News at Eleven: [Lucille Clifton] finally retitled the file "Bad Poems."

Mr. [Kevin] Young and his co-editor, Michael S. Glaser, were correct to include this material, especially Clifton's unpublished early work from the mid-1960s. Clifton was most often at her best, to my ear at any rate, in the first decade of her career, and her debut collection, "Good Times" (1969), is a near masterpiece.

One early and previously unpublished poem here, "Sunday Dinner," presages the high points in "Good Times." It reads in its entirety:

from The New York Times: Views of Life, Straightforward and Spare

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