In addition to 13 books of poetry and a memoir, Generations (1976), Clifton wrote 22 children’s books, many featuring a young Black boy named Everett Anderson. She served as a poet-in-residence at Coppin State College before teaching at Columbia University, George Washington University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Dartmouth College, ending her career as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. She was awarded grants and fellowships from the NEA and the Academy of American Poets.Ī Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Clifton held the role of Poet Laureate of Maryland for over a decade and spent many years teaching writing. Clifton has also been honored with Emmy Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Frost Medal, a Shelley Memorial Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. Clifton’s abundant honors and awards include a further Pulitzer nomination and a Juniper Prize for Two-Headed Woman (1980), and a National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (2000). She was the first, and is thus far the only, author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year: 1987’s Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems.
(1969), was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. It would make sense that in this case the speaker is using “boats” as a metaphor for a body but also for something more than the mere physical form of a person.Clifton’s first poetry collection, Good Times In their most rudimentary form, a boat is a vessel that crosses water and often carries life or lives aboard.
Presumably the boats may be a metaphor for the body or for a life. Next, “boats,” as plural suggests that she is going beyond her own “boat” to encompass multiple boats. This makes the “blessing” available to everyone who reads it and not to anyone in particular. The poem moves on to use the pronoun “our” (Line 3) and “you” (Line 4) rather than “I.” Clifton is drawing a circle that encompasses multiple people, including herself, the reader, and perhaps others who are not specifically named. The poem is about blessing, but it is not totally clear what the boats are. Beginning with the title “blessing the boats”, the speaker sets up an immediate intention. It relies on metaphors, and each metaphor may have several nuanced interpretations. Like many of Clifton’s poems, “blessing the boats” is short but dense.
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