A Conversation with Tiana Clark
BY DIVYA MEHRISH
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025) and I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She also wrote the chapbook Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing.
Additionally, she has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, and other notable publications. She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Clark is at work on a memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved, exploring Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art-making, and historical and contemporary methods of Black survival.
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Divya Mehrish: Tiana, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about your rich, textured, propulsive book of poetry. What an honor, also, it is to sit with you seven years after we met at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, where you were my poetry teacher. You were one of the first people to model for me a love for poetry, and to take my writing seriously. You introduced me to many of the poets who have shaped my own journey as a writer. I am immensely grateful for that.
I’d love to start by discussing your stunning first poem, “Proof.” You open Scorched Earth with this piece that captures the entire arc of a relationship—from its genesis to its collapse—through sharp, precise imagery. Could you share with me how you decided to begin the collection with this poem and how it frames the book as a whole?
Tiana Clark: I love the idea of genesis and collapse. I always tell my students they are creating and destroying worlds with each poem that they write. I find it so interesting that you use the word “genesis,” which refers to a kind of creation story, and then you see the destruction of that world at the same time within the breadth of one poem. I struggled a lot with figuring out the organizing principle of this collection. While I was putting the collection together, I was also teaching a course on the chapbook at Smith College, and had my students read Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems. One of the essays discusses the formerly enslaved quilt-makers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who followed their “intelligent intuition” in crafting intricate designs. This concept prompted me to consider how I might similarly trust my own intuitive instincts in shaping the structure of the collection. I knew that “Proof” was the first poem I wrote about my divorce that felt like a real release. It helped me make sense of myself. I also knew this poem would be the key to unlocking the catalyst for the collection. The ending of “Proof” actually becomes the meta-organizing principle for the entire collection, with the final couplet providing the framework for its four sections:
“There is still some residue, some proof of puncture,
some scars you graze to remember the risk.”
Once that scaffolding clicked into place, I understood the themes for each section. “There is Still Some Residue” would focus on the divorce and aspects of mental health. “Some Proof of Puncture” would deal with race and place. “Some Scars You Graze” would wrestle with family and faith. And “To Remember the Risk” would engage with the intersections of politics and pleasure, exploring a new life after deep loss.
In thinking about how my collection would start, I knew I would start with Rainer Maria Rilke and Aracelis Girmay, whose words form the main epigraphs for Scorched Earth. I wanted to consider what the prologue poem would push against, what central tension it might introduce. I examined the psychology of a sonnet (inspired by Carl Phillips), the three-act arc of problem, voltaic turn, and the push toward finality. Terrance Hayes, for example, once said a sonnet is a room you can scream into. I almost named the collection “Proof” (that’s how important the poem felt to me), but my editor, Jenny Xu, recommended the title “Scorched Earth,” which comes from my ekphrastic poem inspired by Kara Walker’s piece Buzzard’s Roost Pass, from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.
“Proof” made sense to me as a starting point because it would allow me to begin at the end, the psychological site of complete ruin, while also not being destroyed by that ruin. In retrospect, you see the arc from ruin to reckoning to reclamation—and finally, to a new, budding relationship. That is how “Proof” came to make sense to me as the scaffolding, the genesis of psychological ruin. But I also did not want the book to end with a saccharine, Hallmark-movie finale, and that is why I have my epilogue poem, in which the speaker grapples with the future, whether she wants to have children, the stickiness of these uncertainties, and the radical acceptance of the not knowing. “Maybe in Another Life” also acts as a kind of hinge, a kind of closing with an opening, hinting at themes for a future book.
DM: I want to ask you more about these ekphrastic impulses, which you engaged with in the construction of your title. In “The First Black Bachelorette,” you also reference teaching ekphrasis through John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which you introduced me to at Sewanee! Where else do you see ekphrastic impulses at play in this book, and how do they fuel your creative process?
