Poetry Challenge #302-No Messing Around
The first time I heard Lucille Clifton’s poem, “Homage to my Hips,” I thought she wrote it for me. It was bold, it was sassy, it was playful, and like the hips it honors, didn’t mess around.
Lucille Clifton, born June 27, 1936 is gone now (since 2010), but in her lifetime, and in her poetry, she didn’t mince words or spend time messing around with nonessentials.
Clifton was the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987) and Next: New Poems (1987), and from there the list of awards goes on and on. . .
When asked how she wanted to be remembered, Lucille Clifton said,
“I would like to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being human.
My inclination is to try to help.”
“The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.” -Christian Century review of Clifton’s work, Peggy Rosenthal
Poetry Challenge #302
NO MESSING AROUND!
Many reviews of Clifton’s poetry make note of her lean style and “physically small” poems. “Poetics of understatement,” Robin Becker called it in the American Poetry Review “—no capitalization, few strong stresses per line, many poems totaling fewer than twenty lines, the sharp rhetorical question.”
For today’s prompt, write a poem in which you try to “honor being human” the way Clifton herself might have written it.
Keep it short, tight, honest, stripped down, unapologetically lower case—no messing around.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Write It!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2600+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments (below the giveaway notice).
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