[In the following interview, originally conducted in 1999, Clifton discusses her creative process, the role of writing in her life, and her approach to the teaching of creative writing.]

The following conversation between Lucille Clifton and Michael Glaser was edited from a number of conversations recorded in late 1999.

Ms. Clifton is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems (2000). Her many awards include the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She was recently appointed chancellor of the American Academy of American Poets and is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College.

Mr. Glaser directs the annual Literary Festival at St. Mary's College. He is the author of A Lover's Eye and In the Men's Room and Other Poems.

[Glaser]: Lucille, you often state that writing for you is linked to being human, to your own staying awake and your desire that the world stay awake. Would you talk a little bit about that? Why do you write?

[Clifton]: Well, it always seemed to be something that came very naturally to me, to write things down. I like words a lot, as you know. I have always been very fond of words, and the different sounds they make. But, for me, I think the real question is, Why do I continue to write? Because, for me, I think that writing is a way of continuing to hope. When things sometimes feel as if they're not going to get any better, writing offers a way of trying to connect with something beyond that obvious feeling … because you know, there is hope in connecting, and so perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone. And the writing may be sending tentacles out to see if there is a response to that.

So writing is a way of being connected?

Yes.

But part of that connectedness for you is also bearing witness, isn't it?

Yes. If you bear witness, you remain rooted in some way. You continue to feel that what you see matters. What you hear matters. It's a way to connect fully, instead of just intellectually.

See, I believe in energy. I believe there is energy. It exists, and it continues to exist. And I believe it exists in humans, and it's sort of like if someone says, “Oh, everything is going to hell, I have seen it.” Well, I have seen something other, and if that first message is out there, then the other message should be out there too.

You know, I have seen other. The worst has never happened to me. Because even in my imagination, even when it seems like something really, really bad has happened, I can imagine something worse than that. And it's not an either/or. What it means is that even in the face of this madness, there still is, “it could have been even beyond that,” but it wasn't.

Do you feel that writing toward that positive energy is a necessary thing to counterbalance the negative?

I think that you recognize the negative. You have to mention it when you see it. I believe in mentioning that which is negative.

But if we didn't acknowledge it, if we didn't mention it, if we didn't write over against it, that would create more space for. …

For IT. Right. For its energy to expand.

So part of the act of writing is a way of keeping back the darkness?

Yes.

When you talk to your students about writing, what do you encourage them to do?

Well, one does not write to be famous, you know? First of all, how famous is a writer, when you think about it? And I don't write because I have a mission to heal the world. My mission is to heal Lucille if I can, as much as I can. What I know is that I am not the only one who has felt the things I feel. And so, if what I write helps to heal others, that's excellent, but my main thing is for me not to fall into despair, which I have done on occasion and could do at any time.

So, your sense for young people is to write because …

To write because you need it. It will somehow help you get through a difficult life. Don't just accept the surface as the reality. You know, there is form and there is substance. Choose substance, mostly. You can't do it all the time, I suppose. I certainly don't. But at least be aware of the difference. Pay attention.

You do an awful lot, Lucille, probably too much: you write regularly, you teach, you give way too many readings, you sit on boards and panels, you serve as a major competition judge once or twice a year. You work too hard. You don't have to do all these things you do. So what's that about? Is it compulsive, are you a missionary in your own way? Every time you're in front of an audience, every time you're in front of the classroom, you are trying to not just be a good woman but to encourage other people to be good. What's involved there?

I don't know. I think that I would have been a good preacher [laughs]. I think that sometimes some of it is feeling that I have to prove that I am a good person. But also I have always been someone who was very affected by injustice, by what seems unfair. And sometimes I feel that maybe I can help.

Whatever it is that causes that, it's what I see as a calling of yours. You call others forth to be their best selves, and you inspire others toward that. I hope you realize what a gift that is to your students. They don't see many professors in front of them who are sharing their own struggle to be their best self, to fight against injustice, to fight against discrimination without becoming bitter.

