Note, passed to superman
by Lucille Clifton
sweet jesus superman,
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one I’m from.
I’ve been reading this poem a lot lately; it is the last two lines, I think, that keep pulling me back. In them, Clifton reminds us that our own world is alien, a universe that functions as arbitrarily as that of DC comics; and one, too, where Clifton can be just as powerful as Superman. “Trust me,” she says--she is like Superman; in fact, she is even more of an authority than he is. She too has faced a world where “every crook in town [was] filthy” with her greatest weakness, where she must put on a cape and leggings so that she can finally stop just “listening to stories”, and act. In fact, she understands these traits so well that she could spot them in anyone, even if they are disguised in a “blue suit”, as Superman is when he goes to work as Clark Kent.
The lines read, to my ear, as both weary and defiant: Clifton dares the Man of Steel to disagree with her, while simultaneously unburdening herself to him. She addresses him as one outsider does another; there is certainly a desire to compare wounds, to measure them and see which is bigger, but there is also a fierce joy in the finding of a person who can finally understand.
The circumstances of Superman’s inception feel particularly meaningful in this light: Superman was created by two Jewish artists, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in the late 1930s, and spent a good deal of his early career fighting Nazis. The character is—to use words that I recently heard Fatimah Asghar use to describe herself at a panel on violence in poetry—“a diasphoric orphan”, trying to fit into an American society that is rapidly changing. Although Kal-El’s Jewishness, or seeming Jewishness, has been largely erased or forgotten in more modern iterations of the character, he began as a symbol or voice for an oppressed people. Clifton is certainly in a position to appreciate the experience of acting as a voice trying to fight oppression. She writes prolifically about being “both nonwhite and a woman”, and the challenges and celebrations of a life that is deemed unlovely.
This piece, Note, passed to superman, is actually part of a series, Four notes to Clark Kent, letters addressed to Superman’s mild mannered alter-ego. Though the poems are ostensibly written for this familiar comic book hero, the voice of the speaker is so prominent that one forgets the man who is receiving these letters; instead, we see the woman writing them, her anger and grace, the parts of her that are just as superhuman as Kal-El. Clifton gives us a four panel peek into the life of her speaker, who is forging her “own voice, at last”, and allows her to fill the frame, to draw our eye in a way that the absent Superman is never allowed to do in the series.
The engagement with a fictional icon is one that I find so fruitful—I think that to speak to Superman is to do many things. Firstly, it is to suggest an equity between the speaker and the hero; one is not greater than the other, both are participants in a conversation that is voicey, challenging, sorrowful. Secondly, it is to allow the self to become alien or supernatural. Thirdly, it is to grant the speaker access to some larger stage on which to display personal narratives; every reader knows Superman, we understand that the stakes are high when he is on the scene. Thus, when we write to him or about him, we write ourselves into a world that is vast and improbable, we magnify the personal into the iconic. Indeed, the comic form itself is not designed to be a subtle one, and adapting the narratives of comics for the sake of a poem requires some risk, some exaggeration in language or feeling. The work is forced to become dynamic to match its caped subject.
I think, too, it represents an important engagement with science fiction, a literary form that is largely looked down upon as unserious by the academy. Walidah Imarisha, one of the editors of an anthology of science fiction written by activists (called Octavia’s Brood), says that “all social organizing is science fiction.” That is, to work at bettering the world, one has to imagine a future without racism, without sexism, without homophobia, transmisogyny, cultural imperialism, etc. The worlds we imagine when we organize are a sort of science fiction, a radical envisioning of parallel dimensions or lives. Therefore, this engagement with an alien immigrant protagonist is not merely a flight of fancy; it is a tool to accustom the reader to imagining worlds beyond our own, and to fight for them (in leggings and a cape, if necessary.)
by Lucille Clifton
sweet jesus superman,
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one I’m from.
I’ve been reading this poem a lot lately; it is the last two lines, I think, that keep pulling me back. In them, Clifton reminds us that our own world is alien, a universe that functions as arbitrarily as that of DC comics; and one, too, where Clifton can be just as powerful as Superman. “Trust me,” she says--she is like Superman; in fact, she is even more of an authority than he is. She too has faced a world where “every crook in town [was] filthy” with her greatest weakness, where she must put on a cape and leggings so that she can finally stop just “listening to stories”, and act. In fact, she understands these traits so well that she could spot them in anyone, even if they are disguised in a “blue suit”, as Superman is when he goes to work as Clark Kent.
The lines read, to my ear, as both weary and defiant: Clifton dares the Man of Steel to disagree with her, while simultaneously unburdening herself to him. She addresses him as one outsider does another; there is certainly a desire to compare wounds, to measure them and see which is bigger, but there is also a fierce joy in the finding of a person who can finally understand.
The circumstances of Superman’s inception feel particularly meaningful in this light: Superman was created by two Jewish artists, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in the late 1930s, and spent a good deal of his early career fighting Nazis. The character is—to use words that I recently heard Fatimah Asghar use to describe herself at a panel on violence in poetry—“a diasphoric orphan”, trying to fit into an American society that is rapidly changing. Although Kal-El’s Jewishness, or seeming Jewishness, has been largely erased or forgotten in more modern iterations of the character, he began as a symbol or voice for an oppressed people. Clifton is certainly in a position to appreciate the experience of acting as a voice trying to fight oppression. She writes prolifically about being “both nonwhite and a woman”, and the challenges and celebrations of a life that is deemed unlovely.
This piece, Note, passed to superman, is actually part of a series, Four notes to Clark Kent, letters addressed to Superman’s mild mannered alter-ego. Though the poems are ostensibly written for this familiar comic book hero, the voice of the speaker is so prominent that one forgets the man who is receiving these letters; instead, we see the woman writing them, her anger and grace, the parts of her that are just as superhuman as Kal-El. Clifton gives us a four panel peek into the life of her speaker, who is forging her “own voice, at last”, and allows her to fill the frame, to draw our eye in a way that the absent Superman is never allowed to do in the series.
The engagement with a fictional icon is one that I find so fruitful—I think that to speak to Superman is to do many things. Firstly, it is to suggest an equity between the speaker and the hero; one is not greater than the other, both are participants in a conversation that is voicey, challenging, sorrowful. Secondly, it is to allow the self to become alien or supernatural. Thirdly, it is to grant the speaker access to some larger stage on which to display personal narratives; every reader knows Superman, we understand that the stakes are high when he is on the scene. Thus, when we write to him or about him, we write ourselves into a world that is vast and improbable, we magnify the personal into the iconic. Indeed, the comic form itself is not designed to be a subtle one, and adapting the narratives of comics for the sake of a poem requires some risk, some exaggeration in language or feeling. The work is forced to become dynamic to match its caped subject.
I think, too, it represents an important engagement with science fiction, a literary form that is largely looked down upon as unserious by the academy. Walidah Imarisha, one of the editors of an anthology of science fiction written by activists (called Octavia’s Brood), says that “all social organizing is science fiction.” That is, to work at bettering the world, one has to imagine a future without racism, without sexism, without homophobia, transmisogyny, cultural imperialism, etc. The worlds we imagine when we organize are a sort of science fiction, a radical envisioning of parallel dimensions or lives. Therefore, this engagement with an alien immigrant protagonist is not merely a flight of fancy; it is a tool to accustom the reader to imagining worlds beyond our own, and to fight for them (in leggings and a cape, if necessary.)
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