In 2019, Tiana Clark’s essay on Black burnout on Buzzfeed News went viral. Clark opened a conversation that gave voice to a previously underrepresented issue worthy of further exploration, and her poetry is no different. Her debut collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and her chapbook, Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), was selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021–2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, The American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. I was lucky enough to catch her when she came to Butler for the Visiting Writers Series in March of 2024. To say that Clark is insightful and inspiring is an understatement. Her unflinching honesty and unwavering kindness made me feel like a student in her class as she imparted the wisdom she has gained through her rich writing and life experiences.
Paige Wyatt (PW): Thank you so much for being here. I want to start with something that I love about your work. I read I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, and I really appreciate the vulnerability you invite your audience to participate in. “Bear Witness” was so vulnerable. How do you decide what to include or exclude to create that sense of intimacy?
Tiana Clark (TC): My first creative writing teacher, Bill Brown, changed my life in high school. He just recently passed away, so it’s very tender for me, but he was the first person to show me Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, and Li-Young Lee. He taught us to start with personal details and then to zoom out to universal themes like love, grief, and loss. This early lesson was vital for me at fifteen as I tried to pinpoint those very particular moments in my life to extrapolate and connect to a larger human experience.
A line from Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese" captures this: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” We go to literature to feel less alone in the world. It might seem exposing, but when I reveal something about my life or an emotional truth, I hope to experience a connection with my reader.
For example, we’ve all experienced loneliness. If I pinpoint that ache inside of a poem, maybe it’s vulnerable at that moment, but I hope that it connects with somebody else who feels that ping too, which creates a kind of communion of connection. I’ve had that moment, too, where I read a poem and thought, “Oh my gosh, someone else felt that way too,” or named something I didn’t even know you could name, or they concretized an abstraction with such precision that leaves me in utter awe. That’s the most powerful part of a poem to me: when it clicks, snaps into focus, that someone translates something that I thought was untranslatable.
In teaching, I use a close reading exercise from Kim Addonizio, asking students to identify "heart lines"—the lines that strike them deeply. What are those lines that pluck you? I connect this idea to the “punctum” from Roland Barthes to find a line that pricks and pierces you. It can be different for everybody, but those heart lines are often lines that are vulnerable and take some kind of risk.
This type of emotional vulnerability happens all the time. You fall in love with people, whether it be platonic or romantic, when there are moments of vulnerability, someone is willing to be exposed. That’s when you connect with them the most. You feel like they’ve risked something, and you see those tender, fallible parts of their heart. Those are the shards that often can draw you to someone.
That’s what I am trying to do in my work. It’s a type of seduction, but not out of an act of manipulation. It’s an act of bravery to reveal yourself on the page, to be as honest about an experience as you can possibly be.
PW: That’s something poetry does so freely. That’s hard to achieve successfully without being too maudlin or cliche. That’s something I appreciate about your vulnerability. You do take those little pieces and you widen the lens. “Cottonmouth” stands out to me. It shows you’re not afraid to not only be vulnerable but to play with structure. What advice would you give to poets or readers who might want to branch out into new forms?
TC: I would say be brave. Watch children play and remember your own child self. Kids are fearless. They see a puddle and what are they going to do? They jump in it. As we get older and experience multiple rejections and failures, we stop playing. We lose that sense of play and wonder. Lucille Clifton has a quote that I love: “So you come to poetry not out of what you know but out of what you wonder.” It’s about carrying that sense of wonderment in your work. You have to be brave enough to play with the page.
I was talking to my partner last night. He does a lot of collage art, and it was actually an a-ha moment for me because I was thinking that these words, these little chunks, clauses, and appositives are similar to the little scraps and pieces he uses in his art. When I watch him work, he sees what shapes are there for him to play with, and he moves them around on the canvas, seeing what sparks and strikes, and instinctually what has heat and energy. It’s allowing for a sense of tactile play.
I think most of us start our poetry journey in a rudimentary way. For example, I used to think a poem always had to start on the left margin. Maybe we had teachers and professors who gave us these “rules.” Never do this or never do that. I’m at a place in my life where I’m actively trying to break every poetry rule that I know. I do an exercise where I ask my students, “What are all the poetry rules you’ve been given?” Then I say, “Write a poem that breaks all those rules.” The sense of excitement I see from everyone that’s like, “Ah! I’m allowed to do that?” YESSS!