And I think, I really do think, that one of the things people ought to do in classrooms is model being a whole human. And you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable … to pain, to hurt, so that you can love. Otherwise. …

We don't take those risks?

No! We use the word, but we don't take the risks.

A while ago, you told me that someone had mumbled that you had played the race card when you read the poem about James Byrd, the black man who was dragged to his death by the truck in Texas. And you said you were happy to know that people respond that way. Why is that?

Because it made clear to me what I suspect sometimes: that for me, who has to some degree been accepted in the world, people don't expect me to talk about race or think about it. Except in a positive kind of way.

That's your dues for being accepted?

Yes, yes. It's like, because I can speak about race, and because I have friends who are not African American, it must be that I think everything is OK, that I don't feel racism because, after all, I'm OK. But I've got a cousin who's not OK, you know what I mean? And I have friends who are of my race who are not OK, and I am not always OK.

You're also part of a human family.

Exactly.

Which is something that poetry, and your poetry especially, is about.

Absolutely. My poetry is not about “how does it look.” It's about “how does it feel.” You know?

Talk about that. …

Well, it's not about the surface of things. I hope it's more than that. I hope it is about humans who are deeper than that. And it's certainly not about forgetting—it's about remembering, because memory is what we have. I've started writing a poem about what so often happens with memories. I was thinking about that because I was beginning to forget some things about my mother. Now, she's been dead forty years, and I'm forgetting some things about how it felt when her hand touched my hair. I know that she touched it, I've seen the pictures of it, you know what I mean?

You don't remember how it felt?

Once the sensation of it, the feeling of it goes, the photo becomes the memory. And that's not good because the photo isn't the memory.

I was thinking about your mother the other day and the poem that you wrote about her burning her poems. I've heard you talk about your father forbidding her to publish, and how you watched your mother go to the basement and burn her poems in the furnace, but I've never heard you talk about how that felt and how that impacted on you, watching that. You were sitting on the steps. …

I was standing on the steps of the basement, and I don't even know if she knew I was there. I was a young girl, and to me this was just another strange thing that was happening in that house. You know?

Did you hear what your father had said to her?

Yes. Well, I don't remember that conversation, but I had heard that, “Ain't no wife of mine going to be no poetry writer.” And I think that it did impact on me. I think it had something to do with the reason I never stopped writing, and I've been writing since I was a little girl. I think maybe that's where that came from, as I think back.

And your mother knew that you wrote?

Oh yes. She would …

She encouraged that?

Oh yes. Well, they both encouraged me, believe it or not, to do whatever I wanted to. They thought I could do whatever I wanted to. Clearly, that wasn't true [Laughter]. And I knew that it wasn't true. But it was very nice of them.

They believed in you.

They did, very much.

So here's your mother burning her poems, and your context is, this house is always crazy. …

I knew that she was an unhappy woman. I used to think that she was the most unhappy person I had ever seen in my life. But I'm not that sure now. … What was it Camus said? “In the midst of winter I found myself in a wonderful summer,” something like that. There are moments of great joy. I have known those moments too.

Moments of happiness?

And perhaps if we allow them to be, they'll be enough, you know? Why do we think that we need to be so favored in the universe that we are guaranteed tremendous happiness at all costs?

Lucille, when I think back over the last several years, I'm really astonished by what you have been through and how well you have survived.

You know, sometimes I think that too!

You have come through cancer and chemotherapy, kidney failure, dialysis, kidney transplant—you've been looking at death for five years. How do you deal with that?

Well, I think about death a fair amount. But what I'm saying to myself is, I'm not going to go out like this. And I'm beginning to do things that I used to do when I was younger, like listening to jazz, going to the Blue Note. I haven't done something like that in so many years. All those things, and suddenly I think, “I enjoyed life very much as a young woman.” I just enjoyed fun, and I want to enjoy it again.

You never really had a chance to get back to that. …

No, no.

