Former Maryland poet laureate Roland Flint hosts Lucille Clifton, who won the National Book Award for Blessing of the Boats. Flint and Clifton discuss her work.

Clifton reads "Good Times," which was the title poem of her first book, published in 1969; "The 1st" (about an eviction); "flowers"; "lucy one eye"; "forgiving my father"; an untitled poem beginning "cruelty"; "crabbing: the poet crab speaks"; "Samson predicts the Philadelphia fires from Gaza"; "What the Mirror said"; and "carved on a gravestone in a southern baptist churchyard." Many of those poems are collected in her books Good Woman, a few are from Next, and several others were in manuscript at the time of the taping.

This show first aired in September, 1991.
For more information about "The Writing Life" and HoCoPoLitSo (the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society), visit www.hocopolitso.org.