Tiana Clark
Tiana Clark has published the chapbook, Equilibrum, and a full book of poetry titled I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without The Blood. She has won numerous awards and has been published in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Washington Post(just to name a few). A fellow Nashville native, I had the pleasure of watching her career flourish and expand over the years. We officially crossed paths at Sewanee School of Letters where she was my professor in the summer of 2019. We spoke about pantsuits, rage and isolation in the age of the pandemic.
Interview by Massey Armistead.
Photo by Crystal K. Martel
PART 1
You’re well known for your fashion choices, how did you come up with your signature look?
You know what’s interesting is when I started doing more readings and especially becoming a professor, I started asking myself what uniform would make me feel the most powerful? I read an article about top CEOS and innovators like Steve Jobs—who was known for his black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers—had a uniform that was really simple, this is just my go-to look. Around that time, I was asking myself what I wanted my uniform to be, more precisely I asked myself: what do I feel most powerful in? It was pantsuits. Not just normal pantsuits, as you’ve seen, I really like colorful, bold, some would call loud pantsuits, the ready-made outfit that’s really easy to travel with. It met all my needs as something easy to travel with and it made me feel really powerful.
I find it very iconic, it shows that you can care about poetry, writing, and literature and also care about fashion too.
For me, as a woman of color as a professor, I don’t have the privilege of showing up as the frazzled male genius, right? There is a way in which I have to always be on my p’s and q’s and always be polished that other people can’t be, in my opinion.
Fashion’s fun, I’m not one of those writer’s that thinks I’m so erudite that I can’t talk about fashion. If you’ve seen my work, I love to talk about pop-culture. I think fashion is fun and it’s an extension of your personality, your overall aesthetic. Fashion is form.
How has the collective awareness of racism and violence toward black communities influenced your writing? Do you feel more inclined to write less inclined to write?
For me, if you’ve paid attention to my work, it has always centered around the histories of black bodies. I didn’t need George Floyd’s death to stir my rage, it already existed. It definitely added to it, it was a sorrowful time. For me, I really think the tipping point this summer was raising the consciousness for people who aren’t black. I think if you are a black writer you’ve been thinking and working through those emotions for quite some time. I have poems about Sandra Bland, Kalief Browder, Emmett Till, and Trayvon Martin. Elegies have been a part of my work. There was nothing about this summer that prompted me to to say something, I’ve been saying it—off and on the page already. If anything, I found myself not wanting to respond creatively. I often react with a lot of resistance when people tap black writers in those public moments for private pain, because I think it’s a moment for grieving. And honestly, anyone can do what they want. If a black writer feels compelled or wants to respond, go for it. But what’s going to happen next summer or even tomorrow? What’s not trending or going viral on social media? Are you going to still be interested in black voices then?
How has the pandemic impacted your writing if at all?
It was interesting when it first started and people were like “get your book done” and “Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the Bubonic Plague.” I live by myself, so the pandemic hit me hard with isolation and loneliness. I was studying the difference between loneliness and solitude. And solitude is by choice, but in a pandemic there is a constricted kind of loneliness or compulsory loneliness. So it’s hard to reach that place of solitude and being thankful for this time, but I’m getting there!
I have been working hard on my own self-care routine to decouple my productivity from my self-worth. And it’s so funny, people were like “more time for me” but I had already overbooked myself before the pandemic, so when things started getting cancelled it was actually time for me to breath and catch up on deadlines. It was a time for me to actually rest and restore with some sense of routine. I let myself be quiet and still. I let myself not feel the pressure to produce something or do something grand or big. I gave myself permission to nap and do small things and read. And then, after a while, I slowly started writing again.
Mainly I’ve been working on finishing my next poetry collection. It’s been harder to write poems, but it’s been easier for me to work on a macro level with the book, as far as structure and ordering and revising poems. A couple new poems have eked out, but mostly my brain is on this editorial aerial view, which has been helpful for me. That’s as much focus and strength I have to muster during this odd and uncertain time.
That’s so beautiful that you were able to take this time to rest.
Yes, resting is radical.
Speaking of your work, how does location play a role? In particular how has moving to Nashville from LA as a child influenced your writing?
It took me a long time to identify myself as a southern writer, that’s come recently. I think because I was born in Los Angeles and moved to the south as a child. For a long time I held an outsider’s perspective. But of course, moving at seven, I’ve lived here most of my life, Nashville is my home. But it took me a long time to name that and claim it. So for me claiming southern history—the good, ugly, and indifferent—has been a powerful part of my poetic journey. Place plays an important role, because I’m interested in personal and public histories and where those converge. That’s the main mode and technique of my writing. Especially in a poem like “Nashville,” where these public and private histories are colliding together. Place plays an important role in my work. Even the title of my book I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood is a very southern sentiment. There’s the beautiful landscape in the south, but it’s superimposed to me with this really violent, horrible history. I can’t seem to separate those two things in my mind. When I think of trees, I can’t unsee those lynching trees, those are the kind of things that I can’t seem to escape from. I think as writers we have certain obsessions or flood subjects as Emily Dickinson would say. The landscape and history of the south haunts my work.