After Fred died you were too busy being a mother and a poet?

I think it wasn't until I went to the book fair in L.A. last year that I found myself suddenly feeling like I was doing things that Lucille did. I'm really enjoying doing these things again.

Last year, when you were appointed to be a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, there was some noticeable controversy going on about diversifying that bastion of white males. …

I got a copy of the responses to the questionnaires that the academy sent out, and on their web site they had some. And it is surprising how many people felt that they shouldn't try to diversify the chancellors because, they said, being appointed should still be according to the excellence of the poetry. Now, what is the assumption there: that if the chancellors are diverse, it is not because they're good poets? But it isn't necessarily true that if you have diverse chancellors, the minority ones aren't as good as the other ones. I really thought that was so interesting, that view. And that view came from surprising people. I don't think that they knew that the academy sent out copies of their responses.

The ignorance within which we live is huge. …

“The darkness around us is deep.” That's Stafford.

I never understood that quite that way, but it's absolutely right. We are surrounded by how we have learned and whatever ways we've learned. No matter how liberated we think we are, we're still surrounded by our assumptions—in this case that excellence has a universal definition.

Isn't that something? Some of the people thought that the chancellors should not be eligible for the Tanning, but they should be eligible for all the other prizes, because if they were not, then prizes wouldn't go to the best poets.

When I judge competitions I look for the best manuscript. What a minority person can know, if I'm a judge, is that his or her manuscript will get a fair reading, and if it's the best one, I'm going to vote for it. If it is not, I am not. I owe poetry something, you know?

When you wrote Generations: A Memoir, part of your motivation was that your father had carried the story of your family and when he died you wanted to carry on that tradition, get it down in writing?

Yes.

And you said that your husband, Fred's, last words were—

“Tell my story.”

In your own poetry there's a lot of telling your story, but not in the same way that Generations: A Memoir tells that story. Talk some about that.

Remember when we were talking about how memories at a certain point become the pictures of the thing and not the thing itself? For instance, I am told that when my brother was born, I was sitting in my little rocking chair, and I said, “What'd you get that baby for?”

Now I don't remember that. I say I remember because I've been told it so much, and it sounds true to the kid I remember being, but I really have no memory of actually saying that. I wrote a poem recently about my mother braiding my hair. It's a ritual in some neighborhoods, you know, you sit on the porch and the mother greases and braids the child's hair. And I do remember that, but I also have a picture of it somewhere, and so I remember it through the picture. I remember what it looked like, but I am losing the memory of what it felt like. So it's going to become just image to me, you know, if I'm not careful. And then just a story I have heard.

When my brother died, just about a year ago, I thought—now nobody knows what my mother looked like when she was thirty but me. Nobody alive remembers Mamma was a girl once, but me. And I remember how she smelled, you know? I remember how she felt. And that seems like a tremendous responsibility.

That has a lot to do with why I wrote Generations. One day I understood that this story my father was telling—whether it is accurate or not—the story my father was telling has got to be preserved because there were once people who had lives in Africa, and they become statistics, you know? And there was once a woman, and I was named for her, and that was not coincidence. There were these people who were brought over on boats, you know? And I don't know what they did about their parents, and some were kidnapped. …

A guy asked me one time, “I know slavery and all that, but by and large, aren't black people happy now that they were brought here?”

Goodness! What did you say?

He was a friend of mine. He said, “You're like family, I can ask you this.” Now, I did suggest that he shouldn't ask anybody else. I said, “I don't know. It was so bad. I don't think so.”

But for Caroline, it was not just a matter of that. It was when she would sit on the porch and say, “I wonder what become of our mother.” You know? That makes her more than a statistic.

When your father asked her questions, she'd say, “Don't you worry, mister.”

Yes.

What do you think she meant by that?

I have no idea. Maybe that it was going to be okay sometime, you know?

Your father would ask her for more details about a story she was telling and she'd say—

[overlapping] Don't you worry.

