Hello All,

I’m aware many of us use entire poems, or fragments of poems as writing prompts in workshops – and I’m suddenly wrestling with the question: what are the legal ramifications of this?

Here’s what brings me here. I’m presently in the copy edit / ‘rights clearances’ phase of my memoir-in-essays, It Makes No Sense Not To Sit Next To Someone Warm Tonight – A Geography of Love, Loss and Laughter. The book contains 58 texts, each one of which gets its own introduction. Case in point, this introduction following:

In early 2026, in collaboration with my Art of Loss: Writing Through Grief co-facilitator, Meadow Jones PhD, I began leading a new workshop we’d devised together called Rainbow Writing: for Queer Colours of Every Shade. For one of our ‘prompts’, we shared a poem by Lucille Clifton and invited writers, if they wished, to include her words – ‘Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me, and has failed’ – in a composition. To my surprise, the prompt brought up a true story of my own from nearly twenty years earlier.

Question One: Do I need to seek clearance from Lucille Clifton’s estate, to use this line from one of her poems? Both in this introduction, and in my piece that follows?
Question Two – which is perhaps the much bigger one: As workshop leaders, are we (unwittingly) flagrantly breaking copyright laws by supplying our workshop participants with poems or parts of poems?

Any input would be greatly appreciated, thank you!