By Sarah Nance

Featured Art: “Alluvium Variations 25” by Mateo Galvano

“when i stand around / among poets,” Lucille Clifton writes in an untitled poem from her 1991 collection quilting, “sometimes / i hear [ . . . ] one note / dancing us through the / singular moving world.” Here, Clifton configures a communal space for poets where some adjoining strand—what she calls a “single music”—transforms their ordinary path through life into a dance. In drawing a connection between dance and poetry, Clifton evokes a long poetic tradition (consider how villanelle, as one example, comes from the Italian word for “dance”) and forges an association she both troubles and expands in other work. Over the course of her forty-five year poetic career, Clifton takes what are on the surface simplistic references to dance—something one does for joy, praise, or worship—and crafts nuanced claims about embodiment, writing, and Black resistance.

In Clifton’s early work, dance is configured at first as a kind of religious ecstasy, such as in “God send easter” from her 1972 collection good news about the earth. There, the poem’s subjects “dance toward jesus” as they:

      step out
      brilliant as birds
      against the concrete country

And yet, even as these figures confidently move toward the resurrection promised in the title, they likewise “glory in our skin,” evoking a sense of pride and community in the face of bigotry.

The closing poem—“spring song”—from that same collection similarly narrates how the “dance of Jesus music / has hold of the air,” noting in closing that:

      the world is turning
      in the body of Jesus and
      the future is possible

This future that Clifton deems “possible” is one likewise rooted in racialized modes of justice. The dedication to the collection is “for the dead / of jackson and / orangeburg / and so on and / so on and on,” an ongoing sense of violence against Black subjects writ large in its evocation of the killing of Black student protesters and bystanders at two southern universities. Here, the investment in dance is not only as worship but connected to the very “air” itself, covering a world where a new future looms possible.

In both of these early examples, Clifton’s engagement with dance pulls from religious communities where praise is a public part of church engagement. In so doing, she also establishes a specifically Black community, one where “dance” functions both as religious act and a rejection of mainstream whiteness with its racism and violences. In “homage to my hair” from two-headed woman (1980), Clifton praises almost religiously her “nappy hair” that “jump[s] up and dance[s].” Later, in her poem “my dream about being white” from her 1987 collection, Next, Clifton uses an extended metaphor about music to consider what a white life might look like for her speaker: “hey music,” the poem opens, then addresses herself: “and / me / only white,” without the “lips” and “behind” that have, until now, structured her body. The “music” that opens the poem provides a backdrop of imagined whiteness, one also mapped on to the clothes that the speaker imagines wearing on her white body. As the poem closes, however, the speaker’s imagined identity starts to crumble: “i’m wearing / white history,” she says, “but there’s no future / in those clothes.” As she peels them away, the poem ends with a new relationship to music, one where the speaker “wake[s] up / dancing.” Here in “my dream about being white,” dancing is configured as joyful, but also as an embodied experience that aligns with Blackness.

For Clifton in particular, there is one further turn. The Black body she imagines dancing in pride or praise is also deeply intertwined with language: the dance is poetry, and the Black poet is dancing. She links this notion to a long lineage of Black women, including her “sanctified grandmother” who she describes in an untitled poem from her 1996 collection, The Terrible Stories. This grandmother, she notes, “spoke in tongues / dancing the syllables / down the aisle,” linking language to an embodied, almost ecstatic, state. For Clifton, however, this state manifests as poetry itself, a relationship she lays out in “the poet” from an ordinary woman (1974). There, her very body and its “bones [ . . . ] keep clicking music,” and the speaker finds herself “spin[ning] in the center of myself / a foolish frightful woman.” In the midst of this motion, Clifton closes the six-line poem by describing the feeling that she’s “tap dancing for my life.” Dance, then, becomes a vehicle for the act of poetry itself, one where the stakes are quite high: the speaker dances for her very survival.

These stakes become clarified throughout later work, including The Terrible Stories, with its wrenching subsection titled “From the Cadaver.” There, Clifton lays out her experiences with breast cancer, treatment, and recovery. In the section’s opening poem, “amazons,” Clifton recounts the tribe of Amazonians, “the rookery of women / warriors” and “daughters of dahomey” rumored to have cut off their right breasts to better wield their bow and arrow in battle. The poem turns suddenly at the end, however, shifting back to the speaker “five generations removed” from those mythical women she calls “poet[s]”:

      i rose
      and ran to the telephone
      to hear
       cancer     early detection    no
       mastectomy    not yet

In response to this sudden encounter with her own mortality, Clifton closes the poem with a reflexive act that also hails back to her earlier use of dance:

      there was nothing to say
      my sisters swooped in a circle dance
      audre was with them and i
      had already written this poem

When encountering “nothing to say,” the women in the poem instead turn to dance, a ceremonial approach that likewise connects Black women to poetic practice. “[A]udre [Lorde]” was already there, Clifton recounts, and in a strange moment of atemporality, the poem was somehow already written, the implied outcome of the sisterhood’s collective dance.

Over two decades earlier, long before her cancer diagnosis, Clifton considered the same notion of sisterhood and dance in her poem “in salem,” the opening to an ordinary woman. There, Clifton describes how:

      the black witches know that
      the terror is not in the moon
      choreographing the dance of wereladies

but rather in the “plain face of the white woman watching us / as she beats her ordinary bread.” Even when tinged with danger—the moon’s rising turning woman to wolf—the “dance” Clifton evokes is not a threat compared to the violence of a white-dominated culture.

The dancing wereladies that Clifton describes in 1974—a community of
Black “witches,” what she refers to as “weird sister[s]”—transform into the supportive group of Black poets that surround her in a “circle dance” after her cancer diagnosis in “amazons.” These dancing women provide a communal sense of protection, one that suggests important links between bodies, Blackness, dance, and poetry. In framing dance throughout her early career as a joyful act that simultaneously challenges white supremacy, Clifton lays the foundation for her later investigation of dance as poetic practice. This practice, as Clifton suggests in The Terrible Stories, is not solely for praise, worship, or camaraderie, but also protection: “you know how dangerous it is / to wear dark skin,” she writes in “1994,” the title a reference to the year of her cancer diagnosis. Dance, figured as poetry itself, becomes then a way of ensuring, as Clifton suggests early on, that a different future might be possible.

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Sarah Nance is a writer and an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A Pushcart Prize winner, her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Southern Humanities Review, Iron Horse, and elsewhere.