Lucille Clifton's "cutting greens"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, on June 27, 1936. Her first book of poems, Good Times (Random House, 1969), was rated one of the best books of the year by the New York Times.

Clifton remained employed in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed two collections: Good News About the Earth (Random House, 1972) and An Ordinary Woman (Random House, 1974). She was the author of several other collections of poetry, including Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 (BOA Editions, 1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee as well as the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize.

In 1999, Clifton was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She served as the poet laureate for the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and distinguished professor of humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

After a long battle with cancer, Lucille Clifton died on February 13, 2010, at the age of seventy-three.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is
0:05.8	Wednesday, June 19th, 2004. Today's poem is by Lucille Clifton, and it's called Cutting Greens.
0:15.4	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time. Here's cutting greens.
0:24.2	Curling them around, I hold their bodies in obscene embrace,
0:28.6	thinking of everything but kinship.
0:31.4	Collards and kale strain against each strange other
0:34.4	away from my kiss-making hand in the iron bed pot. The pot is black,
0:40.1	the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife,
0:46.5	and the kitchen twists dark on its spine, and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things
0:53.9	everywhere.
1:01.4	This poem transports me in a million directions simultaneously, so it's hard to decide
1:09.9	where to begin, except at the beginning, I guess.
1:16.5	This is ostensibly a poem about preparing greens for cooking and consumption. And if you have
1:25.8	never done this, there's a little bit that you're going to have to
1:28.4	take on faith here. If you have, perhaps you'll intuit a lot more of what Lucille Clifton is
1:35.4	getting at here. But first, it's worth noting that there are two kinds of greens, collard greens
1:43.1	and kale, which are perfectly delicious when prepared together.
1:50.7	But on first blush, they are distinct from one another.
1:54.5	Collard greens usually have much broader and longer leaves.
1:58.7	Even when they are of similar size, kale has a rougher, more roughly texture.
2:07.0	Usually, it's stems or spines are a little woodier.
2:13.8	But in most cases, both collards and kale, you have to remove the stock that runs up
	...

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