Poetics of Survival and Memory: A New Historicist Reading of Lucille Clifton and Toi Derricotte's Selected Poems

The cultural poetics of Stephen Greenblatt is employed in this article to analyze how Toi Derricotte and Lucille Clifton address history, identity, and the politics of memory in their poetry. Greenblatt's New Historicism offers a framework for examining how such poets express individual and group survival in the face of oppression by treating literary texts as sites where social energy flows and cultural power is negotiated. In "Won't you Celebrate with Me," "The Lost Baby," and "Homage to my Hips," Clifton asserts survival against erasure, which turns into a historical reclamation. By combining personal experience with cultural memory, Clifton emphasizes how Black women are both resilient and vulnerable in the face of structural oppression. Similarly, Derricotte's "The Weakness," "Workshop on Racism," and "For the Black Women Who Are Afraid" blend the historical and the personal, emphasizing gendered vulnerability, racialized pain, and the challenge of defining oneself in a marginalized society. Both poets turn personal experiences into collective culture poetics, demonstrating how Black women poets use self-definition, memory, and survival as poetic techniques of resistance to fight cultural silencing. Their poems give readers a deep understanding of the ways in which race, gender, and cultural power intersect in American literature by shedding light on the power dynamics between prevailing historical narratives and underrepresented voices.