—which is to suggest—

That it didn't matter about the details.

Some of the details may not have been so important, but others were. She is the one who passed on the legacy of the Dahomey Women.

[overlaps some with last sentence] Yes. Yes. But, see, the one thing about stories is that in black households, at least in my generation and before, to sit in the kitchen and listen to the old folks talk was part of what you did. And so sometimes the stories weren't told to you, but you always heard the stories and listened to them. You'd sit, like when they were doing your hair, and people weren't talking to you, but they were talking. And so you heard the stories. It's interesting, I was thinking about last words. Fred's were “Lucille, tell my story.” And my father's mother—did I ever tell you this story?—My father went to Bedford, Virginia, to see his mother when she was dying—I remember it was the only time I ever saw my father kiss my mother. The only time ever. And it scared me, if you want to know the truth [laughs].

When he kissed her?

I said, “Oh my God!”

He kissed her on the lips?

Yes. I couldn't believe it. I thought it was … I was petrified, I knew something amazing was about to happen. And that was scary enough. Then she said, “You behave yourself now, Sam.” She was scared to death, he was going south.

Ahh.

I'm talking about the 1940s, that's when this was. And he went to Virginia, and he got there just as his mother was dying. And his mother looked at him and said, “You always was a bad boy.”

Hmmm. This was your father?

Yes. Think of that! You know? Because he had run away when he was younger.

And he told you that. That's how you know that?

That's how I know that. He had a great memory, and he was a great storyteller. Both he and my mother were great storytellers.

What is in these stories that writers want to preserve? You talked just a little while ago about wanting to remember the feel of your mother's touch and your mother's smell. And that's a little different, it's a part of the legacy, but it's a little different from the stories about Mammy Caroline and the heritage of the Dahomey Women.

But you know … I want to remember. I want memory to be as whole as possible. Not just what people did, but how they did it. I want to understand why they did it, you know? I want to know who they were so I can know who I am.

Stories help us understand who we are, what we are made of … ?

I think maybe so. Or what our possibilities are. … The story goes that I was my father's favorite, you know, and I suppose I was, in an odd kind of way, but I didn't care. Being his favorite child didn't help me at all. Elaine called me one day, “Lu”—that's how she talked—“Lu, Lu, our daddy drove us crazy” [laughs]. I said, “I know. I know. Try to get over it. I came fairly lately to this: I can forgive my father for driving us crazy. He was driven crazy, you know. But I cannot forgive him for driving my mother mad. And she was probably always on the edge.

You're really protective of her, and the memories you have of her. She died very young. …

She died too young. I remember once I was to give a recitation at Christmas, so I got in front of the church, and when it was my turn. I didn't say anything. So people were saying things like, “Well, isn't she something!” “See there.” And my mother, who didn't go to our church, who rarely went to church at all, my mother walked up from the back of the auditorium, marched down the aisle, took my hand, and said, “She don't have to do nothin' she don't want to do.” And then she marched me back down. Now, on the one hand I was a little embarrassed. But on the other hand I was absolutely empowered. “She don't have to do nothin' she don't want to do.” But then, after I remembered that, I think this: somehow abuse feels like betrayal.

I also remember that there was something that my mother wanted me to do; something I didn't want to do, and my father said, “She don't have to do it.” And my mother cried, and she said, “Who is the Mamma here anyway?” … I hadn't thought of that in a long time.

And that, see. … brings tears again. It feels like betrayal. And it's all mixed up with it, I'm sure of that.

The dynamic there is really complex. It seems they both treasured you. But your mother was also trying to protect you from him in ways that she could?

I guess. I like to think so. One other time I remember, she said, “You've hurt your mother.” And I went into hysterics. I would have done anything to not hurt my mother. I'm sure it was a result of something, and I just started screaming and crying, because I had hurt my mother.

All these stories tell us who we are—and what our possibilities are, What to guard against, what to encourage in ourselves, and how to recognize it in others. That's part of why you write this, yes? It's part of why we tell stories, to understand these things?