Some of your poems face local Nashville qualities and events head on. In the poem, “Conversation with Phillis Wheatley #7” the speaker recalls their experience at a debutante ball. When you write poems like that do any fears come up and how do you push forward knowing that there could be backlash?
Number one, realize that the lyric “I” is a persona. It’s a collage of personal and imagined experience. There is some psychic distance that provides a little bit of sense of safety that I’m not writing 100% autobiographically. Yes, most of my poems are close to the bone and closely tied to my real life. However, I’m hoping to needle a type of emotional truth more than an actual fact that I would be beholden to in creative non-fiction, per say. I think there’s a veil we have as poets that provides a little bit of a buffer between us and being responsible to answer some questions about what actually happened. So that provides a little bit of cushion and leniency for me. I used to write very factual poems. I didn’t even know that poets lied in their work until my 20’s, and I was like wait… we can do this?
Secondly, Terrence Hayes said something in an interview once that has always stuck with me that in his first draft he says it’s just him and his shadows. The audience isn’t there. He said I exorcise all my demons on the page and whatever I need to say. And I really hold true to that same sentiment during my revision process. If I thought about backlash or thought about audience or thought about what people would think or who might get offended or what taboo I might be crossing, then I would never write or publish anything. It’s important for me in the first initial stages of releasing the poem to not censor myself. Those concerns about audience come in revision. So when I have my revision brain on…I’m like okay, “let me start shaking the poem. What’s actually here? What am I trying to say? What am I trying to communicate?” That’s when negotiations happen in several different ways. It’s always trying to get to that marrow of emotional truth.
In “Phillis Wheatley #7,” I’m having this idea of her being sold on the auction block and this extended metaphor of the speaker feeling like they were on an auction block at this debutante ball. The idea of the debutante ball…being presented to society. The one black girl there feels like she’s being sold in this very white space that’s been traditionally segregated and invested in the prestige of old south. The country club with the black waiters with white gloves, still holding onto that Flannery O’Connor south. In that sense, that’s an emotional truth that feels very true to me that’s important to communicate. At that point, there’s that sense of duende, you know all dark sounds come from duende Lorca writes. I’m probing these dark areas of our history and my psyche. They aren’t always beautiful things to look at.
That’s the point of my title too, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, I have to talk about the beauty and the blood. I’m not going to sanitize my work to make people feel comfortable because that is not honest. And that’s not how you fall in love with someone, you have to show someone your vulnerabilities and flaws. As a writer, I’m interested in exposing those areas in our histories and within ourselves and probing those areas for inquiry. I may never reach an answer, but it’s the grasping that feels like I’m getting closer to a type of revelation or resonance that leads to connection, that’s what we are all trying to do with our work.
PART TWO
The Rime of Ancient Mariner is well known, what about that poem inspired you to take it on as your own in The Rime of Nina Simone?
I had an independent study at Vanderbilt with professor Mark Jarman. We were looking at 18th century British romantic poetry, and every week I was supposed to respond to a poem he would pick out and write a poem in response. We were reading “The Rime of Ancient Mariner,” and I felt this huge burden of “how the heck am I going to write my own epic ballad?” I thought about, “who would be the person I would want to warn me about their tales of woe? Who would be that ghost of a person to be like: I gotta tell you something?”
At that time, I had just finished watching the Nina Simone documentary (What Happened, Miss Simone?) and she had been haunting me. When I answered that question of “who,” then I knew of course it would have to be Nina Simone. I’m also interested in smashing contemporary and classic allusions together. I like this idea colliding Coleridge and Nina Simone in a poem and seeing what would happen. And that becomes a jazzy intersection that gives a lot of revitalization and energy to me on the page. It’s loosely based on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by the concept. That framework was really helpful for me to explore Simone in this format, who is basically a foil for the speaker, a way to ask the lyric self these probing questions.
How has your poetry influenced your non-fiction essays and vice versa. Is there a connection between being a poet that naturally leads into the non-fiction essay? What do you think the connection between poetry and non-fiction is?
I started writing longer poems, it was as if my poems were slowly ushering me into the world of the essay. You know, “The Rime of Nina Simone” is ten pages. It was as if I was naturally pushing for length. There’s an interesting dilation between poetry and prose, of course as a poet I am in love with image, in love with the sound of language, and all of those are just major benefits to the essay as well. I was interested in expansion. I was interested in seeing how my poetic mind would feel in this open space and not have to constrain myself.
To be honest, I felt very scared to write my first essay and didn’t even know if I could. I started thinking that I needed to write like other essayists and be more like Joan Didion, or I need to be more like Roxane Gay. But the truth is always that I need to be more like myself. So I brought my poetic instincts into my essays and that’s when my prose started clicking and coalescing with my sense of repetition and lyricism. I didn’t restrain myself. I approached the essay as another kind of form, similar to a prose poem or thinking about genre in those places where there’s a type of liminality. I’ve always existed in those in-between places, being mixed and not being totally straight, so there’s this idea of something between a poem and between an essay and giving myself permission to fully inhabit that boundarylessness. It gave me permission to flow with the prose.