TC: I love ekphrastic poetry for the same reason I love metaphor—I feel like it does similar, alchemic work, this kind of reaching forward in the imagination like a fishing line being cast or reaching into a different world to make more sense of this one, and then returning to this world transformed with new knowledge and sharper insight. I also love the triangular gaze—from the poet, to the art object, to the reader, and back again. There is a poetic duel taking place in the theater of looking, an electric current of pinging gazes: I am staring at the art object, and you are watching me as I observe and interrogate the art (and sometimes, the artist!), and then I am invoicing and interacting with the art, hoping to reveal something more true and surprising with deep, emotional resonance, not only for myself, but, hopefully, for the reader as well.
For me, ekphrastic poetry helps me explain myself to myself. I love the challenge of setting up the art object for the reader, and then deciding where to rupture it, and where to break the fourth wall. I use that fissure to explore and explode my lyric self. So many mercurial, magical things happen in that ekphrastic space. Natasha Tretheway is the queen of ekphrasis, and I’ve learned so much from her about ricocheting off artwork and memory—both historical and intimate. As you know, I love to smash and weave the personal and the political, and art for me is a great collider of both of these themes. Another ekphrastic poem in this collection that is important to me is “50 Lines after Figure (2001) by Glenn Ligon.” I was commissioned by Ada Limón, in collaboration with MoMA, to write a poem inspired from their collection. I selected the piece from Glenn Ligon, where I mimicked his fifty silk screens with fifty stanzas in correspondence.
DM: You end “The First Black Bachelorette” by referencing duende, another concept you were the first to teach me. How does duende infuse your writing practice, particularly during those moments when the outside world feels overwhelming?
TC: What Federico García Lorca says is that the duende is haunted by death, a deep ache and sense of diasporic doom that links people living on the margins from all over the world. Lorca writes, the duende loves the edge, it loves the wound. It is this capricious, fiery, and restless force that no one can truly explain, which is why I am drawn to it. It means something different to all of us, and that is why I love teaching it to my students, and asking them to define it for themselves. It reminds me that I don’t have to be masterful. I just need to be available for the duende to arrive, and when it does come, to let it rattle and rouse through me whether I am writing or reading my work. When it comes, I find myself inside the wild metronome of the poem, and something mysterious is taking over me. According to Spanish folklore, the duende represents a kind of hobgoblin, a kind of nuisance. I love this, because we have deified artmaking, with the muse and the angel. But the duende is darker and grittier.
Once, when I was working with Ross Gay, he said to me (and I’m paraphrasing): if you have a beautiful line but it doesn’t mean anything, then what’s the point? I have always thought about that. I don’t know if I believe John Keats when he writes that beauty “obliterates” all consideration. But I do believe the duende obliterates all consideration. I always hope that the duende will explode my work, helping me to stay raw and open. Playing close to the edge is where the magic emerges. I want to take these risks in my work, and I want to be able to risk saying something meaningful and true, even if it’s messy. That was one of my major considerations while writing this book: I wanted to break every poetry “rule” that I know. I did not want to be polite. I did not want to be neat or tidy. I was thinking about the politics of poetic mess while trying to shatter all the insidious respectability politics lurking inside me. I wanted to go into the stanza (the Italian word for the “room”) of the poem, and mess it all up. What if I am not interested in beauty, but in destruction? I wanted to risk the wildness in my poems. I wanted to break out of beauty, beyond playing it safe, to delve into and wade through something gnarly and knotted.
DM: I love your description of playing close to the edge, of instigating chaos. I think this takes a good deal of tenacity to make space for and to achieve. You have also written poems that themselves proclaim a special kind of bravery. Your poem “After the Plain Day Becomes Magnificent to Her” is an example of this. Here, you write, “I think it all takes courage: falling in love, staying in love, / leaving love that no longer serves you, loving yourself…” Can you talk about how writing poetry shapes or even amplifies the courage you need in your own life? Does seeing these words on the page bring you closer to acting on them?
