), then to return to those ten words (12 syllables) again, but now with the addition of the inclusive multiplier “and.”
happy to be alive
and in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
To end the poem as the poem has progressed, with no punctuation, no capitalization, no enforced visual hierarchies or divisions. To land the poem not on the pejorative “inner city” but on the self-claimed title “home.”
Wow.
To take Archibald MacLeish to town a little, this is a poem that both be’s and means. I think this is part of how a poet makes me feel at home in her world. Even if the home described by the poem isn’t my own. Or, even if the home the poem describes is a space that is conflicted and conflicting—or convicted and convicting.
This blog post is based on Camille T. Dungy’s talk “(Feeling) At Home in America,” given at Poets House in fall 2017, as part of Poets House’s 30th Anniversary season in which six poets were asked to provide close readings of five seminal poems (6 x 5 = 30).
Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. Her other poetry collections are Smith Blue (2011); Suck on the Marrow (2010), winner of the American Book Award; and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006). In addition, Dungy is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009). She has received fellowships from the NEA in both poetry and prose, and she is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.