the whole language

A writer who is not a minority thinks about the audience as people very much like him- or herself. On the other hand I am very much aware of the fact that my audience is of a number of cultures, a number of economic classes, and a number of colors. Black poets are always aware that the audience is very colored. 

I feel strongly a responsibility to my art, to my sex, to my family and to my race. And I feel a very strong responsibility to humanness. I don't know why I should feel it. Everyone does, I suppose. I often get asked when I am going to break out of black things and write real poems. Am I always going to feel bound? And yet I feel that I am freed by my culture because I do think about the whole language.

 

 - Lucille Clifton, in conversation with Pearl London in 1983, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011). 

poems do not come from what you know

Curtis Fox: When did you write that poem about your hips?

Lucille Clifton: Oh, that was early seventies.

CF: Was that in response to the feminist movement at the time?

LC: No, it was in response to my big hips! There’s not always, you know, I mean... I’m not always responding to various movements and things, I’m responding to life. Somebody asked me where do I get my ideas, for instance, as if poetry comes from ideas all the time. Poems do not come from what you know, they come from what you are trying to wonder about.

- from an interview featured in the lovely Poetry off the Shelf podcast "Done with this Dust". Lucille Clifton died on February 13th.