Response to Clifton’s Cutting Greens and My Replacement Poem

Out of all of the poems we had to read for this week, I chose to write about Lucille Clifton’s Cutting Greens because it was the most comprehensible to me. I decided to google Clifton so that I could get more out of the poem. It turns out that she was born in 1936, meaning that, as a black woman, she had to live a significant amount of her life dealing with segregation. Cutting Greens is a story about a woman cutting kale and collard greens in her kitchen, at first completely detached from them. She described the somewhat violent way in which she forces the greens together and how they resist there fate: they are going to get cooked; just like all humans will eventually die. The speaker then describes how the kitchen (that has a spine) is black, and that color connects the knife, the kitchen, and the greens that turn black temporarily. She makes a connection between all three, and maybe even to herself, and realizes the universal connection that everything on Earth shares with each other. The speakers feelings change from apathetic or detached to profound attachment by doing something so simple: preparing her veggies.

I chose to write a replacement poem, which is an exercise Burroway suggests. I replaced almost every word because I wanted to test Burroway’s assertion that doing so would allow me to convey a completely different message while retaining the emotional and power, or energy, that Clifton created. My poem, at least the first draft of it, is completely different in terms of subject matter, but I do get a sense of what Burroway says. I’m not sure if all of the power of Clifton’s words is there, but there is definitely something there. The exercise was an interesting challenge so hopefully my final version will manage to capture a little bit more of that poetic energy.