Lucille Clifton Goes Home

from The Buffalo News

Clifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies

by Jay Rey

Lucille Clifton, born and raised in the Buffalo area before going on to achieve some of the literary world's highest honors as a major American poet, died this morning at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore at age 73, her sister told The Buffalo News.

Clifton had been ill for some time with some type of infection, and had undergone surgery to remove her colon Friday, but her exact cause of death is still uncertain, Clifton's sister, Elaine Philip said today.

"We really don't know," Philip said, "she had an infection throughout her body, and we don't know yet where it was coming from."

Clifton, who lived in Columbia, Md., and was the former poet laureate of the state, was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

She won the National Book Award in 2001 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000," and in 2007, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded one of the literary world's highest honors — the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Foundation."

"She is, in my opinion, the greatest poet to have been born and raised in Buffalo in the 20th Century," said R.D. Pohl, longtime literary contributor to The Buffalo News.

"I think so, too," Philip said, "not just because she was my sister. She was so sensitive. Everything touched her. Everyone mattered to her. She was such a loving person."

The former Lucille Sayles was born into a working-class family in Depew on June 27, 1936.

She moved to Buffalo with her family at an early age, and was raised on Purdy Street. She graduated from Fosdick-Masten High School and was awarded a scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., before she transferred to Fredonia State College, where she graduated.

Clifton left Buffalo in the late 1960s, after she met and married Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor at the University at Buffalo.

The couple moved to Baltimore and had six children. Clifton moved to California for a short time, after her husband died in 1984, but returned to Maryland several years later and has been there ever since.

In 2004, she returned to Buffalo to receive an Outstanding Individual Artist award from the Arts Council in Buffalo and Erie County and the Buffalo Niagara Partnership.

At that time, Clifton had published 11 poetry collections, autobiographical prose and 20 children's books. Her poems have appeared in more than 100 anthologies. In 1987, she became the only author to have had two books nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year and was a finalist for the prestigious award.

Besides her sister, Clifton is survived by three daughters, Sidney, Gillian and Alexia; and a son, Graham.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

Literature from The Underground: 'Born to Use Mics'

Does a new anthology devoted to a hip-hop classic elevate the genre to its rightful place as a literary form?

Literature from the Underground

ADAM SERWER | February 5, 2010

Illmatic, the first album by hip-hop elder statesman Nas, is a masterpiece. Released in 1994, its tales of scowling corner boys, prowling drug addicts, undercover cops, treacherous lovers, and remorseful gangsters are so vivid that you can almost feel your nostrils being singed as Nas brushes the marijuana ash from his clothes. From out the gate, Nas identifies himself as a writer's writer ("see with the pen I'm extreme") and proceeds to prove himself right, offering lines that are poetic ("with more kicks/than a baby in a mother's stomach"), bleak ("straight-up shit is real/and any day could be your last in the jungle"), and cautiously hopeful ("that buck that bought a bottle/could have struck the lotto").

As the legend goes, the frenetic pace of Nas' flow, his complex internal rhyme schemes, and his dense lyricism had people wearing out their cassette tapes, rewinding them over and over again in disbelief. It's the one album in all of hip-hop whose artistic value, regardless of the critic's personal taste, is unassailable. Even Nas' longtime nemesis, Jay-Z, frankly confesses that the first time he heard the album, "the shit was so ahead/thought we was all dead."

Despite not being a commercial success at the time, Illmatic was recognized as a classic almost immediately. A lean album comprising 10 tracks that eschew trendy beats and high-profile guest appearances, its mythical status was virtually assured when The Source magazine -- then still widely known as hip-hop's bible -- broke its embargo on giving albums a five-mic rating (the equivalent of a five-star rating) to bestow the honor on Illmatic. Nas was praised for reclaiming hip-hop from the gangsta rap groups of the West Coast and ushering in an East Coast renaissance that included the likes of the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z himself.

The new anthology Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai, is a love letter to Illmatic, a self-conscious effort to preserve the album as a classic of poetic nonfiction. There's plenty of academic work on hip-hop as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. But despite being the most distinct and dominant form of poetic nonfiction of the past 30 years, it has yet to be given its due as literature. Sure, your average liberal-arts college has more than its share of rap-focused classes taught by hip professors ready to act as urban-culture guides for wide-eyed private-school kids. (My class at Vassar was called "Literature from the Underground.") But these are seen as quirky electives. For the most part hip-hop is still fighting a dulled American impulse -- the same one that dismissed jazz out of hand as "noise" for so long -- that the artistic contributions of urban black culture are just fodder for the groundlings. If Illmatic fails to persuade the reader of hip-hop's intrinsic value as poetic nonfiction, the editors seem to be asking, what else could?

Read the Full Review @ The American Prospect