Lucille Clifton

Across thirteen collections published between 1969 and 2008, Lucille Clifton established herself as an essential American lyricist. This course is interested in Clifton’s poetics as philosophical thinking, in her investigation of what being human is (ontology), how the human is to be (ethics), what knowing is (epistemology). We will study Clifton’s engagement with the theological—especially of the Edenic—as a praxis for exploring trauma, language, time, and the beginning of the world. Most centrally, we will consider Clifton’s deployment of brevity, of vernacular or everyday language, as a philosophical and aesthetic enactment of ordinariness.