There’s a sense of transgressive joy that happens when you start playing with form. It feels naughty and freeing, but that’s where we get the pleasure back. It’s that sense of allowing yourself to have wonderment. Give yourself permission to experiment. I look at forms as different containers. Throw a poem you are working on in couplets or tercets. I tell my students all the time: try a sestina if it’s not working or compress the ending into a tanka. I do broken forms all the time. I have a poem in my forthcoming collection titled “A Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy.” I’ve also written a broken ghazal before. I have another sestina that I put into tercets, so it’s a sneaky sestina. I like the idea of changing the expectation of what the form could look like on the page, while still having the palimpsest flourishes of the original form exist in little slices through the music or repetition. These kinds of subversions coupled with a sense of play keeps it really fun and interesting for me to explore and subvert expectation in my work. So, give yourself permission to follow your own poetic instincts and see where they take you. Make and break forms. Invent your own forms. Don’t forget to have fun!
PW: That’s what poetry is, at least to me. You’re creating art with words. That’s your medium and visually you have to play with that too because most of the time your audience is not going to be in front of you to hear it. You have to rely on form to get that idea across, which I think you do really well.
TC: Thank you. I also see poetic forms like museum curation, a way to guide your readers through your work with some kind of context. You’re leading them through the exhibit of your poem or poems, especially when you think about a whole collection.
But also, I think of poems as houses. You think of the title as the mailbox and the epigraph might be the front porch, and then you enter the home of the poem. You’re guiding them through different rooms. You lead that curation. You’re hosting the reader through the architecture of your poem.
PW: It helps us to think of form outside of just “organic form means do whatever you want.” It guides the poet’s thinking, especially if you’re more linear when you write. I want to talk more about preparing a poem for an audience. I read in another interview that you used to perform improv comedy. How has that experience informed your work, particularly with how you build a poem with an audience in mind?
TC: It’s funny you mention that because I want to get back into improv. The biggest lesson I learned from improv is that when I tried to be funny, I wasn’t funny. When I entered a scene tabula rasa, with a blank slate, and trusted myself and my scene partners, the scene flowed organically in surprising ways. I apply this to my poems by treating the page as a blank stage. I don’t try to enter my poem with an agenda; I try to let the poem develop naturally without forcing my will on it.
Improv teaches the concept of “yes, and,” which promotes continuance and prevents shutting down ideas. This applies to poetry, especially metaphors, reaching into another world to describe this one. It’s about extending and exploring, similar to improv. In both, you quickly think of ideas and see where they can lead. This process is like using a View-Master in your mind, continually clicking to reveal new images or lines, clicking, and clicking so that the poem can keep revealing itself to you.
Improv feels like adult playtime, reconnecting with a childlike sense of play. I aim to bring that playfulness into my work, even when dealing with heavy topics. I’m trying to reintroduce joy into my poems, even if it doesn’t work. The grasping for delight, even if it fails, sometimes feels more successful and honest to me.
PW: I attend a lot of open mics and can see how a poet would have to say, “This poem may not be good for this audience, so I need to adjust.” That’s what comes to mind when I think about how improv and poetry go together. Pulling those things from your mind and putting them onto the page and also onto the stage is linear.
TC: I always ask myself, "What am I in the mood to read?" or "What do I have the energy to read?" At the end of the day, it’s just you and your work. What people respond to is bravery and courage. Oftentimes, you never really know the temperature of the audience. The same thing is true with improv: if you try to serve the audience, it flattens the experience. You never know what’s going to hit or not. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen, but I wouldn’t consider myself a funny writer, yet I’ve had moments where I’d read a poem and people would laugh. I would think, “Huh. I didn’t know that was funny.” You never know sometimes how a poem or line might land for a certain audience, so I try to read what I feel excited to read and share.
I really check in with myself and my own energy and intention for the night, and I’m trying to rely less on the audience for approval. It’s like Lorca’s duende: it hits, or it doesn’t. You can’t ever plan for it. I have found the closer I am to being vulnerable and brave, those are the nights when the duende might arrive. Some force takes over my body, and I feel like I’m floating above the crowd, fully in and outside of my body. It’s wild to explain. Lorca explains that the duende, that mysterious force, is a labor. It’s a struggle. It’s a thing you can’t explain. It’s not about skill. It’s actually about something that’s kind of broken and beyond beauty. Even if you’re wonky or still a bit scared, but you still read the daunting poem, even while you’re shaking, that’s where I think something really alchemical and palpable can happen—not for the audience but in an exchange with the audience, something magical and powerful is transferred, charged, and changed.
