David Gura from NPR’s “All Things Considered” put together a beautiful tribute to Lucille that was broadcasted last weekend. The piece begins:

“As a girl growing up in the 1940s on Lake Erie, Lucille Clifton never thought she would become a poet.

“The only poets I ever saw were the portraits that hung on the walls in elementary school in Buffalo, N.Y.,” she said in 1993. “Old, dead white men, with beards, from New England.”

Clifton did not look like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or John Greenleaf Whittier or Walt Whitman. She was a woman and an African-American, and later, a wife and a mother of six children.

But Clifton did become a poet — and after a long, successful career, she died on Feb. 13 at age 73 from complications from cancer.”

You can listen to the entire broadcast here [NPR Tribute to Lucille Clifton]

Bill Moyers Journal.

The tribute to Lucille by Bill Moyers was one of the most beautiful pieces on a poet I have ever seen. Lucille’s readings are powerful, playful, deadly serious, and passionate. Moyers eloquently described the impact of her work and the combination of interviews, readings, and information about Lucille’s career presented a well-rounded portrait of the poet.

In his introduction to the piece, Moyer’s said, “The long arc of morality that bends toward justice leads not only through the courthouse and the statehouse but out on the streets and in the pages of poetry and prose. Luckily for the rest of us, there are writers who in words both beautiful and bold can express rage at injustice. But they don’t stop there, they help us experience sorrow and joy through an intimate knowledge of our tempestuous human nature. We lost one of those gifted people the other day- one of our most popular poets, my friend, Lucille Clifton.”

You can watch the entire tribute here:  [Bill Moyers Tribute to Lucille Clifton] 

The Rooster's Wife, poems (and cover art) by Russell Edson

In 2005, we were thrilled to publish The Rooster’s Wife by prose poet master Russell Edson. Russell was at the forefront of the emergence of prose poetry in America in the early 60s and he continues to produce his trademark hilarious, surreal, and poignant poems. What many people don’t know is that Russell’s father was a cartoonist and that cartooning had a strong influence on his style. Russell is also a visual artist himself – in fact, his artwork graces the cover of The Rooster’s Wife.

Given his influences and style, it was a stroke of brilliance on the part of the Poetry Foundation to create an animated adaptation of a poem by Russell Edson. The poem they used is “Let Us Consider” from The Rooster’s Wife. The piece was animated and designed by Chris Lightbody.

You can watch the animation here ["Let Us Consider" animated poem]

Here is the text of the poem:

“Let Us Consider”

 Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his

sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;

or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping

her shadow off a wall….

Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’

tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips

in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given

to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which

saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in vanity.

Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,

whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man

who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for

dessert served himself a chilled fedora.