I don't know how I survived. Poetry. And memories. Because I think others tried not to think about those things they bottled up inside them. But I tried to see wholly who these people were because I want to be seen wholly. That's who I am. I want to understand myself as a fallible human being.

When your memories are painful, and you block them and forget them, the price you pay for that is … ?

They come up to haunt you and to pierce you at bad moments. Sometimes the memories are awful. Something I've never talked about is the memory of what happens as an abused child. … That's a horrible thing. And trying to suppress that one, you know. It's horrible to have that happen, to anybody.

Would you read the poem you wrote about that recently? “moonchild”?

Well, O.K. I guess so.

“MOONCHILD”

whatever slid into my mother's room that
late june night, tapping her great belly,
summoned me out roundheaded and unsmiling,
is this the moon, my father used to grin,
cradling me? it was the moon
but nobody knew it then.
the moon understands dark places.
the moon has secrets of her own.
she holds what light she can.
we girls were ten years old and giggling
in our hand-me-downs. we wanted breasts.
pretended that we had them, tissued
our undershirts, jay johnson is teaching
me to french kiss, ella bragged, who
is teaching you? how do you say, my father?
the moon is queen of everything.
she rules the oceans, rivers, rain
when I am asked whose tears these are
I always blame the moon.

I've had a very challenging life. … And still I rise.

I get more and more fascinated by how those challenges inform your poetry. What is it that drives you to write? And how do the things that decide they want to be poems come to the fore?

Well, I'm triggered by sound, for one thing. I'm triggered by the way things sound. Some people are triggered by what they see. I'm not. I don't see well enough, probably, to do that. But I am triggered by how things sound. And a phrase, a sound, a word comes to me, and it automatically goes somewhere if I leave it alone.

During some years I couldn't talk to anybody about what mattered to me or about what was bothering me. But just putting words out … it's interesting. I've never put this together, but Maya has a thing about when she was raped. She was mute for a couple of years. And I think that maybe the way you try to deal with not being able to talk about it is to write. I've always loved poetry, and I was used to loving it because Mamma loved it. I would sit and recite poetry. Sounds—they were comforting sounds—you know. And one thing I've learned in this life is that I'm probably going to have to comfort myself.

My mother used to rock me. I'd sit on her lap. I think also that what I learned was about possibility, about people, and that, at any time people could do something completely unexpected. Something could happen because everybody is capable of everything. And the only way I knew to live in such a world—such an unexpected world—was to know that everything could turn from you or toward you, anytime. And to know that that was not unusual.

Hmmm.

You know, this is the nature of being human: it is full of positive and negative possibility. And writing about that is interesting.

When you say you respond to sound, though, it's not so much the musicality of sound as what a tone triggers?

All of it together. The musicality. I mean the musicality of some words going together, calling other words, other sounds. Our bodies respond to music, our bodies respond to sound, you know. Certain sounds call for certain things, but if you think of it as words, then you begin to narrow the possibility of the sound. “Jesus wept” is just more powerful than “Jesus cried.” You know what I mean? If you say the words and the musicality of the language, that's true. But if you say the words alone, they start being connected with their definition too much, they start being weighted toward the denotation.

Sounds start something in me. Sometimes I don't even really know what a word means. I have a line, “And the spindle fish have come to ground.” Now, what the heck is a “spindle fish”!?! I have no clue. But I know it's right because of how it sounds.

When you were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, you spoke of your colleagues in the academy as “scholars of the mind, scholars of the heart, and scholars of the spirit.” What does that mean to you?

Well, at the induction I talked about how important that was to me, and perhaps to the world. So often people think that intelligence is just about the mind, but, you know—especially in the humanities, you do have to explore both the mind and the heart. Nobody is just mind. Absolutely nobody. Balance is the law of the universe, to balance the inside and the outside of people. It's important. I was at a reading someplace, and a guy came up and he said, “I really enjoyed that. Of course, I'm not into poetry because I'm a historian, and so I study the history of people.” And I said, “So do I. You study the outside of them. I just study inside.” And he looked puzzled.

