Bibliographic record
Abstract
On Lucille Clifton's Children's Books Anthony Madrid (bio) I'm guessing most Lucille Clifton fans know next to nothing about her books for children. I've never heard of anyone's being passionately devoted to any of these. I just reread, for the third time, the entire Everett Anderson series of eight books, and in my judgment they are, for the most part, much more interesting than actually good. Probably the only people examining these artifacts in 2023 are people like me, who can't know enough about Clifton's personality. Such investigators will not find the books disappointing. I should say, straight-up, I've not read all her children's books. Some are hard to get. Also there's just too many of them. One's choices are to either order a snowcapped mountain of material, omitting nothing from the inaccurate and misleading bibliographies on Wikipedia and in the back of Clifton's Collected (2012), or confine oneself to an arbitrary selection. I have taken the latter course. The Lost & Found HQ still needs to get some search parties together. We need to get a grant so we can order some the scarcer items (All of Us Come Cross the Water, 1973: cheapest copy online this morning = $75). No need at this point to do Clifton's poetry-poetry any favors; I doubt her reputation has ever been higher. And it's been high. National Book Award, multiple nominations for the Pulitzer. Her memoir/family history, Generations (1976), was just reprinted by New York Review Books. I would say she's pretty firmly on the Required Reading list. However, unlike most people on that list, she deserves it. I'll try to explain. Two points, the more important first. Her poetry is founded on epigram. That means quick in, quick out. It also means aim and shoot. Clifton always uses a telescopic sight, with a red crisscross through the middle. She does not use a shotgun. Result: her stuff is clean, precise, and you don't need a tutor to help you understand it. Like all epigrammatists, she does a lot of portraiture. And everybody likes portraiture. Second point. From first to last, she was a poet of exemplary integrity. She [End Page 59] got away with a lot, presumably by insisting. All her first books are much shorter than what publishers usually demand (e.g., Generations is only thirty-seven pages of text; Good Times [1969], same). And (I am permanently amazed by this) she was never roped into producing reviews and essays. There is no book of her collected prose, because if there were, there would be nothing in it except for Generations and about twenty books not intended for adults. You can squeeze your brains to molecules before you think of even one other major American poet of whom the same can be said. Asked about her not writing reviews and essays, she said something to the effect of "not my business." If I had been the interviewer I would have pressed. "The fact of its not being a person's business doesn't stop most people. How did it come to stop you?" But, see, that is always the bottom line with Clifton: She was a jeweler. She considered being in control of her materials essential. What she cannot do justice to, she does not handle. And that's the epigram thing again. Use what ya got. And no more. She made her own way. This makes her pleasant to contemplate. She wrote two kinds of books: poetry for grown-ups, and children's books. And thirty-seven pages of memoir. And that's it. I'm told that, in Canada, Clifton's writing career would not seem as unusual as it does here. Supposedly, serious Canadian poets very frequently do children's books as a side hustle. For some, it's where their real money comes from. I badly want this to be true, so I'm not interested in statistics or any counter-evidence of whatever kind. Canada, that superior place, has solved the problem of how poets can make a living without being professors. Clifton, however, lived in Maryland...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".