by Joshua Bennett
1.
Lucille Clifton’s children were seven, five, four, three, two, and one years old when her debut collection of poems, Good Times, arrived in the world in 1969. Whenever I talk to a new group of students about craft, her name rises to the air: as the story goes, many of her poems were so short because they had to be composed between one baby going to sleep and another waking up. These are lines hard-won, forged in the crucible of a mother’s care and sustained attention. Clifton was also a Jeopardy! champion, the author of eighteen works of children’s literature, and the first nature poet ever read at length. In my reading of her work, I’ll begin there, in the space of black environmental imagination, and a certain kind of lyric togetherness—to use Christopher Spaide’s phrase—that transcends species. This is “cutting greens,” which first appeared in The Massachusetts Review in 1973:
curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.
First, a word on form. Cutting greens is a near-sonnet, coming in at a crisp fifteen lines. We begin en medias res, with the speaker in the kitchen, the greens in her hand, being curled around her steady palms in preparation. To prepare collard greens, you have to fold them first, then cut the stem, removing the leaf to be cooked in a pot separately. Some folks use ham hocks, some turkey necks, others opt for vegetarian alternatives, in order to set the flavor profile for the dish. But this initial aspect of the process is, to my knowledge, near-universal. There are parts of the proceedings you cannot skip. Clifton drops us in the middle of this process with no warning or elaborate explanation. And rather than name this act as what it appears to be from the outside—i.e., an ordinary task of preparing a meal for oneself, one’s family—the stakes are raised, almost immediately, by a larger critique of power: “I hold their bodies in obscene embrace / thinking of everything but kinship.” From the outset, then, we are asked to think about control, dominion. Of the collard greens in the speaker’s hands as having “bodies.” As being able to experience pain, or discomfort. The embrace the speaker names is obscene, perhaps, because it is no true embrace, but a forced contortion, a puppeteering, and what’s more, a preparation for consumption. Perhaps these greens don’t want to be next to each other. Perhaps they don’t want to be here, over the sink, above the mixture of white vinegar, water, and salt that awaits them. Clifton’s speaker is thinking of everything but kinship because kinship is foreclosed here; there is only consumer and consumed, the dominant life form pulling the strings, and the greens languishing in their silence.
The embrace the speaker names is obscene, perhaps, because it is no true embrace, but a forced contortion, a puppeteering, and what’s more, a preparation for consumption.
Until the fifth line, of course, when things get a bit stranger, and more intense. The greens, now more precisely identified as both collards and kale, “strain against each strange other”; they are suddenly animated—agents even—though they were once, it seemed, insensate objects to be manipulated, and ultimately destroyed. Then, two lines later, comes the major turn in the poem:
the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
Here, the poem shifts into the world of the utterly surreal. We move from objects that we might naturally presume to be black, a blackness that is quite literal, and purely chromatic (the pot, the cutting board), to a blackness that is racialized (the speaker’s hand), to a blackness that is transversal and claims the unexpected (the greens, and ultimately the space of the kitchen itself). Rather than blackness appearing here as a marker of alienation or abjection, it is a space of gathering across the continuum of human and nonhuman identity, of life and death, being and becoming. The kitchen twists into darkness, and the entire scene is adorned in opacity, blackness’s endless breadth. And in that space of absolute possibility, both the visual and the tactile take a backseat to taste, to the gustatory, as the speaker’s primary mode of engagement with the greens: “and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.” Not living things. But all that which is live, electrified. All that which persists: living, dead, or otherwise. The cutting board, the kitchen, the speaker, the greens. Under the banner of blackness, all of these disparate entities can assemble and be accounted for. Through Clifton’s poetics of the more-than-human world, we are able to see, taste, and feel more clearly this bond that unites across the bounds of personhood, species, or even, the grave.
Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
2.
