ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on elegiac poetics in Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. It analyzes Lucille Clifton’s more public occasional poems in Blessing the Boats, focusing on the historical violence done to African Americans. Lucille Clifton also incorporates poignant and painful images of trees into her elegiac poems, suggesting their complex significance for a history of anti-black terrorism. Claudia Rankine takes up Lucille Clifton’s call to innovate the elegy to compel her readers to keep horrific racial violence in mind, while enjoining them to confront and contend with present racism. Claudia Rankine takes up Lucille Clifton’s call to innovate elegy to compel her readers to horrific racial violence in mind, while enjoining them to confront and contend with present racism. Lucille Clifton offers poetry as an antidote to the prevalence of police brutality, allowing for a space for empathy.