PW: It takes a lot of courage to make sure that you are accurately representing yourself and your poem so you’re not adjusting yourself for your audience. You’ve mentioned Terrance Hayes as one of your favorite poets, and I’ve read American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, so I can see the comparisons between your styles. Your poetry works toward social justice and activism. How do you find the bravery to do that? That’s a hard thing to do, especially for a BIPOC creator. People like Hayes have blazed a trail, but it’s still scary to me. As a gay person—and I’m not saying at all that I have nearly the same struggles—I sometimes find it hard to write about my queerness. How do you have the bravery to tap into that?
TC: The truth is, my Blackness is stitched to my being-ness, which is connected to my poetry-ness. You can’t compartmentalize any of these things. It’s the same engine for writing any poem. I don’t sit down and think, “I’m going to write a social justice poem.” It’s all connected. It takes courage to approach the page.
I am trying to unhook myself from the constant validation machine that capitalism forces upon us. It’s not easy, because of the ego. The ego wants to be safe and validated, but that’s antithetical to how, I think, art operates.
I’m very interested in the intersection between the personal and the political. Some of my work, especially my poem for Kalief Browder, came from the engine of psychic negation. “I don’t want to write about this,” and yet here I am writing about it because I had to. That poem was welling up inside, waiting for a release. There was no other option but to write the poem.
Could I ask why you’re afraid to write about your queerness?
PW: Because I’ve been closeted for so long, and I had the safety of being in a heteronormative marriage for a really long time. I left that marriage recently, and now I’m in a queer relationship. So now I’m visibly queer. Losing that safety net that I had for a long time makes me more afraid because I’m vulnerable now. It’s dangerous for me now. While hiding is not a luxury provided to people of color, being visibly queer is a new experience to me. It’s not one that I’ve had to deal with going into the world until now.
TC: Safety is a real issue when you’re writing about those topics. There’s a difference between the poem you write and the poem you publish. Whatever you need to write about is for you. Publishing it is a different matter. It would be a lie to say I don’t think about publishing, but whatever needs to come out of me has to come out. It’s like keeping a buoy down. I understand the concern about visibility and safety. That’s very real and something I reckon with a lot, especially when I travel.
PW: It’s nice to talk to another poet who puts themselves out there so raw and visibly and does so with so much bravery. And maybe you’re sick of hearing “you’re so brave” because that’s how you have to be. That’s how you have to live.
TC: It’s a negotiation. Sometimes I have the energy, and sometimes I don’t, but I feel so lucky to live this life. Even tonight, there are some poems I’m nervous about reading, but I do a lot of work off stage before a big reading to conjure that energy. When I read a scary or vulnerable poem and take that creative leap in front of others, those are electric moments that are exhilarating for me. They go beyond the audience, moment, or time. I don’t want to over-romanticize it, but sometimes I feel untethered from reality during a reading. It’s almost untranslatable.
PW: You’re connecting with your true self and that’s all that really matters. You’re transcending the fear you had in your mind.
TC: Even if I’m only speaking to that one person who might connect with my work, or even my childhood self. I often speak to her. I always say I’m writing to save my own life first. If it happens to save other people, great, but I’m primarily writing to that younger version of myself and thinking about her a lot.
PW: I hear that a lot about speaking to your inner child, which is a good way to think about it. Like, what stories or narrative would my fifteen-year-old self need to hear? Speaking of narrative, I love the way you incorporate narrative into your work, especially when you use history as a basis. Your Phillis Wheatley poems were such a cool way to slip in and out of that persona. How do you do that? How do you access those voices? Do you have a process for that?
TC: Many things in art aren’t consciously known until you look back later and see the steps that were once invisible to you. It’s like following a fuzzy impulse until the constellation of ideas or research or lines rolling in your head start congealing and coalescing, gaining some traction.
For example, I became obsessed with Phillis Wheatley because I was taking a class in grad school on literary friendships. I wanted to focus on Black women poets and tried to find letters between them. It was hard to find existing letters between two Black poets, but then I found letters from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner. We only have Wheatley’s letters, not Tanner’s. This dynamic fascinated me because it’s the only time we have her correspondence with another enslaved Black person.
