Lucille Clifton’s “the lost baby poem,” as scanned by Sharon Olds.
This is from a handout Sharon Olds gave out for a Spring 1998 Craft of Poetry class at NYU. I was slaving behind a desk at the film department at the time, the after I got my MFA, and so I audited about half the classes, which was supposed to be taught by William Matthews, but he died just before the semester started. And so the semester morphed into a kind of guest lecture series, with Richard Howard, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, and several others I can’t remember right now.
I loved the Sharon Olds class the best, particularly because it re-confirmed, to me, how much of a great ear she has, how much effort and skill she puts into her own lines, and how well she reads other poets’ work. The entire handout is 13 pages. I made it a PDF; maybe I’ll post some more pages in the future. Sorry for my own marginalia here.
Oh, and isn’t this a superb Lucille Clifton poem?
Comments are closed.
I love this–I do hope you post more in the future.
dan! did you ever post more of this handout set? i love this too!!