We had a few brief conversations, and she was kind.Īnd I met Henry Taylor via some friends at American University, where he co-directed its MFA program. Mary’s College of Maryland, where Clifton was a distinguished professor of humanities. I taught twice in the beloved, now-defunct literary conference held biannually at St. So when two career-spanning poetry collections came across my desk, by the late Lucille Clifton and by Henry Taylor, I was eager to explore them, not only for the individual poems themselves, but to see how well the books represented the legacies of these contemporaneous but profoundly different writers.īefore I dive in, I want to say that though I cannot claim either of these poets as friends, teachers, or mentors, we were acquainted. Or maybe it’s because I, like so many others, was astonished in the aftermath of Louise Glück’s Nobel Prize win to discover via social media how many younger writers had never heard of her. Maybe that’s in part because so many fine writers have passed away this year maybe it’s simply because it’s autumn, which always seems to bring a mood of quiet reflection after summer’s heat and light. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about writers and their literary legacies.
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