I can get obsessive. I think, if you’re an artist, you’re a creature of obsession. I was studying her letters, and as I was studying her letters, I was studying her voice. I wanted to imagine what Obour Tanner would write back to her. It’s that kind of speculative aspect of art where you’re using your imagination to fill these lacunae. By creating art to fill in those silences, you’re creating something else that feels really magical. In my imagination, I’m creating a chemistry and connection between two Black women writers that feeds something deeper and ancestral in me. That kind of archival joy allows me to write back into history.
I love history and once wanted to become a historian in college, but all my research came out in verse. With Phillis Wheatley, I was chasing my own literary heritage by decoding her work. She couldn’t write freely in her letters and had to be savvy. I was trying to learn the secret messages within her letters and poems. Wheatley’s voice is dripped in a lot of Christian rhetoric, so I was wanting to be subversive and use the biblical lexicon as a way to explore double meanings. She was using Christian theology to appeal to white abolitionists. She had to. Those were her tools at the time.
Whenever I use any character in my work, it’s a way to have a conversation with myself. I’m inspired by voices like Nina Simone, Rihanna, and Phillis Wheatley. I use these radical Black women to explore how to be an artist and maintain my sanity. I think about Black women artists who burn themselves out for art. What’s left of them? How do I protect myself? These are the things I wrestle with. I look at these women as guides and cautionary tales, figuring out how to maintain myself in this practice. We don’t often see Black women in charge of their own agency and retribution, and I wanted to explore that. Many of these poems are exercises in experiencing feelings I don’t get to inhabit in the actual world.
PW: I think using other people to explore a voice hidden within yourself is a good technique for anyone who is struggling to find someone who is part of their literary heritage. I love that idea. Speaking of burning out, you have a poetry collection coming out called Scorched Earth and your upcoming memoir, Begging to Be Saved. I want to talk about Begging to Be Saved, if you can, or as much as you can because it speaks on your experience as a Black writer who feels burned out. Can you talk a little bit about how your intersectionality has influenced that collection, and what literary void you’re hoping to fill? There is absolutely a literary void for that topic, and I would love to hear about your upcoming stuff.
TC: Scorched Earth is coming out March 2025, and I’m very excited about my next collection. I’ve waited a long time to release my second full-length collection. It’s exploring divorce, transgressive joy for sure, and queerness. This book is very much reveling in breaking all the rules. There are a lot of longer poems, which chase a kind of breathlessness.
Regarding the memoir, I wrote an essay called “Black Burnout” that went viral on BuzzFeed a few years ago. I received a lot of attention from agents wanting me to write a book, but I wasn’t ready then, but I am now. It took me a long time to be ready to write the book.
I’m excited to venture into prose. I’m seeing the essay as just another form, a bigger river to communicate my ideas. It’s definitely a memoir-in-essays that is tackling an intimate portrait of Black burnout. It’s thinking about millennial divorce, the aftercare of art making, and what lies on the other side of survival. It’s in the early stages, so I’m hesitant to say too much, but I appreciate you asking and I’m so excited to release it. I’m still very much inside of it, and the book is still revealing itself to me, so I’m a little protective of it right now.
PW: It’s cool that you’re willing to explore that. It’s something that’s not really talked about, which is probably why that essay went viral and so many resonated with that. It reminds me of when Tupac was saying something like, “You use us for your pain and your sorrow and your art but then you don’t want to deal with us. You just want to milk us and use us for your money. You don’t want to deal with the problems that are causing all this pain.” This ties into that idea that you have to mine all this and then burn out. It’s a really important topic to talk about. Any parting pieces of advice you’d give to budding writers or poets or people considering going into a workshop experience or MFA?
TC: I just want to thank you for your time, attention, your thoughtful engagement with my work, and for asking such wonderful questions.
I guess I would say to writers out there not to give up. Keep trusting and chasing their wild and wonderful imaginations. Keep submitting. Keep trying. Keep going back to the page. Keep falling back on their instincts. Keep reading. Keep underlining. Keep highlighting. Keep chasing joy as much as you possibly can in whatever way you can. It’s something I keep reminding myself of in my own writing life. I feel so incredibly grateful. Don’t give up on your dreams or your joy. Keep returning to the page as much as you possibly can.