Many people think you can only be interested in one thing at a time, so if I'm interested in poetry, for instance, how could I possibly be interested in music? If I like Bach, why do I like Aretha? You know? I mean, there's a world to know about. And still you won't know about it all, or have a feeling for it all. But I'd like not to be a stranger in the world. Someone who's only interested in their field is going to be a stranger among the world's things.

One of the ways to not be a stranger in the world is to recognize that one's humanity is a complex thing.

Yes.

It would seem to me that one feels oneself to be a stranger because one thinks that the dark side that we know in ourselves is something that nobody else has, because nobody else has talked about it. Part of what makes you such an important teacher to your students and to your readers is that in your teaching and in your writing you do acknowledge that dark side.

Yes, and to validate it as human, you know? The beasts are not only “out there.” When I showed the Mai Lai video to my class, what I understood was that the men who were shooting could be my son. So could the people they were shooting at. They could all be my son.

And that seems to me to be important. I've been teaching college for thirty years, and I still don't know if I can teach well or not, but I do know it's possible to learn. I know that people can learn. And if we model anything, it seems to me, we should attempt to model what it means to be a whole human. When I teach about oppressed peoples, I want it to be understood that horrible things did not happen to statistics. This stuff happened to humans not unlike myself. People who wanted to love and try to get over their fears, who just wanted to be and who just wanted to be left alone.

Would you talk some more about recognizing the dark side of oneself. Why is this so important to you?

To control it. To work against it. To be the master of it. To balance oneself. You know? To realize what is possible—because if it's possible in me, it's possible in others. And then to see others as humans, as not strangers to ourselves. So people who don't look like me are not strangers to me. They are human like I am.

How do these understandings find their way into your poetry?

I don't know how to answer that, because you write out of all of who you are. The kind of person I am writes poetry like I do. What can I tell you? [Laughing] I see a lot of humor in things, I write out of that. And I am certainly a person who has fears, who has insecurities. I'm quite insecure about a lot of stuff, as you know. But I try not to hide that because I don't believe in hiding. It's better, it's healthier for me. And I want to be as healthy as possible, on the inside if not the outside.

Don't you think that part of what makes literature valuable is that good writers bring their own perspective, their own voice, to the task?

Yes. And, you know, I try not to be a person who's exclusive. I believe in being inclusive. I pretty much try to be myself—that doesn't seem to put people off, even though we tend to think that if we don't act a certain way, if we are just ourselves, people will not like us. But I don't think that's true.

A while back, we were talking about the importance of our recognizing our dark side and being able to acknowledge that and still go into the world and live our lives. Your poem, “how great Thou art” in The Book of Light—isn't that about this shadow?

Oh, yes, I think so. I might have that poem here. Because it's a poem, if it's here, it's a poem about God and the creation. … Here it is: “how great Thou art.” May I read it?

I'd like that.

This is from “Brothers” in The Book of Light. This is Lucifer, not Satan. I don't ever talk about Satan. I do talk about Lucifer. And he's talking to God about how it all turned out.

“HOW GREAT THOU ART”

listen, You are beyond
even Your own understanding.
that rib and rain and clay
in all its pride,
its unsteady dominion,
is not what You believed
You were,
but it is what You are;
in Your own image as some
lexicographer supposed,
the face, both he and she,
the odd ambition, the desire
to reach beyond the stars
is You, all You, all You
the loneliness, the perfect
imperfection.

Now that's an understanding that I think is a true one.

Say more about that. …

Well, even in talking about the ambition—imagine! “I'm going to make a world like me.” Gwen Brooks has a poem, “I Think It Must Be Lonely to Be God,” in which she writes, “Nobody to sit down and have a beer with.” [Laughs] If it is so, that what is made is made in one's deity's image, then all of this that is us must somehow reflect something of the deity, I would think. People are lonely, as God is lonely. You know? But there is always the possibility of going beyond one's loneliness, one's “unambition.”

