The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

The poems “haiku” and “An American Story” stem from files from that conference.

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.

What Watches Me? A Writing and Drawing Book for You. (Children’s Book) Washington, DC: US Dept. Health, Education & Welfare and the Central Atlantic Regional Educational Laboratory, c. 1968

“I stand here before you having survived 3 bouts with cancer, a kidney transplant, the loss of my husband and two of my children and arthritis like you wouldn’t believe. Indeed won’t you celebrate with me?”

there seems a purposeful ordering to the sections and even in the new title.

The more immediately recognizable style of “6/27/06 seventy”—the date and age of her birthday—recasts a poem of a similar title that appears in Voices.

The poem was written, we know, from early drafts in 2006 and appears completed in 2008

composed in e-mail then printed,

Clifton, who attended the conference many times (and commented on the awkwardness of its place name), often used the daily practice to full advantage—indeed, a number of poems from Voices appear to have taken first form, or perhaps been polished further, at Squaw Valley

These eight-by-eleven inch, month-by-month calendars include her busy schedule of readings, and often serve as a kind of portable desk, with work memos, invitations to read, and travel itineraries tucked in; they also include drafts of poems in progress and what appear to be reading copies of new poem