Wont you celebrate with me poetic devices

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black.
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me” from The Book of Light. Copyright © 1993 by Lucille Clifton.

Used with the permission of the The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org External links.

Commentary

My name is Sharon Olds and I’m going to read Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me?”

Lucille Clifton: “Won’t you celebrate with me?” Yes we will, Lucille. I love this poem. I love that the poem is an invitation and it begins almost with a kind of negative: “Won’t you celebrate with me? Will you celebrate with me?” I love, also, the phrase: “A kind of life.” So many of us feel that we don’t have a normal life but something approximating it—a kind of life. I love the words “shaped” and “model”, sort of Lucille as God in Genesis, creating herself, the way we must try to make ourselves, make our characters better if we can. I love the word “Babylon”, also, the biblical tones of that and the sense of the diaspora of exile. And I love the shiny word “starshine” and the gloomy word “clay” and the image of holding one’s own hand, the star-shine hand clasping the clay hand for solace and courage. And the way we are made of the earth and the stars—we actually, physically are made of the matter of the stars, it turns out.

And oh, that ending, that “something”: “something has tried to kill me.” And the word “try”, the way the speaker of the poem tried to shape a life, “something has tried to kill me,” “try” as a dangerous word here. And the word “fail” as a triumphant word: brief, poignant, tough, musical, swift with truth. Miss Lucille, how we do miss you.

Commentator's Poem

Stag’s Leap

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine 
looks like my husband, casting himself off a 
cliff in his fervor to get free of me. 
His fur is rough and cozy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant, 
the bough of each furculum reaches back 
to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up 
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic, 
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray 
level as he soars from the precipice edge, 
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart 
leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, 
I am half on the side of the leaver. It's so quiet, 
and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape, 
a ground without a figure. Sauve 
qui peut—let those who can save themselves 
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone 
tiny being crucified 
on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim, 
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched 
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he 
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his 
faithfulness, as if it was 
a compliment, rather than a state 
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he 
feel he had to walk around 
carrying my books on his head like a stack of 
posture volumes, or the rack of horns 
hung where a hunter washes the venison 
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap, 
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old 
vow have to wish him happiness 
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still 
can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy 
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots 
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots 
clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their 
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.

—Sharon Olds

Rights & Access

“Stag's Leap” by Sharon Olds.

Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

By permission of the author.

• 

  Sharon Olds

  Sharon Olds (1942- ) was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford and Columbia Universities. She is the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Stag's Leap (2012). Olds' other honors include the National Book Circle Critics Award as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. From 1998 to 2000, she served as the State Poet of New York. Olds currently teaches graduate-level workshops in poetry at New York University. Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones.

• 

  Lucille Clifton

  Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was born in New York and educated at Howard University and State University of New York at Fredonia. She is the author of thirteen poetry collections, several children’s books and prose collections. Clifton’s many honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, a National Book Award for Poetry and a Ruth Lily Poetry Prize. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Poet Laureate for the state of Maryland. Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

  What does Won't you celebrate with me mean?

  'won't you celebrate with me' by Lucille Clifton addresses racism and inherent gender inequality. The speaker has overcome every hurdle and modeled herself in her own image. Throughout this poem, the speaker explores her journey and the obstacles that were in her way to becoming her true self.

  What is the tone of won't you celebrate with me?

  Her tone is almost timid and apologetic. Rather than ask us as readers to celebrate “the life” she's made, the speaker asks us to celebrate “a kind of life” she's shaped.

  What does Babylon Symbolise in the poem won't you celebrate with me?

  “won't you celebrate with me” Speaker She was "born [...] nonwhite and woman" into a culture hostile to "both" identities. Metaphorically, she was born into "babylon" (the city of Jewish exile in the biblical period).

  What is Starshine and Clay?

  Starshine & Clay is a history of injustice and oppression in America grounded in the lives, loves, and despair of individual men and women whose spirits fight on earth and dream of the heavens: “I think of / Joy, Théma, Kerry, Anthony, Phebus.