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“oh children think about the
good times”
– Lucille Clifton

Courtesy Vox of Dartmouth

Poet Lucille Clifton

Clifton’s VOICES ~ Recipient of the National Book Award

Jay Rey: Lucille Clifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies ~ The Buffalo News, February 14, 2010

Nick Madigan: Lucille Clifton, one-time poet laureate of Md., dies at 73 ~ Baltimore Sun, February 14, 2010

Dwayne Betts: In Memory of Ms. Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010) ~ The Atlantic, February 15, 2010

Lucille Clifton reads a poem about the days surrounding 9/11 ~ PBS News Hour

<<Listen>>

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There is a girl inside

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a greeen girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

– Lucille Clifton

© Estate of Lucille Clifton

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Click a look inside

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Lucille Clifton at Wikipedia

Books by Lucille Clifton at Library Thing

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Courtesy photo

LUCILLE CLIFTON: 1936 – 2010

Beloved and admired friend and staff member, Lucille Clifton died Saturday, February 13. She had been invited back again to Squaw Valley this summer as a Special Guest. We had so looked forward to seeing her again. She had been a regular staff member since 1991 and continued to return almost every other year since then. She last taught in Squaw in 2008.

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LUCILLE CLIFTON: 1936 – 2010
Lucille was a major figure in American letters. She was an award-winning poet, fiction writer and author of children’s books. BOA Editions published her most recent collection, Mercy, as well as Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton’s BOA poetry collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, while Clifton’s The Terrible Stories (BOA) was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Clifton served as Distinguished Professor of Humanities and holder of the Hilda C. Landers Endowed Chair in the Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s College of Maryland until her retirement in the fall of 2005. She continued to serve St. Mary’s as Professor Emeritus and Friend to the College. She was appointed a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. In 2007 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. This year, 2010, she was awarded the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America to honor “distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.”At the Poetry Workshop in Squaw Valley, she was a warm and wise presence, a listener as well as a storyteller. She wrote new poems each day along with the other staff poets and participants, and even her rough drafts were fine examples of her work. Lucille composed her daily poems on a typewriter, working on one of Oakley Hall’s shabby IBM Selectrics.

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We still remember her final poem of the 2008 week, how it achieved what Lucille’s work did so well – three spare lines that captured the spirit of the previous night’s party at the Hall House, the week itself – and much more. That poem, the last, as it turned out, that we would see from our old friend, went something like this:

over the mountains
and under the stars it is
one hell of a ride

There is an empty place where once there was Lucille, but we are fortunate to have her words to help us fill it.

A Community of Writers scholarship to honor Lucille has been established. If you wish to contribute, please send donations made to Squaw Valley Community of Writers and mail to:

Squaw Valley Community of Writers
Clifton Scholarship
PO Box 1416
Nevada City, CA 95959

Tax ID: 23-7179177

Or visit JustGive.org and donate with a credit card.
www.squawvalleywriters.org

Courtesy photo

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Squaw Valley Community of Writers remembers poet Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

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Visit the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Website

We are pleased to announce our 2010 Summer Writing Workshops.

Every summer for over four decades, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley has brought together poets and prose writers for separate weeks of workshops, individual conferences, lectures, panels, readings, and discussions of the craft and the business of writing. Our goal is to assist writers to improve their craft and thus move them closer to publication.

Squaw Valley, located in the California Sierra Nevada, close to the north shore of Lake Tahoe, is a ski resort, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics. Summers are warm and sunny; the area offers mountains, alpine lakes, and streams. Participants will have opportunities to enjoy the natural surroundings.

Poetry Workshops

Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Memoir

Screenwriting Workshops

Fees and Deadlines

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Courtesy of Susan Henderson/Lit Park

” … The view out the window of our Squaw Valley House.”

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Click a look inside

WRITERS WORKSHOP IN A BOOK
The Squaw Valley Community of
Writers on the Art of Fiction

Edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez
Introduction by Richard Ford

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Ed Thigpen, Jazz Drummer, Dies at 79
By Peter Keepnews
The New York Times, January 26, 2010

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“Do you know why they call a drummer’s seat a throne? Because drummers are kings and queens.”
–Ed Thigpen, August 1984

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© Heinz Kronberger

JAZZ DRUMMER ED THIGPEN DIES AT 79

By Jesse Werner
10 February 2010
WSWS.org

On January 13, 2010, American jazz drummer Ed Thigpen died in Copenhagen at age 79. With a career spanning nearly six decades, he was an underrated master in his field. Although his finely crafted technique, artful subtlety and musicality at the drums made him a respected figure in the international jazz community, Thigpen received relatively limited recognition during his lifetime in the United States, his native country.

Read the rest of this story

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Ed Thigpen Discography

Photo courtesy of AllAboutJazz.com

… and scores more

Ed Thigpen Online

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© Nicola Fasano

Ed Thigpen: Master of Time, Rhythm & Taste (2009)

Ed Thigpen: Solo Brushes

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Drummer Matt Wilson: Remembering Ed Thigpen
at NPR’s A Blog Supreme

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Courtesy photo

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Courtesy Examiner.com

Sir John Dankworth in concert with vocalist Dame Cleo Laine, his life-long love and musical collaborator — the UK’s jazz royalty couple.

Breaking news
Saturday, 06 February 2010 20:18

Sir John Dankworth, who died today aged 82, was one of the totemic figures of British jazz, the first major jazz musician and the first British bebopper to be knighted, a leading musician, who with his wife Dame Cleo Laine, became known to the broader public beyond the jazz world and to an international audience, particularly in America.

Sir John had been in poor health for same time and back in November, before the London Jazz Festival where he was due to appear, was hospitalised with some fears that he would not make the concert. But made it he did even sitting on the stage in a wheelchair for the duration of the concert.

Born in Essex in 1927, Dankworth grew up in Walthamstow in a family of musicians and began to play clarinet after gaining a liking for the music of Benny Goodman. He later took up saxophone and studied at the Royal Academy of Music before national service. A high flier soon on the jazz scene in the UK he became a favourite with readers of Melody Maker in the late-1940s and was voted musician of the year, touring further afield with Sidney Bechet and even played with Charlie Parker in Paris. His group the Dankworth Seven became a favourite on the local scene in the 1950s and later his big band extended the scope for his writing activities and ambitions and played at the Newport Jazz Festival in the States. Cleo Laine’s singing was a feature of his band’s performances and the pair married in 1958.

Dankworth began a parallel career as a film and TV composer and became known to a wider public for the music he wrote for The Avengers, Tomorrow’s World and Modesty Blaise. He made the charts with ‘African Waltz’ and became a frequent presence on radio and TV.

Aside from his musical career he developed a theatre, The Stables, in the garden of his home at Wavendon in Buckinghamshire which flourishes to this day and he became heavily involved in jazz education and as an ambassador for jazz. For his services to the music he was made a knight bachelor in the 2006 New Year’s Honours List.

– Stephen Graham

Stephen Graham — a regular contributor to Jazzwise.com, the UK’s best-selling jazz publication — filed this early obituary on the internet while news of Johnny Dankworth’s death was breaking over the BBC.

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Courtesy Photo

John Fordham: Sir John Dankworth obituary
UK Guardian, 7 February 2010

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BBC tribute to Sir Johnny Dankworth ~ 7 February 2010

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Courtesy photos

The Charlie Parker-influenced Johnny Dankworth in 1955 and 2005

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A Johnny Dankworth Discography

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Cleo Laine & Johnny Dankworth swing “Lady Be Good”
~ Marina Del Rey, CA, February 1965

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Visit the home of Dame Cleo Laine
& Sir John Dankworth

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