A Study Guide for Lucille Clifton's "Homage to My Hips"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Lucille Clifton's "Homage to My Hips," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535824835

Book preview

Homage to My Hips

Lucille Clifton

1980

Introduction

Lucille Clifton's homage to my hips first appeared in the book Two-Headed Woman (1980), a collection of poems written between 1960 and 1980. Although Clifton was publishing both poetry and children's books during this period, Two-Headed Woman, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, established her as a major American poet. Clifton calls the opening section Homage to Mine and includes several homage poems; homage to my hair is the poem that immediately precedes homage to my hips. In both cases, the poet is celebrating a part of her body that has traditionally been demeaned.

In homage to my hips, Clifton provides a sometimes playful (but always mighty) expression of African American womanhood. In just seventy-eight words, she frees herself from both the dominance of Caucasian ideals of beauty and from masculine notions of femininity. The poem has been widely anthologized in collections such as Twentieth-Century American Poetry (1994), and it is also available in Clifton's important collection Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987).

Author Biography

Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles in Depew, New York, on June 27, 1936. Her parents were Samuel and Thelma Moore Sayles. Her father was a steelworker, her mother a laundress and homemaker. Clifton was born with six fingers on each hand, a trait she shared with her mother and later with her daughter. This trait becomes a significant motif in Clifton's poetry.

Neither of Clifton's parents finished elementary school; although her father could read, he never learned to write. Her mother, on the other hand, was a poet herself, producing verses in traditional iambic pentameter. Life was not pleasant in the Sayles household, even after their move to Buffalo, New York, when Lucille was seven years old. Her father was a womanizer and