Everything below comes from Patricia Spears Jones:

*****

I had the honor of facilitating a conversation between Lucille Clifton and Ishmael Reed at The Schomburg Center, January 29, 2009. I have excepted the part of the introduction that focused on Lucille Clifton. Lucille was really moved that night. She and Ishmael grew up in Buffalo, knew each other but had not been "on stage" together in quite this way. She read from her new book and she talked at length about Buffalo and its importance to her. And for once Ishmael took the back seat and let her be--no easy feat for him. She was frail, but she refused to be wheeled out onto the stage. Much will be said of Clifton's common touch and her courage. I'd like to say she was dignified and chic. Lipstick on. Eyes wide open. Voice strong.

"When she gets to heaven, she's gonna put on her crown and shout poetry all over heaven."

Peace and poetry
Patricia Spears Jones

FROM THE INTRODUCTION FOR WRITERS ON THE CUTTING EDGE SERIES at The Schomburg Center, January 29, 2009

Poetry is not only dreams and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change; a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” from Sister Outsider

A few hours before his assassination in Memphis, Martin Luther King said “let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be.” 1968

LUCILLE CLIFTON AND ISHMAEL REED; TWO POWERFUL LITERARY MASTERS

Two poets who grew up in Buffalo, New York have been creating poems that have laid the foundations for a future of change and we are now in the powerful days when those changes are taking place. Lucille Clifton has created significant poems and memoirs exploring the myths, dreams and unsettling realities of Black women’s lives for four decades. She has shown how the family drama effects mothers, daughters, sisters and outside women—how awful things occur; how knowledge of the past—those Dahomey women; and finding a way to forgiveness are keys to psychic health. In an apt message for these days, her proverbial poems from the sequence: From the message from the Ones, the speaker notes:

in the geometry
of knowing
we have no new thing
to tell
only the same old
almanac
January
love one another
February
what you sow
you will reap

Clifton’s powerful collections are her harvest of maternity and marriage, the legacy of enslavement, the power of storytelling, family love and loss, mystical and spiritual explorations particularly of Christianity, nature and the environment, illness and recovery, but most of all a recognition of the vulnerability and the resilience of women, the girls we were, the women we become. As she sings in #4 of the shapeshifter poems from Blessing the Boats, “the poem at the end of the world/is the poem the little girl breathes into her pillow/this poem/is about the human heart/ this poem/is the poem at the end of the world.” That little girl is breathing. Her poem continues.