You know, when I go places, I often am asked to speak to classes on Milton.

Why is that?

Because of Lucifer! Milton's Lucifer is the Lucifer that we think we know, but I've got a Lucifer too.

But, your Lucifer is more Hebraic than Milton's, don't you think?

Yes. Lucifer was the most beautiful angel in the heavens. And he was God's right hand man and all of that. Lucifer means “light.” And he was doing his job. If it is true that God was all powerful and that we all have tasks, Lucifer's task was what he did.

To be the adversary?

Be the adversary. Yes. And mystics say that there is always an adversary to allow one to test oneself against. Something like that.

So Lucifer is also aware, though, of the shadow in himself?

Well. … Still there is mercy. There is grace. That's the title of another one of the poems from “Brothers.” May I?

how otherwise
could I have come to this
marble spinning in space
propelled by the great
thumb of the universe?
how otherwise
could the two roads
of this tongue
                                                            [interjects; like a serpent, you see?]
converge into a single
certitude?
how otherwise
could i, a sleek old
traveler,
curl one day safe and still
beside You
at Your feet, perhaps,
but, amen, Yours.

Something that I think is astonishing about the Bible—and I guess I'm particularly talking about the Hebrew Bible here—is that there is so much space between the verses. If you're at all curious, you have to ask questions to even begin making sense of what happened and why.

Yes.

Your poems do that a lot. They fill in the details of these stories …

Yes. Hopefully, they fill them in according to humanness. Because the Biblical people were human—they are meant to be human, and it's much more interesting that way, much more interesting if sacredness can be part of what it means to be human. What a concept! You know? What a concept that Lucifer was beautiful. I try to remember that there was light in Lucifer.

So the ambivalence of our struggle is always before us, and always there is a choice?

Yes. And you know something, Michael. It is not a completely intellectual choice. To choose life, that's reason enough to know that the whole of life is more than an intellectual life.

I don't believe that one should always try to take the easy road. And when you do, you should know you're doing it. But suppose once in a while we choose joy. That could almost be enough, you know?

And you can't choose joy unless you acknowledge the darkness?

Absolutely.

But to acknowledge the darkness and not choose joy is—

Is sin.

Wow! “To acknowledge the darkness and not choose joy is sin.”

It's sin against the spirit. Against the self. It's sin against what made us.

I went to this symposium at Princeton. It was called “In Search of the Soul” and some guy there was arguing that the Soul wasn't hiding from humans. My take on it was that the Soul wasn't hiding from us, you know. Why would that happen? We have closed the door on it, and it can't get out now. Are we hiding from it? That could be, but the Soul is there. Perhaps we don't know how to listen to it.

What does Stafford write? “It is important that awake people be awake.”

Let me come back a minute to you as a teacher, because for you, helping your students to be awake means using your role as teacher to create opportunities for people to talk to each other.

Yes.

Because that's how we embrace the learning? Things that matter?

Yes. In my classes we talk about things, and disagree, and find that after disagreement we can come together. And we don't leave on negative notes. We're not going to have leaving on a negative note.

That's a very hard thing for most students, for most humans, to understand—that we can disagree and still honor and respect one another.

Exactly.

Your class becomes a place where people can practice this difficult task of being different with other people who are different. That's a rare gift to give to people nowadays.

[overlapping] Just talking to each other. It takes a lot of energy. I mean, I'm a fellow learner in there—but the energy it takes to hold it in some sort of focus!

Paying attention is tiring.

Yes. And to each one. It's like with my children. I had six. I tried to act like I had six “only” children, paying attention to each of them.

That would exhaust you!

Tell me about it, [laughs]. It ruins your kidneys. It gives you cancer. All that.

