The Summer issue features two previously uncollected poems by Lucille Clifton: “poem to my yellow coat” and “bouquet.” These—along with eight more newly discovered poems and a career-spanning survey of her work chosen by the poet and editor Aracelis Girmay—appear in How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, which will be published by BOA Editions next month. Below, read the first five sections of Girmay’s twelve-part foreword to the book.

Lucille Clifton. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

No one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to open a voice, like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside, I believe that within the voices of many contemporary U.S. poets are the poems of Lucille Clifton. There is the ferocity of her clear sight. There is the constellatory thinking where every thing is kin. The verbs of one body might also be the verbs of another seemingly disparate or distant body (her streetlights, for example, bloom). And all things have agency: as the speaker of “august the 12th” mourns a distant brother on his birthday, the speaker’s hair cries, too (“my hair / is crying for her brother”). The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder—bearing witness to joy and to struggle.

Over the course of her life, Clifton wrote thirteen collections of poems, a memoir (which she worked on with her editor Toni Morrison), and more than sixteen books written for African American children, including Some of the Days of Everett Anderson and Black BC’s. And in 1988 Clifton was the first writer to have two books of poetry appear as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. Those books were Next and good woman.

Her works are explicitly historical and of a palpable present moment. The earliest of the poems in How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton were written during the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the nuclear age, ecological crises, and independence movements across Africa. As the poet Kevin Young writes in the afterword of the monumental Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010: “Both the poetry world and the world of the 1960s were in upheaval; the years from 1965 to 1969 saw the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the first human walking on the moon, all of which appear in the poems … The Black Arts movement, which Lucille Clifton found herself a part of and in many ways helped to forge, insisted on poems for and about black folks, establishing a black aesthetic based on varying ways of black speech, African structures, and political action.” Read More

My mother, a classically trained dancer, didn’t stop dancing all at once. When she moved to America, she still performed, still taught. She stopped teaching when I was little. Still, she would sometimes be called into action, choreographing dances for the school plays my brother and I were in. A couple decades later, she stopped doing even that. Now, I know, she doesn’t even dance by herself, in her kitchen, as I remember her doing when I was a child. “I could give up dancing,” she told me once. “It wasn’t as if I was going to die. Only, it felt like the color went out of the world.”

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There have been stretches of time when I have been unable to look at my life through language. What I mean is I was unable to write, but that is not only what I mean. There is a way I move through my life that is about putting language around its small pleasures, the sight of neighborhood flowers or strangers embracing or a crow slipped into a disorienting current of air and gliding backward: the narrative of my own life and the movements between its characters, and the narratives of my friends’ lives revealed through long conversations while walking through my city, on the phone or in person: a way of living in words even if they are not written.

I am not always going around in this state, catching the soft smell of the chamomiles in the tall green vase on the dresser, moved nearly to tears by the sound of my daughter’s laugh in the evening—I wish! Like anyone, I am often preoccupied with the petty anxieties and logistics that rule my days: it’s just that, from time to time, and sometimes more often than others, a window opens. I catch a gust of fresh air, of language. A sentence forms in my head. When I am able to live this way, I understand who I am, even if I am not writing. When I am not living this way, when I am unable to reach out to something beautiful and to name it, I am wretched, a stranger to myself. The color drains out of the world.

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© Allen / Adobe Stock.

I was listening to an episode of the BBC podcast In Our Time, on which a group of English scholars was discuss­ing the French philosopher Henri Bergson, when one of them mentioned an essay called “The Unreality of Time,” originally published in 1908, by a philosopher named John McTaggart. The phrase startled me—I was writing a book called The Unreality of Memory. It’s possible I’d heard the title before and forgotten I knew it—as the scholars note, it is a famous essay. (“Is forgotten knowledge knowledge all the same?” is the kind of question we asked in my col­lege philosophy classes.) In any case, I had never read it. I paused the podcast and found the essay online, curious what I’d been referencing.

McTaggart does not use “unreality” in the same way I do, to describe a quality of seeming unrealness in some­thing I assume to be real. Instead, his paper sets out to prove that time literally does not exist. “I believe that time is unreal,” he writes. The paper is interesting (“Time only belongs to the existent” … “The only way in which time can be real is by existing”) but not convincing.

McTaggart’s argument hinges in part on his claim that perception is “qualitatively different” from either memory or anticipation—this is the difference between past, pres­ent, and future, the way we apprehend events in time. Direct perceptions are those that fall within the “specious present,” a term coined by E. R. Clay and further devel­oped by William James (a fan of Bergson’s). “Everything is observed in a specious present,” McTaggart writes, “but nothing, not even the observations themselves, can ever be in a specious present.” It’s illusory—the events are fixed, and there is nothing magically different about “the pres­ent” as a point on a timeline. This leads to an irresolvable contradiction, to his mind. Read More

Jean-Patrick Manchette, 1967.

