Lucille Clifton

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Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

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Show Notes:

Read the London Review of Books praising Aracelis Girmay's volume, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton. 

Watch Girmay read Clifton's poem "praise song."

Learn more about Lucille Clifton here, here, and here. 

Explore more about The Clifton House, and learn more about Clifton's life in Baltimore. 

Watch Debby Boone sing her 1977 hit, "You Light Up My Life" 

Listen to Deborah Ann Gibson sing "On My Own" from Les Misérables. 

Here is the trailer for Boxing Helena, directed by Jennifer Lynch.

Read more about the friendship between Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

For more about Clifton's children's book series, Everett Anderson, read here.

Here is a partial list of the poems we read and discuss on the show:

"my friends"

"a poem written for many moynihans"

"5/23/67 RIP" (for Langston Hughes)

"alabama 9/15/63" (which appeared in a 1999 special folio of Callalo)

"jasper Texas 1998" in Ploughshares Issue #78 Spring 1999

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49491/jasper-texas-1998

"If I should (to clark kent)"

"further note to clark"

"hag riding"

"to my last period"