When you were undergoing dialysis, you mentioned that you thought your body was saying that you were holding on to so much stuff that it had become toxic to you. Would you talk a little about what you've been unwilling to let go of?

Well, my kids, you know, are up to forty years old and still I get concerned about how they're doing, how I can help. And after a certain point, I have to let it go, you know, but it's very hard for me to do.

But you don't want to let go. That's what your kidneys were telling you?

Yes. That's what my kidneys were saying: If you hold on to this, it could kill you. I've had a lot of losses, you know. I have no parents, my husband is dead, my sister is dead—my older sister's dead. I had lost babies, whether abortion or not, I had still lost babies. And friends. You know? I've been evicted twice. I've had a whole lot of losses. And I think my body said, “I'm not going to lose anymore. I don't want to lose anything else.” And so, it was going to hold on to anything—in the poem, even what would kill it. Even what would kill it.

The toxins …

Yes. And I understood that the doctors could fix the physical thing, but I have to fix the metaphor.

You write poetry about a lot of different subjects, and people like your poetry for many different reasons. Some read your poems and define you as a black poet; others as a feminist. Still others define you as an abused person, or as a cancer-stricken person, all these different things. If people want to put you into categories, you have many that you fit into.

I do.

And yet you resist those categories. Why is that?

When I write, I certainly don't write out of any of the categories.

Even when you're writing a specific poem, let's say, about breast cancer or about being abused or about being black?

No, there are a lot of categories, but to think, “OK, today I will write out of my having cancer. …” Well, what about the rest? One wants to write out of wholeness, out of the wholeness of “What is Lucille?” And that allows, I hope, something about what any human is. I am as complex as the next overweight person, you know? I mean, this is what we are, whether we like it or not. Whether it's hard or not. It is difficult to be human and to have all these things going on, but things are all possible in me. I certainly would never have thought I'd have cancer. That didn't happen to people like me. And the kidney failure: not supposed to happen to me. Dialysis? That happens to other people—I don't have diabetes, so why is it happening to me? But that's the wonder of it all. That all of this is what we are.

And writing from the parts is to choose to be trapped in what is only a part of you?

And which thing would you be trapped in? Should I become a victim of cancer? Then what happens about dialysis, which I hated beyond belief. And what do I do with abuse? And where do I put being a widow, you know? You can't chop yourself up like that. Literature should not be chopped up like that because it's then acknowledging only part of what it means to be human, and it's allowing someone to say, “Well, I'm not that, so I must be somehow OK,” or worse, “better.”

That's similar to what I find sad about so much theory coming into the study of literature. Because too often theory focuses on only a narrow agenda. So it doesn't look at the wholeness of the poem, the wholeness of the story. It looks at some singular aspect that most often seems to illumine the theory more than the literature.

I recently read something about me in a literary biographical dictionary. It talks about an early poem of mine where I walked out—“in the 40s / a nice girl / not touching / trying to be white.” What they say in there is, “she is not talking about race. She is talking about the blank page of herself and how she is trying to learn how to write on it what she is.” Well, no, I wasn't. I was talking about trying to be white. Buffalo, New York, in the 1940s.

I'm reminded of What Fred D'Aguiar said when he talked about how skin defines what he does because as soon as he opens his front door he is received in a particular way—he is a part of a history, something much bigger than he is, something which is theorized and to which he knows he must listen.

And think about it: Would I choose that history? Would I choose that fear that I can see sometimes in eyes? Would I choose the anger that it has fostered? No! I do not choose to be victimized by my own life and by my own experiences.

Tell me, Lucille, how do you like to be seen, how would you like to be remembered?

Oh! [chuckles] I used to say, I have this friend, and she changed her name—when everybody was changing their names to African names—hers was Jeribu. And I thought that was the most beautiful name because it means “one who tries.” If ever I were going to change my name I would like to be known as Jeribu, one who tried.

I would like to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being human. And who tried to do the best she could, most of the time. My inclination is to try to help.