The Two-Headed Woman: A Profile of Lucille Clifton

In the vast, often noisy landscape of American letters, Lucille Clifton’s voice was a distinct, unmissable quiet. She didn’t shout. She didn’t need to. Her poems are famous for their brevity—short lines, no capitalization, simple punctuation—yet they hold the weight of entire histories. She was a poet who could fit the cosmos into a stanza and a revolution into a lowercase 'i'.

Born in Depew, New York, in 1936, Clifton claimed she was born with twelve fingers—a sign, perhaps, of the 'two-headed' nature she would later write about: one head for the earthly world, and one for the spirit. She called herself a 'two-headed woman,' a seer who could look backward at the legacy of slavery and forward into a future of survival. She was the Poet Laureate of Maryland, a National Book Award winner, and in 1987, she achieved a feat unmatched in history: she was the first author to have two books of poetry—'Good Woman' and 'Next'—named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year.

Clifton’s innovation lay in her radical self-acceptance and her refusal to make her work 'small' just because her lines were. She wrote about the female body with a frankness and joy that was revolutionary. She celebrated menstruation, birth, and bodies that refused to conform to societal standards. Nowhere is this more delightful than in her famous anthem, 'homage to my hips'. Listen to how she claims space:

these hips are big hips. they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don't like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!

Beyond the body, Clifton was a poet of endurance. She wrote as a Black woman in America, a mother of six, and a widow who outlived her husband by decades. Her work acknowledges pain but refuses to be drowned by it. She turned suffering into a bridge. In her poem 'blessing the boats', often read at times of transition, she offers a benediction that feels like a spiritual embrace:

may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that

If you are new to Lucille Clifton, the place to start is her collection 'Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems.' But if you only read one poem today, let it be 'won't you celebrate with me.' It is a masterpiece of economy and power, a definition of triumph that fits on a single breath. It is the perfect introduction to her spirit:

won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.