Black Swan

Black Swan is a 2002 collection of poetry by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. Her first published work of poetry, it consists of thirty-one poems, which refer loosely to the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan. The original myth tells a story in which Zeus adopts the likeness of a swan in order to court a beautiful human named Leda. Providing a contemporary spin on the myth, Van Clief-Stefanon relates it to the objectification of the black female body. Her poems cast black women as especially vulnerable to sexualization, exposing how their popular depictions and perceptions are regulated and distorted by powerful stereotypes that continually renew themselves. The book won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002.

Black Swan opens with a voice telling the reader to imagine Leda the Swan as a black woman. This initial image is more or less the foundation for the rest of Van Clief-Stefanon’s poems. Most of the speakers in her poems are women who reflect on the ways in which their racialized and sexualized bodies turn them into exploited and marginalized subjects. To make their conditions vivid, Van Clief-Stefanon applies a mixture of classical, biblical, and contemporary symbols and literary references. Collectively, her imagery suggests that racism and sexualization are not fully intelligible through literature; rather, literature is always late to the game, taking place after exploitation is already in progress.

Van Clief-Stefanon’s figuration of Leda morphs through her poems. In her first appearance, she seems on the verge of puberty: awkward, uncoordinated, and reeling from the loss of innocence that comes with newly internalizing the meaning of the gazes of privileged subjects. She fears the discipline of her parents and of a hostile, regressive external world. Ironically, Van Clief-Stefanon depicts Leda as someone who is conditioned and reared, while her brothers are loved and nurtured. In a later poem, Leda’s mother ignores her request to decide the menu for dinner, listening only to her brothers. Here, Leda’s futile plea for something cool to eat points at the black female’s desire for her deep anxiety to be allayed, even if it is only temporary. The poet’s subjects are torn equally between rage and desire as they negotiate their nascent identities.



Van Clief-Stefanon’s poems take on a variety of metrical forms, borrowed from a broad swath of traditions. One villanelle, “Home: Volusia County, Florida,” depicts a woman who examines herself in the spirit of an archaeologist. Finding herself inexplicably and abruptly without innocence, or stable home or family, she grasps for some semblance of identity among a heap of memory fragments. She finds that she is unable to describe her identity or position other than in the negative terms of what she has left behind.

Most of Van Clief-Stefanon’s poems aspire to render the black female subject despite the prevailing message that it is pointless to try. One villanelle, “Hum,” describes a speaker’s attempt to transmute her awe of her condition into something real and intelligible through the power of language. A sonnet, “Eight,” is told by an eight-year-old girl who fends off a sex offender by rejecting the notion that her mother or friends will always be there to help her, learning to summon, instead, other “powers.” These poems incorporate formal elements from the black musical tradition, including jazz and bop.

Black Swan explores the resonances between the classic myth of Leda and the Swan and contemporary readings of the body of the black female subject. Repeating, in each of its thirty-one poems, the voice of the subject speaking back to a world that objectifies and paralyzes her, the book’s emancipatory mantras suggest that her agency might be reclaimed, poem by poem.