Poetry Friday: In conversation with Lucille Clifton's Notes to Clark Kent

The challenge for March stayed close to our 2025 theme of conversation:  we were to be "in conversation" with a series of four poems written by Lucille Clifton, loosely known as Notes to Clark Kent. Here's an excerpt:

they had it wrong,

the old comics.

you are only clark kent

after all. oh,

mild mannered mister,

why did i think you could fix it?

See how with that question she so easily invites you to talk with her about this? After all, she's writing to Clark Kent, and letting us eavesdrop.  It feels like she would be open to conversation with us ordinary folk, too.  And she is--all four poems are spare but rich with feeling, and the casual tone makes it easy to engage with her words---to talk with this great poet about superheroes, admiration and disillusionment, rescue and risk...and so much more.  Please read more here (all four poems are very short.) 

At first, I simply imitated one of her poems, beginning with her line "They had it wrong..."  

They had it wrong,

the bishops—

you can’t slide

across the board

slicing through armies

on the sly to meet the queen;

how you must have puzzled

at my idea that I was 

invisible, able to slip

between worlds,

to Narnia or Prydain.

What did I expect? 

That the shadow

of my pointed hat—

the open book a peak

over my eyes—

would make me

less of a pawn,

plodding my way 

from chamber 

to chamber,

from dark to light 

and back again? 

-----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved) 

On my second try, I veered off, and decided to address the poet directly, triying only to match her easy flow of ideas and emotions, as if I were writing her a note, too:

Dear Lucille,

I didn’t crush on Superman,

my comics were Casper,

that pudgy, good-hearted ghost

and Scrooge McDuck, 

whose pert-tailed nephews’ 

names rhymed like rap,

so I guess that’s why my questions

are different. I didn’t wonder who

they were—human or superhero—

I only wanted to float through

fights, misunderstandings, and darkness—

or to waddle, flanked by friends,

into schemes and out again, unchanged—-

to be the reason the story took you

out of this world into that one,

but didn’t leave you heartless.

-----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved) 

You can find the conversations my poetry sisters had with these poems here:

Liz

Tanita

Mary Lee

Tricia

Laura

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Marcie Flinchum Atkins

Check your teeth

Who do you write for?

There are usually two answers for children's writers (or possibly all writers, but somehow the question gets thrown at us more.)

1) For a specific audience. Keep the age of the reader in mind! we are admonished. Watch your vocabulary. Make sure you hook those wiggly young'uns with lots of action. Observe real children. Keep adults out of it. Be a storyteller, not a navel gazer.

2) For yourself. Anything else is pandering. Write to entertain your inner child, and age appropriateness will take care of itself. Universal themes will save the day. Write the book you want to read.

I waffle back and forth between these answers.

I'm definitely aware of the age I'm writing for when I'm drafting a piece. I can't help it; I've tried not to care, to let the manuscript decide, but I'm in the business of making my work public, in all the best sense of that world. (Think public libraries, public interest, the reading public...) I want to be part of the goings on in the town square; I respect the power of words to reach beyond my own little world, and to ignore my audience seems...well, RUDE. I want to talk with them, not at them, and how can I do that if I don't bother to get to know them?

On the other hand, I simply can't sustain the energy needed to write a novel unless it's making me happy, too. My inner child throws a fit, a stinking hissy fit, if she's bored. And she likes to be thought unique, special, in that wonderful "only you can write this book" kind of way. But darn it, she's so often right that I can't ignore her either.

What to do? What to do?

I came across another possible answer, and it occurred to me that maybe I'd already written a book this way:

You must write as if you were talking to a stranger.

Crooked House excerpted a bit of a blog post by Thaisa Frank, and I went and read the whole post. Printed it out, even.

I'm still thinking about it. Perhaps this is what I did when writing Letters From Rapunzel.

"To create a common bond, the writer must write to the reader as one would write a letter, and not for the reader, as one would write a paper in school. The writer must also be able to step back, and, at times, write from a distance, yet with the intention of wanting connection.

This is a special sort of connection. From the beginning of time, writers have forged a singular language of intimacy, much of which is nurtured by the fact that writing involves the meeting of two strangers."

Yes, I do crave that intimacy. So much of life involves being polite or reserved or pretending we don't see the frond of spinach wedged between a diner's teeth two tables down. (Her own tablemates will tell her, right?)

Writing a book gives me both intimacy and distance. I can be totally, embarrassingly personal, but I don't have to be there when you're reading it. I can even disguise the embarrassingly personal within other characters, mixing everything so skillfully that you can't tell what I've done and what I've only thought of doing or seen another foolish soul doing.

When I write, I can whisper to that stranger: check your teeth. And she can whisper back: Thanks. Have you checked your breath?

My feet would like to ask you for a favor

Conversing in the blogosphere is an art form. Sometimes, I feel as if I'm at a huge party, and there are clusters of fascinating, nattily dressed people filling the multi-leveled hip club, with music thumping and lights flashing, and I'm running (in my sensible tennis shoes) from one cool conversation to the next. I'm running because, instead of talking about Spice Girl's baby, these people are talking books, and writing, and art. (The Eternal Conversation, right?)

At first, I tried to handle my rounds alone. Then I hired the much younger----but with such cute glasses!---Mr. Google Reader to assist me. Great! Now I could follow multiple conversations at once. The only problem was that (and here the party gets weird) if I actually spoke during one of these conversations, instead of just sagely nodding at the fringes, then I had to keep dashing back to that group of people to see if anyone had replied. Which was often days later. (How I would love to hear Dorothy Parker handle this kind of conversational time travel.)

A breakthrough occurred when I discovered I could subscribe to all comments as well as all original posts. (And just so you know, you can do that for the conversations here by clicking on the link "Subscribe to all comments" at the right.) And joy! joy! some blogs even offered to tap me on the shoulder only when a particularly scintillating conversation had new thoughts. (That would be found here by clicking on the title of a post, and then scrolling to the bottom for the link marked "Subscribe to: post comments.")

And here's where I need your help: I can't find these links for some of the wildly wonderful, totally fascinating, non-probation anklet conversations I want to follow. Is this not available in some blogging software? Or is it an option the blogger turns on or off? Please, I'm begging you, enlighten me. Because I really want to ditch my sensible tennies and slip on my three-inch bronze snakeskin heels.

Enter

I like the word enter rather than the word begin because begin has always terrified and paralyzed me. Begin evokes the command of a professor at the start of an exam, and implies a linear route to a fixed end. Enter seems much more inviting, conjuring up the image of multiple doorways into a fascinating place. And of course, if you enter, rather than begin, you can always exit, re-emerging from that fascinating place, perhaps by a different door, changed by your experiences within. This is why I write.

I also write because it is the only way I know how to be part of the Eternal Conversation. "Truth," says Parker Palmer, "is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline." So today, I'm entering the conversation by joining in with Poetry Friday.

Jules, over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, asked about the healing power of art. This is my reply. Perhaps I should have saved it for a more appropriate month. But that is the thing about entering. You use the door that is open before you.

The Bones of January

I love the plainness of January

when I have taken down my Christmas

finery, and in the shock

of my home stripped bare, I see

the corners of my rooms

again. And outside, all is

stark, gray, glorious

with no false beauty to help me

pretend that I am satisfied.

In January, I kneel beside my children’s

sleeping faces, and let them break

the leafless branches

that cage my chest.

And outside, all is

undone. Roots rend

the earth like bones.

How did this happen?

That all should be taken

down–

and that love,

love should be plain

as January?

---Sara Lewis Holmes

Poetry Friday Roundup is at Farm School today.