TC: I think poetry speaks not only to who I was, but who I hope to be. It holds all these versions of myself, in different tenses and modes of speech. Sometimes the lines I am writing can be memories, metaphors, prophecies, or indictments. Sometimes, too, poetry can hold the space of prayer, in a secular way; a kind of meditative moment of repeating what might be true or what I hope to be true. In this way, poetry becomes a supplication—a form of pleading and requesting by way of lyric surrender, often fueled by insatiable longing. Sometimes, my lines are begging to be seen, to be touched, to be understood—not only by my reader, but also by myself, in hopes of restoration, reclamation, even reckoning.
I think that courage is a form of supplication. For those of us who have gone through a traumatic experience, like a divorce, we often find ourselves clinging to anything that might help or save us from the intense pain of loss. I think that when you’re in the depths of grief, you desperately want to claw your way out of the pit of despair. I write not only about the struggle with self-love, but also about holding hope for another, future love. But after a traumatic divorce, it takes a lot of bravery to date again, to find love again, even to show up in your work in an honest way. I think my poems are a conduit for my courage. I may not have access to that boldness all the time, but I can at least inhabit the audacious nerve for as long as I’m reading or writing a particular poem. It’s a ladder, rung by rung—I’m clinging to those lines just as I’m clinging to courage, hoping for some kind of unflinching transcendence.
Maybe it’s just a form of desperation as I am trying to climb this poetic mountain of courage. If anything, my work is a kind of persistence to the commitment of hoping, pleading, trying to be better—to hope for better. I don’t know if poetry can save anyone, but it has definitely saved my life again and again and again. I go to poetry to feel less alone in the world, especially in these lonely, harrowing times. Think about Mary Oliver’s line from “Wild Geese”: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” That is a link to communion. We are tethered in despair together, and yet this line feels quite enlivening. In sharing our sorrows and scars, there is a kind of fellowship and comfort. Now more than ever, we need these tender bridges of empathy.
DM: You depict many forms of love in Scorched Earth: lost or old love that still holds remnants of tenderness, sacred or divine love we might question, and a visceral, maternal love. In what ways does poetry help you reconcile these different permutations of love?
TC: I think poetry can contain a multiverse of love, each with its own definitions, applications, and entry points. I believe one task of the poet is to be accountable to language and to hold language to account. I think words can fail us as much as they can save us, and it’s our vocation as poets to call language out, to call it in, to ask more of it—to wring each word out in search of distillation. I think it’s also a risk using the word “love” in a poem. Sometimes, it’s a risk worth taking, but how are you going to make it new, fresh, and interesting? What is going to be your unique discovery into that huge word—that massive world, over-bloated with meaning, so much so that it can almost mean nothing because it tries to mean everything?
I think you’re right; there is a reckoning with the idea of love in my collection, in all of its permutations: self-love, divine love, hope for new love. I have a dear friend, the poet Ciona Rouse, and every year, she asks me to choose a word. In 2021, my word was “love.” When you pick out a word for the year, you are looking for it everywhere, inviting it into your life. I meant it as love for myself, in rebuilding a self after damage, and the hope of possibly inviting new love into my life.
In retrospect, selecting that word allowed it to hover over the poems as I was writing. I’m only now putting this together, something I probably didn’t realize before, but can only gather by looking back at how you create a book that didn’t exist before. Sometimes, I think your life creates these strange echoes in your work that you can either be aware of or not. Until you asked the question, I hadn’t fully realized that this is a collection reckoning with love in all its variations. I am the type of writer who is constantly searching and archiving and investigating. Maybe I was on the hunt for love, kind of cataloging it, and then it started to spill out all over my poems, saturated with tenderness and devotion. I have been thinking a lot about repetition these days, as I teach my students about using it in their work. Are they repeating a word for emphasis, because they want to double down to swell meaning or music, or because they want to satisfy or frustrate a reader by disrupting their expectations? A word repeated is like a diamond, with all its different, glittering facets, each one a distinct and shiny portal into something new, and hopefully, profound. This recalls Gaston Bachelard’s quote, “The minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.”
