This poem's title announces that it is an homage—a statement or work of art that celebrates, pays tribute to, and publicly honors someone or something. Though Clifton does not specifically use the word "ode," this poem is closely linked to the tradition of the ode. An ode is a lyric poem of praise, devoted to a person, concept, object, or even event, although it usually addresses the object in question while Clifton's poem does not. Odes traditionally have been performed on ceremonial occasions. While certain specific varieties of the ode have employed set structures, the designation "ode" itself refers to thematic and conceptual, rather than formal, qualities. While its roots are in ancient Greece, where the performance of odes often accompanied athletic competition, the poetic genre has remained unceasingly popular, both in English-language poems and worldwide.
The most formal variety of ode is called the "Pindaric" ode, named after an Ancient Greek poet, Pindar. It is this highly structured type of ode that was often performed at sporting events in the ancient world, often with elaborate accompaniment from musical instruments of choruses. The Pindaric ode is composed of three sections: a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode. The strophe opens the poem, while the antistrophe parallels and replies to it: in ancient Greece, the strophe and antistrophe were accompanied by the movement of the chorus across the stage, which reversed direction in the transition between these two sections. Pindaric odes close with an epode, a concluding line or section that departs from the pattern established in both strophe and antistrophe. Pindaric odes were especially popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with poets often introducing alterations that kept the traditional three-part structure but lessened its formal strictness. Thomas Gray's “The Progress of Poesy," and Aphra Behn's "A Farewel to Celladon, On his Going into Ireland" are among the most well-known Pindaric odes of that period, while William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood," produced at the turn of the nineteenth century, carried the genre into the early Romantic period.
Horatian Odes are another formally structured sub-type of ode, though these are less intricate, formal, and highly structured than the Pindaric ode—in general, they belong to the tradition of private reading rather than to that of public performance. The Horatian ode is named after the Roman poet Horace, and it usually consists of couplets or quatrains that follow a consistent meter and rhyme scheme—the specific pattern of rhyme and meter is left to the poet. Horatian odes tend toward introspection, and usually address intimate, personal themes with an emphasis on serene subjectivity rather than on the heroic themes common in Pindaric odes. Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude" uses the tranquil, contemplative atmosphere of the Horatian ode to explore its central topic. John Keats's six odes are widely considered some of the most enduring in English poetry. Among these six are several Horatian odes, including "Ode on a Nightingale." In their focus on emotional experience and subjectivity, these odes tended to focus on moments of intense emotion, brought on by memories or encounters with nature and art.
Finally, many odes are written in neither the Horatian nor the Pindaric tradition, following no set structure, or else adopting the traditional structure of another poem type. These "irregular odes" still maintain the traditional thematic focus of an ode, dissecting, describing, addressing, and praising a given person or thing. The irregular ode was pioneered by the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley, who rejected more formally strict ode traditions. It has remained common into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, appearing not only in Clifton's "homage to my hips" but in lyric poems ranging from Bernadette Mayer's 1998 "Ode on Periods" to Kevin Young's "Ode to the Midwest." These works often include stanzas of irregular length and reject strict patterns of rhyme and meter.
"homage to my hips" is irregular in its structure, but it knits together the tonal and thematic focuses of each ode type. It is heroic and theatrical in the tradition of the Pindaric ode, both in its strident tone and in its thematic attention to triumph over widespread social injustices. But it is also introspective in the tradition of the Horatian ode, since the speaker's mind, body, and experience are at the center of the poem. At the same time, the poem's rejection of strict structuring principles reflects its speaker's commitment to personal choice and autonomy.
