You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Lucille Clifton.

She is in the rare position of being an American poet,

all of whose work is in print, which is an extraordinary thing.

And with a new book coming out soon from B-O-A editions called The Terrible Stories.

Her previous book of poetry was the Book of Light,

and this goes backward through quilting, poems 1987 to 1990,

Next, new poems, and a great big collection of her work between 1969 and 1980 called Good Woman.

Well, I wanted to begin. In generations, which is your memoir, you talk about coming home from college and announcing to your father that you don't have to finish college

because you're a poet. And you went there as a drama major and I wondered about the

discovery of poetry. What was it that told you?

Well, at the time, you know, I may well have been making an excuse as opposed to discovering anything.

I was writing before I went to Howard. But it never occurred to me to think that I would be a poet. I wanted to be an actress, and I thought that there was some matter of choice in what you wanted to be.

Writing poems wasn't about a matter of choice for me.

It was something that I had done since I was a little girl.

It seemed as natural to me as breathing was.

And I think it was coming from college, I realized that perhaps this thing

that I did and that I tended to take for granted was important. How do you learn? How do you

learn? I think you pay attention. I read a lot. I still do. I love reading. And both my parents were great readers. And so the reading of books mattered in our family. And this, of course, was from parents, neither of whom graduated from elementary school. And I think you pay strict and close attention to the world outside oneself and to the world inside oneself.

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