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

The act of bearing witness is important, she explains, "because someone must be a voice, someone must notice things and see beyond the obvious. If one person speaks, no one can say that they never heard."

wants my son
wants my niece
wants josie's daughter
holds them hard
and close as slavery
what will it cost
to buy them back.

[From "white lady - a street name for cocaine"]

But teaching people to hear is a challenge. Clifton, who is a professor of English at Saint Mary's College in southern Maryland, is often surprised by how unaware young people are about the past. "We don't know the history of our time, and we don't know the history of our country."

And, on a more basic level, she says, students often don't realize that they can "learn with more than just the intellect." Poetry, she says, "is a balancing between intellect and intuition," and if one must choose between the two, "one should always fall on the side of intuition."

Poetry also balances between joy and sorrow, and Clifton has had her share of sorrows. One of her sisters, who worked as a prostitute, died years ago. And in 2000, one of her daughters passed away. Clifton has also battled cancer several times.

But through it all, the poet with the warm, rich voice maintains that life is not out to get her. "I get angry," she says, "I write about it, but I can't live there.... If I have any faith, it is that the universe is not my enemy. Fear may be the enemy," but she won't let it define her.

What does define her? Perhaps her capacity for joy, she suggests (she loves Bach and Aretha Franklin), her determination to "stay in for the long haul," and her complexity. "Sometimes I am foolish, prone to error, silly, mistaken, and downright bad," she says. "You do the best you can, which isn't always sufficient."

That comment might surprise fans who admire her work's precision and its strong, unwavering voice. Her poems have become a bit longer over the years, but she has always remained true to her spare, well-honed style, regardless of what the current literary trend might be.

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering
mine

["why some people be mad at me sometimes"]

The one thing she has never been able to do, however, is learn how to type. "I have used four fingers for 30-something years," she admits with a laugh. She lets a poem form in her mind until a draft is ready. "I need to feel urgency," she says of her creative process, "that I have to get this down." Then she types the poem up on "a very ancient videowriter. No one makes them anymore."

Clifton, who can't stand typos, sometimes retypes a poem several times before revising. Her unwavering approach is one more testament to the perseverance of a very respected, much-loved poet whose life has surprised both her and her thousands of readers.

• Elizabeth Lund is one of the coordinators of the Monitor's online poetry site. For more poetry coverage, go towww.csmonitor.com/poetry.

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