DM: What a beautiful image, and a fantastic framing of repetition. I want to turn to the visual layout of your collection, which I found to be striking. In Scorched Earth, you experiment with white space, length, caesura, and even positioning text in unusual ways (as in “After the Plain Day Becomes Magnificent to Her”). Why were you manipulating a poem’s visual presence on the page, and how were you hoping this might color the reader’s experience?
TC: I am really interested in the visual realm of the poem, or the field of the page (which I learned from reading the work of Charles Olson). I remember, in high school, being really taken by the way that E.E. Cummings played with punctuation and broke the rules of grammar. I love that poetry can be a place where I am intentionally transgressive, and that poetic rebelliousness can be celebrated. I also have very long poems in this collection, and I was interested in pushing the poem to the edge—to its limit, possibly even to the verge of failure. But I do worry about fatigue for the reader, and so I like to think about the visual dexterity that can happen on the page to create moments of dynamism and propulsion. For example, I can employ caesura, so that the reader can catch their own breath inside a poem that is on the brink of breathlessness. I am very inspired by the art of museum curation. In the same way, my reader is entering the exhibition of my poetry collection, and I am guiding them meaningfully, poem by poem, with thoughtful care, intention, and context—much like wall texts and docents might guide a viewer through a solo gallery show.
I played with the opacity of the font color in “After the Plain Day Becomes Magnificent to Her” (the text seems to dissipate). The poem ends without ending, fading off the page—presumably still going up and up and up. I find that these variations energize and startle the reader. Another example is in my poem “Delta Delta Delta,” when the phrase “felt good” is deferred to the very end of the page. All that white space was initially unintentional, but I really liked my mistake—once meaning gave way—and chose to embrace it. For me, it’s a way of playing with the set dressing of the poem’s aesthetic quality through the seen and unseen architecture of the page. What does it mean to showcase the mistakes as you are writing—to show the process while in process, as your process? I think the meta-space of poetry creates urgency, strangeness, and intimacy in the text by waking up the reader through wrecked and wild configurations—active spaces as psychic containers, which I love to explore and experiment with as I write and revise.
DM: I was also fascinated by your use of parentheses as a way of interjecting or inserting commentary into your own reflections. This seems to be a way of pushing against the rules of poetry, noting mistakes, offering your reader different comprehensions of the same moment, which you demonstrate can coexist in the same space. What draws you to these parenthetical moments, and how do you hope they affect the reader’s experience of your poems?
TC: I love what you said about the mind holding different registers of meaning at once. I am really interested in the meta-moments in poetry. I love when form can inform the content. To me, the parentheticals reflect a mind going through deep grief, toggling asides that exist as internal and external dialogues. You are questioning yourself, and second-guessing. How do you display this visually? And also, your personal lexicon changes after divorce. The revision is happening as I am writing my poem because I am revising my own life, too. The parenthetical is holding the space for the breaking of the self and the fourth wall, a way of interrupting oneself while also whispering your real intentions to the reader.
I am team Reveal-Too-Much. I find myself actively making space for these kinds of intimate moments to happen. It involves a series of experiments and failures, of trying to figure out the recipe of balancing what might or might not work in a poem, of how much salt it can take without overdoing it. I feel it as a spark, one I don’t want to edit out. There is a stunning and devastating poem by Jericho Brown, called “Again,” which begins with a fourth wall break as the speaker says, “You are not as tired of the poem / As I am of the memory.” Brown then braids the breaks throughout the poem with the story of the speaker’s parents, wrestling with domestic violence, frustration, and tenderness. This is a story that cannot be told without the speaker’s older voice interjecting throughout the poem. The awareness of the older poet looking back at the younger poet—witnessing, but not yet ready to bear witness—is crucial. The fact that Brown decided to break the poem even as the story is being told is also part of the poem’s brilliance and ache to me.