They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Herman Melville called them isolatoes—the word he coined for those among us who don’t have much truck with fellow humans. The bonds of society, except in odd and extenuating circumstances, are not really for them. Love, marriage, family seem as strange, distant institutions, things one might observe with a notebook in the other hand. At best, there are a couple of old comrades accumulated on life’s journey to whom one might turn when things go south. For isolatoes, the most constant of companions are those voices inside the head.

Jean-Patrick Manchette’s protagonists are isolatoes. Georges Gerfault in Three to Kill, Julie Ballanger in The Mad and the Bad, Martin Terrier in The Prone Gunman, Aimée Joubert in Fatale: windowless monads, all of them. Memorable, violent, alone. Read More

On a Saturday, as though the concept of “weekend” still pertains, we go for a drive. This is a great excitement. It marks the day as different from other days, brings it into Technicolor, and it feels like movie magic to be in a car in motion, seeing a wider world of different streets out the passenger window, now more zoetrope than mere plane of glass. I gaze through it with moronic delight, like a person who’s never ridden in a car before. There’s also—after all these slow, ambulatory weeks—the plain thrill of speed as we accelerate onto the highway. All of this is heightened by the frisson of the illicit, because these roads are deserted and above them loom signs telling us to avoid nonessential travel. As I read them, something both sincere and self-mocking rises up in me, wailing, to ask: “but what’s ‘essential’ anymore, what does ‘essential’ mean now?” The things we used to hold essential—human touch, in particular—are now denied. Masked, we stand six feet away from our friends making hugging motions at each other in a sad, awkward, teddy-bear like travesty of the real thing. It is so good and necessary to touch and be touched. It is also so good and necessary not to transmit this virus which, unlike touch, is not a discrete and contained contract between two, but a potentially endless chain of infection. So I know that this drive, this nonessential travel, is an infraction. I also know that leaving the house and getting in the car strikes me as a psychological necessity, that is to say, essential.

The world has become much smaller—physically circumscribed by the walls of our homes, socially contracted to the friends we wish to call (or Zoom)—and simultaneously bigger, because now all the shameful inequities of this country tower over things, crudely exposed and monstrous. The enormous problem, then, is the political one: the way in which we’re called to do all we can to ensure this moment reconstitutes us in lasting, salutary ways. And then there’s the much smaller problem: the individual one, my problem, which is that I have not written King Lear in quarantine. Instead, I have been mostly logging in and out of Twitter, against a white noise brain backdrop of Rilke, on loop, going: “You must change your life.” In “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” he ends the sentence and with it the poem like that—a sober period. In my head it ends with a hysterical flurry of exclamation points and runs in all caps.

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The legendary mystery writer P. D. James, often dubbed the Queen of Crime, was born on this day a hundred years ago. Below, read her 1982 essay “Murder Most Foul,” in which she explains her attraction to detective stories, considers what makes a successful whodunit, and highlights her favorite practitioners of the genre—including her predecessor Agatha Christie, “a lady I think of less as a novelist than as a literary conjurer whose sleight of hand as she shuffles her cardboard characters can outwit the keenest eye.”

P. D. James. Photo: Ulla Montan.

“Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent enjoyment than any other single subject.” So wrote Dorothy L. Sayers in 1934. She was, of course, thinking of murder; not the sordid, messy and occasionally pathetic murders of real life but the more elegantly contrived and mysterious concoctions of the detective novelist. To judge, too, from the universal popularity of the genre, it isn’t only the Anglo-Saxons who share this enthusiasm for murder most foul. From Greenland to Japan, millions of readers are perfectly at home in Sherlock Holmes’s claustrophobic sanctum at 221B Baker Street, Miss Marple’s charming cottage at St. Mary Mead, and Lord Peter Wimsey’s elegant apartment in Piccadilly. There is nothing like a potent amalgam of mystery and mayhem to make the whole world kin.

When I came to write my first novel in the early sixties it never occurred to me to begin with anything but a mystery, partly I think because its highly disciplined form provides an admirable apprenticeship for a writer who aspires to become a serious novelist. I had always enjoyed the genre—Dorothy L. Sayers was a potent influence—and I was fascinated by the challenge of trying to do something new with the well-worn conventions of the detective story: the central mysterious death; the closed circle of suspects each with a credible motive; the arrival of the detective like the avenging deity of an old Morality Play; the final solution which the reader himself can arrive at by logical deduction from clues presented to him with deceptive cunning but essential fairness.

In my own reading it wasn’t the puzzle which most intrigued me and I sometimes think that fewer readers watch for every clue, note every twist in the plot, and sniff happily after every red herring than we writers imagine. My younger daughter, reading my latest book, merely comments: “It can’t be him or her; you like them too much”, and I suspect that most of us guess the murderer more through our knowledge of the author, his style, prejudices, and foibles, than through close attention to every detail of the plot. We are pitting our wits primarily against the writer, not his villain or his detective. Read More