The term generations holds a unique place in Lucille Clifton’s broader oeuvre. It is the title of both her field-shifting 1976 memoir and a poem first published in her debut collection, good times. The poem bearing that name, which I borrow from Camille Dungy’s 2009 anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, begins in boundless possibility and ends in negation:
people who are going to be
in a few years
bottoms of trees
bear a responsibility to something
besides people
if it was only
you and me
sharing the consequences
it would be different
it would be just
generations of men
but
this business of war
these war kinds of things
are erasing those natural
obedient generations
who ignored pride
stood on no hind legs
begged no water
stole no bread
did their own things
and the generations of rice
of coal
of grasshoppers
by their invisibility
denounce us
Living Room n°10.
Oil on canvas, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
This doesn’t appear, at least at first glance, to be the sort of poem you might expect from a book with a title like good times. But then we have to remember Clifton’s general orientation toward goodness as a frame within her larger body of work. Let’s consider, for example, her 1972 collection, good news about the earth, in which she wrote the following lines: “being property once myself / I have a feeling for it / that’s why I can talk about environment.” This sense of things animates “generations”; it represents a kind of incandescent reminder, returning time and time again in Clifton’s writing; the poet as witness to the catastrophes of both the human and more-than-human world. Clifton asks us to see not only a kinship between human and nonhuman beings here, but a resonance between our respective life-worlds; to conceive of the coal, the rice, and the grasshoppers as also having generations; descendants; sprawling networks of kin that must be accounted for. We ought not behave as if these life-forms are fungible simply because they communicate in a register that is altogether opaque to us. This is a further elaboration of what Edouard Glissant might have us think of as a “right to opacity” extended out to the social scene of plants, and animals, and even members of the mineral kingdom that many would imagine as forms of “nonlife.” Though of course, his fellow traveler in the tradition, Audre Lorde, had her own thoughts on this matter, as in “Coal” where she writes: “I am black because I come from the earth’s inside.” Like Clifton, blackness, for Lorde, becomes a bridge, rather than simply a marker of derogation or outsider status. Alterity is an opportunity: for collaboration, and care.
Still, we are left to ask: what is this good news, who are these good times for, exactly? And in what possible sense? This is where, I think, the apocalypticism I mentioned earlier comes into play: the good news about the earth is that it will survive us; that it will ultimately win the day. As Ed Roberson reminds us, “the world does not run the earth, but the earth does run the world.” The age of unchecked human dominion, market time, the wanton extraction of the social wealth of the nonhuman world, will come to an end. The order of things will shift on its axis. The nonhuman world will not have to cry out in a voice we understand or might be tempted to reckon with. The absence of so many millions of its inhabitants will be damning enough. “We bear a responsibility” to the communities we will join once we leave this mortal plane, and become, as Clifton so deftly puts it, “the bottoms of trees.” As we move, then, from human to humos; from conscious adventurers back to the dust from which we draw our names, we are called, the speaker of this poem seems to say, to look after the least of these. To give our attention to the sites of life that flourish in a minor register, off the grid, the marginalized, unmappable, and microscopic.
…we are called…To give our attention to the sites of life that flourish in a minor register, off the grid, the marginalized, unmappable, and microscopic.
Just as her memoir was not simply a story of one woman’s journey, but a collective story of her father, mother, and aunts—a narrative divided into sections by lines from none other than Walt Whitman, who June Jordan once said “went ahead and wrote the poetry demanded by his vision”—Clifton’s poem is one that asks us to trade in our refusal to answer the call of the nonhuman for a more beautiful and expansive song. In this vein, Jordan also once wrote the following passage, in a larger essay on Whitman entitled “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us,” published in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays in 1985:
And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully.
Like Jordan, Clifton demands we give an account, that we remember the desecration of what we are meant to keep precious. She knows that we cannot tell the story of this land without speaking of both the terror and the beauty of its past; that every time she tries to write a poem about trees, “there is always an other poem” underneath it—see The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (2015). And yet there is also, in this work, the potential for new life, new language, “new flowering.” A reassurance that the war will one day be over. And that, if we are brave, love will be at the end.
3.
In collaboration with the New York Botanical Garden and the Poetry Society of America, I have spent the past year designing an immersive outdoor exhibit, also entitled The Bond of Live Things Everywhere, that brings to life the speeches, sermons, poems, and songs of black writers from the nineteenth century to the present. As visitors move through designated sections of the Gardens’ sprawling campus, they will both see these selections installed in text and hear them read aloud by an assembly of speakers both dead and living.
