Don't Play for Safety

The queens revisit Lucille Clifton's poem "won’t you celebrate with me." Then the queens are NOT. HAVING. IT. with misogyny in an Anthony Hecht poem.

Consider supporting and shopping at Loyalty Bookstores, a black-owned DC-area independent bookstore.

You can listen to Lucille Clifton read "won't you celebrate with me" here (the text of the poem is available with the audio; ~1 min). 

Read more here about The Clifton House. Writers and artists interested in participating and developing Clifton House programs may contact Sidney Clifton at cliftonhousebaltimore@gmail.com

 Watch Lucille Clifton read "Sorrows" and "What Haunts Him" at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival (~2.5 min)

The title of the new selected poems is How to Carry Water, Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (American Poets Continuum Series, 180).

 Starshine and Clay is Kamilah Aisha Moon's 2nd book from 4Way, published in 2017. 

Tracy K. Smith has a great essay on Clifton that appeared in The Paris Review and you can read that here. Smith's edition/selection of a Clifton-centered tarot deck is available here.

The beginning of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" is "I caught a tremendous fish," not "terrible fish," as James says. You can hear Bishop read that famous and much-anthologized poem here.  

There are absolutely scholars who defend the Hecht poem as lampooning Matthew Arnold's / Victorian notions of gender and romance, but these queens remain unconvinced.