Michelle T. Clinton

Michelle T. Clinton (born 1955) is an American poet.

Her work appeared in Zyzzyva

Michelle T. Clinton was born in 1955 and grew up in a socio-economically challenged South Central Los Angeles family. She was based in Santa Monica, California for a period of time. Interviewed by Penelope Moffett, Clinton stated: "I don’t think the writing saved me, but I think being dedicated to the writing helped me save myself." Her family "was poor. . . . We were troubled by alcoholism, and we saw a lot of violence. We moved frequently", according to Clinton. She left Los Angeles to study political science at UC Berkeley, but returned to Los Angeles in 1981.

A performance artist and poet, Clinton described her work as "an attempt to assimilate the racist & sexist violence in my body. The poems struggle to answer the question: How does the individual/community survive and continue to function in the face of systematic atrocity?"

The table of contents from her book Good Sense & the Faithless give an indication of her grappling with the "racist and sexist violence in her body": such poems as "Options for Girls: Patience and Loathing", "Guidelines for Brothers: How to Heal Rape", "Another Anti-Love Poem", and "The Loneliness of Healing" are just a few of her poems that address that issue of race and sexual violence. She was quite active with the performance and literary arts scene at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA, and Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA, and led a multicultural women's poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation. Clinton also performed her poetry in the Los Angeles area. According to Los Angeles-based writer and graphic designer, Pam Ward, who participated in one of Clinton's poetry workshop's, Clinton "was a powerful force in the literary community during the 80s–90s".

For a time, Clinton's work centered on multiculturalism and gay and lesbian issues, although in Good Sense & the Faithless she frequently refers to the particular politics of bisexual identities, seen in such poems as "Politics of the Bisexual Deep Fry" and "We’re All Gringos on this Bus/ Ode to the Am. Butch".

Clinton was very concerned with feminist issues in her work. "Through her poems, Clinton said, she has found expression for 'a lot of emotion that there’s no place to put in the world…How do you deal with a rape that happened 10 years ago? What does it mean when you say 30% of all girls are sexually abused by the time they get out of high school? I constantly come back to issues of sexual abuse. I’m appalled, I’m outraged, outraged.'"

Clinton uses black vernacular forms of speech as part of her aesthetic. Examples of titles: "Solitude Ain't Loneliness", "it's them flat" and uses lower-case letters to start poems at times, or writing a poem like "it's them flat" that is written in all lower-case letters, and uses & ampersands instead of the typewritten word "and", frequently, types "w/" instead of "with", occasionally using profanity in the poems.