The installation is composed of twelve wooden signs depicting various nature poems written by both canonical and contemporary luminaries such as Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, and Angelina Weld Grimké. These signs are strategically positioned throughout the space where the installation is housed at a given moment—the installation will be moving, for example, from its current home in New York City to the Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts next Spring. The experience of reading these signs is accompanied by a soundscape that includes not only recitations of the individual poems—recorded by the poets themselves as well as a chorus of my friends, family, and colleagues—but gospel music, soul records, and sermons that are deeply concerned with the natural world. This gathering of voices echoes forth across the outdoor space through speakers hidden in the bushes, flowers, and trees.
I imagine this exhibit, in a sense, as my own contribution to a tradition of transmitting black ecological consciousness through public works. Toward that end, The Bond of Live Things Everywhere also features a symposium of science educators, environmental activists, creative writers, and visual artists dedicated to recovering this under-theorized aspect of black social and literary life. This, to my mind, is the most rigorous way to honor the history that is this project’s condition of emergence: to help craft a space of not only deep study, but astonishing encounter. To return us to the clearing, where we might hear a constellation of human voices in ensemble with a much older melody, one that echoes through the trees, and the dirt, and the birds of the air. And then carry that lesson, this sharpened attention to the bounty of the black earth, within us. So that every time we get together, it is a rehearsal for another world.
…return us to the clearing, where we might hear a constellation of human voices in ensemble with a much older melody, one that echoes through the trees, and the dirt, and the birds of the air.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this concept of yearly renewal, rebirth, regeneration, was a topic of great interest for Clifton. Her understudied eco-poem “spring song,” for example, is an ode to celebration on Easter Sunday, and ends with a sequence as dynamic as just about any in her larger body of work: “the dance of Jesus music / has hold of the air and / the world is turning /in the body of Jesus and the future is possible.” Contrast the closing lines of this poem with the ending of Ross Gay’s “Sorrow is Not My Name,” from Bringing the Shovel Down (2021):
there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
The last line of Gay’s poem is a riff on the final stanza of Gwendolyn Brooks’s, “To the young who want to die,” a poem that ends with the following couplet: “graves grow no green that you can use. / Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.” The Brooks poem appears in her 1987 collection, The Near Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems, which was dedicated to the students at Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School. Clifton’s “spring song” was published seven years earlier, in her hybrid work of poetry and memoir, good woman (and there of course goes goodness yet again, everywhere Lucille turns, or dares to lift her mighty voice). Ross Gay, it seems, pulls from the resources of both poems. He is Spring itself; and thus, not only full of color and light, but temporary. Mortal, but promised to return.
Seven years before publishing “spring song,” Clifton penned a children’s book entitled The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring. It is the story of a child named King Shabazz and his best friend Tony Polito, two boys growing up together in a city marred by blight and generational poverty. King Shabazz is the eponymous nonbeliever: whenever his teachers or family members refer to the Spring season, it makes him visibly upset. He’s never seen any signs of Spring firsthand, he argues—there are no flowers or trees, for example, in his neighborhood—and therefore has no reason to believe in its existence. It all must be some elaborate conspiracy hatched by the adults, he surmises. Tony Polito, his brother from around the way, affirms this alternative cosmology at every turn.
He is Spring itself; and thus, not only full of color and light, but temporary.
Mortal, but promised to return.
At the end of the story, however, after an entire day spent in search of Spring, King and Tony stumble upon a nest of bright blue robin’s eggs in an abandoned car: life flourishing where they would least expect it. And just like that, King Shabazz changes his mind. Not unlike the jazz musician, Bill Evans, he learns that we must, in a sense, believe in spring, and do our best to carry its promise of a different world within us. Across genre and form, Clifton petitions her readers to take on a similar adventure. To move from innocence, or fear, to responsibility, and ultimately, undergo a kind of metanoia: a refusal of the language and laws of wartime, and the embrace of another way.