won't you celebrate with me

Lucille Clifton

“…for me, poetry is a way of living in the world… for me, poetry is a way of trying to express something that is difficult to express, and it’s a way of trying to come to peace with the world. The mistake teachers sometimes make is that they think art and poetry, they think that’s about answers. It’s not about that, it’s about questions. So you come to poetry not out of what you know, but out of what you wonder. And everyone wonders something differently and at different times… It is an honest mistake in poetry to try to figure out the ways that it’s crafted. But its crafting is not what it is.”
- Lucille Clifton (from the Academy of American Poets video series - Poetry Breaks)

A way of living in the world. What a perfectly honest way of describing the creative impulse and expression, and more importantly, self-discovery. I have shared Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats on Poetly before, and I turn to her poems in much the same way I decide to go for a quiet walk in the morning, or sit down alone to listen to a recording of alaap in Raag Yaman in the evening. It is an act of great vulnerability to find the simplest and truest path to the fragile, quivering thing called the self, and to celebrate the relationship that one has with this entity that is fraught with contradictions, fear, doubt, and uncertainty. I am sharing Clifton’s won’t you celebrate with me today for a couple of reasons. The poem is about self-discovery, and it is written with humility and honesty.

There is none of the epic or the brazen in Clifton’s tone. In fact, there is a quiet acceptance of fragility, and a gathering comfort of being in one’s own body. Identity is a thing that Clifton wears lightly, without fuss. This is not the same as saying that there is no acknowledgement of struggle or oppression. Rather, it is a way of looking at that struggle, a way of placing the enormous weight of reality before the inconsequentiality of the human self, and continuing to hope, to live, even to celebrate the imperfection. I love this poem for the airiness with which it confronts profound questions, and for the unabashed testimony of being alone, always, and still fighting.

This is the most difficult thing for a poet - to let the veneer fall, and to prod out with care and intensity, the real feeling behind words, to make language bend towards human experience, and not the other way round. Isn’t that what makes a poem click? Isn’t that what makes us love - seeing another’s acknowledgment of being broken, even celebrating it.

The last line of the poem is a reminder. It is echoed in Jericho Brown’s Psalm - a poem that I shared around the time that the Anti-Muslim pogrom was raging in Delhi’s streets. Adversity will always be there, surely. But I like to be reminded that everyday/ something has tried to kill me/ and has failed.

Note. I’m also sharing a youtube video of Lucille Clifton reading the poem.