The unlikely career of one of America's most loved poets

Lucille Clifton is often surprised by the reception she gets from audiences. In September, at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Ms. Clifton received two standing ovations - the first for simply walking onstage. "I don't understand it," she says without any pretense. "I just try to write clearly and directly. I try to appeal to the whole human."

Clifton has done that and more. For decades she has been one of America's most celebrated poets. She has published 10 books of poetry and won major awards - including two NEA grants, the National Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. Both critics and fans describe her as "beloved" - a term she doesn't like - anda symbol of wisdom and strength. Still, Clifton views the adoration as just one more surprise in her "unexpected life."

The first surprise, some might say, is how she became a published poet. Her mother never finished grade school, and her father never learned to write, but theirs was a house "filled with words." Both parents were voracious readers, and her mother often recited iambic pentameter and penned her own verse.

Clifton attended the State University of New York at Fredonia and Howard University. But by her early 30s, she had six children under the age of 8.

Clifton wrote short, tight poems whenever she could steal a few free moments, but surveying the literary landscape, she "didn't see anyone who looked like me." White poets, she says, were the only ones who were validated.

Yet as Clifton explained during a recent interview, "the universe will sometimes give you what you need, even if you don't know what you have need of."

In 1969, she sent a poem to Robert Hayden at the National Endowment. He had already left the NEA, but Carolyn Kizer, his successor, read the work and submitted it to the Discovery Award competition in New York City. Clifton won. Her big break came when she read at the award ceremony. An editor from Random House was in the audience, and he published her first book.

Few of Clifton's fans know this story, but many feel they know her - and that she speaks directly to them about perseverance and the will to survive. This has been another surprise for the poet who writes with stark grace about the beauty and brutality she has experienced as an African-American woman:

maybe my father
made these couplers.
his hands were hard
and black and swollen,
the knuckles like lugs
or bolts in a rich man's box....

[From "what i think when i ride the train"]

"I was at Smith College shortly after I left the Dodge Festival," Clifton says, "and there were several young women who came up to me and said 'Thank you for writing that poem.' " What they meant by that, she believes, was thank you for writing about my experience.

"One of the things poetry can do for people is to say you are not alone." But conveying that message is just one part of her job.

Clifton, who writes unflinchingly about both her own sensuality and the darker sides of human experience - drug abuse, poverty, physical abuse, and slavery - views herself as a witness, "a person who tries to see the whole [human] history."

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