DM: I really felt, throughout your collection, that you were taking up space, that your language was almost spilling over. You illustrate for us the “body on the brink.” You are showing us, in real time, how to defeat the constraints that can etch themselves around us—by undoing them. Your collection—and your writing over the years—has been so inspiring to me because you exist so fully within the space of the poems you create.
TC: It’s so fascinating to me, the psychology of people who write poems. For me, you cannot truly know someone or love someone unless you are willing to be vulnerable with them and show them all the messy parts of yourself. It’s actually exhausting to hide all the parts of yourself that are unhealed. I’ve learned in my life, in risking those moments of vulnerability, those are actually the parts that often draw people to me, and not away from me. At least in my artmaking, that has been a source of intimacy, not of distance. I love when people come up to me after I’ve read a poem and they say, “you’ve made me feel so seen” or “you’ve given language to something I didn’t know how to express.” I live for those moments when another person meets me in my mess. This is a shared sense of solidarity, despite all the brokenness and weirdness, going back to my earlier point about the communion of shared sorrows. When you give people language, you give them possibility, and when you give them possibility, they have a chance to change their life.
DM: I want to close by asking about your forthcoming memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved. Could you share how that project is coming along? Are there any other directions you’re excited to move in?
TC: I am in the middle of writing it, and I am very excited about it. I’ve been loving the dilation, the expansion and distillation, as I go back and forth between prose and poetry. It’s been so interesting watching my mind work in prose. There have definitely been moments of frustration, but I’ve also been so inspired about this new genre. I’m trying to embrace being a beginner in a new genre and making mistakes. I started re-reading some of my favorite prose writers (Baldwin, Didion, Sontag), and then I began to notice some common structures: they, too, are starting with an image, or using anaphora, or have an extended metaphor. They are using similar poetic tools, just in a different way. I realized I don’t need to suppress my poetic instincts; I can instead usher them into my prose, as Ocean Vuong does. There was a topic I was trying to write about for the memoir that was very difficult for me, one that I’d never written about before, and I found myself constantly striking through my text. Then I wondered: what if I used failure as a form? What if I played into this a little bit? That’s when the form revealed itself to me, and the essay began to coalesce and untangle itself.
It takes me a little longer in prose to find the scaffolding I need before I can fill in the content, since it’s a newer genre for me. Thank goodness for my amazing editor, Jenny Xu, who helps me with the aerial view and macro-organization. This is very much a memoir written by a poet, experimental, nontraditional, and full of risk-taking. I’m greatly inspired by Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The epistolary mode is also really fascinating and electrifying to me, as seen in Heavy by Kiese Laymon, a book I am obsessed with and constantly return to when I need a zap of potent inspiration for my memoir.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to explore this new genre, and to work with Jenny Xu, with whom I did a two-book deal (for both my poetry collection and my memoir). I’ve been having fun on my book tour, because people are asking me all these questions about certain poems, and I often have essays that I am working on that are speaking directly to their deeper inquiries. For example, the poem that we discussed earlier, “Delta Delta Delta,” is based on a true story in my life of joining a white sorority at a college in Memphis, Tennessee, reckoning with the violence in the landscape in relation to race and class, and the performance of playing the “other” as the other. In some ways, my essays have become further examinations of my poems, which I now see as lyric chapter summaries or snapshots for the memoir. It feels enlivening to return, edit, and finish my essays as I see which poems are exciting and resonating with people.
DM: Do you want your two books to be read together?
TC: I don’t think they need to be read together necessarily, but there are linkages. I am looking forward to my books being in conversation with each other. I think if you fall in love with someone’s voice, you will fall in love with where they are going. If you resonate with my poetry collection, then I think you will feel the same sense of emotional reverberation in my memoir. At least, I hope so!
Let’s take Ocean Vuong or Saeed Jones, for example—I feel so familiar with their poetic voices, and I love recognizing their distinct lyricism within their astonishing prose. I say that as a form of praise. You hear the metronome in their work, the love for language, and intensity of feeling, which, in my opinion, often comes from their poetic influence. I am excited to see what happens when my memoir comes out in the world.