The truth is when you fall in love with a writer, you fall in love with the way they write sentences or lines. What we are all trying to do is figure out our style or figure out our own sensibility, whether that’s in a poem or an essay or a short story. That’s the number one thing I preach to my students is that they have to learn to trust their own imagination. How can you become more of yourself on the page? Sometimes my poems are a lot braver than I am in my actual life. But it’s about reaching towards that type of power that feels good, a type of lyric swagger.
What was the process of creating your chapbook versus creating your book? How were the processes different and similar?
The chapbook is a shorter format, at the time I was like “Do I have twenty poems in conversation? I don’t know…let’s find out.” You throw your poems on the floor and you start moving things around. I knew that I had 15-20 poems that I felt were strong and might be in conversation with each other. Once I started seeing the aerial view of my poems on the floor I realized that I might have something here. I had never put a chapbook together before, but I had studied a lot of chapbooks. I put it together and it won the Frost Place Chapbook Competition with Bull City Press, which was amazing. It was a delight to work with Ross White. It was definitely a training wheels process for the big book. I was so thankful to have the chapbook process: going through revisions with an editor, handling the book sale process, and reading the book at events to get a small taste of what that would be like when my debut would come.
I started working on the big book with my mentor Kate Daniels at Vanderbilt. She came up with the title, which is actually a line from “The Rime of Nina Simone.” I knew instantly that it was going to be a triptych, a book of three sections: I Can’t Talk / About the Trees / Without the Blood. I knew I had written one chapbook, so I was like I can write three more! I adopted the same practice I had in the ordering the chapbook, which helped to breakdown the full-length into manageable sections. It’s overwhelming to have this large book with 40-60 poems swirling around, but breaking them down into these chapbook size chunks helped me shape the larger narrative of my debut collection.
The cover art is absolutely beautiful, stunning, and gorgeous, how did you find the cover art? Did you play a big role in that?
Aesthetics are extremely important to me. For my chapbook, I was very honored that I was able to procure that piece from Amy Sherald. If you don’t know, she was the visual artist who did Michelle Obama’s portrait for the National Gallery and she recently did Breonna Taylor’s portrait for the cover of Vanity Fair. I found her before she did Michelle Obama’s portrait and blew up, otherwise I don’t think I’d be able to afford her now, ha! I feel very lucky to have her gorgeous painting.
Someone had posted a link on Facebook, about 15 Artists of Color on the Rise, and I clicked on it. When I saw that Amy Sherald’s painting had the same the title as my chapbook, Equilibrium, then I was like “this is a sign from the universe!” I just loved the image, and is was important to me to have a black woman on the cover that’s staring directly back at the reader, which felt very much what I wanted my poems to do. My poems aren’t looking away, they are looking directly at you with intensity. The black women in the painting is also balanced on a beam, but there is also a beam on her shoulders. There’s this weight she has to negotiate. There’s also the patchwork quilting on her skirt that resonated with African American tradition, and the colors are so vibrant and stark. All that red! I knew instantly that it had to be my cover. Amy Sherald was so gracious to work with me and her gallery. It was very expensive, but I had some savings and it was very important to me to have that as my cover. I would do it again. I fully want to invest in my work and that was the only cover I could ever imagine.
For the full-length collection, I didn’t know that Terrence Hayes painted until I found this article where someone did a review of his visual artwork. I saw the painting he did of Nina Simone, and I knew instantly that it would have be the cover of my book. I was shaking! Simone was the fulcrum of my collection, and his surrealistic painting off of a photograph of her at an airport in Amsterdam captured her in this gorgeous but ghoulish way. That visual tension encapsulated how I felt about the psychic landscape of the south in conversation with the title. It goes back to that binary I talked about earlier with the beauty and the blood. There’s something kind of haunting about the image that captures that specter and possession of Simone. Again, it’s an African American woman staring directly at the reader, but this time it’s obscured by nature. Her eyes are covered by these dripping flowers that seemed almost blood-like to me.
When I won the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize with the University of Pittsburgh press, I told them that I wanted this cover image for my book. Luckily Terrence Hayes was so generous and so kind and gave enthusiastic permission to use the piece. I’m forever indebted to him. I remember screaming around my house when I found out. I was so thankful that he allowed me to use his stunning artwork for the cover of my book. He’s one of my favorite poets, especially because his brilliant poems have given me many numerous permission slips to play with language and manipulate form.
When will your next book be ready?
No idea, but I’m getting close to finishing. I’m really excited about this next book. It’s stuffed with long poems and lots of audacity. Lots of longing!
What advice do you have for anyone in an MFA program right now?
The workshop is A voice but it’s not THE voice. Learn who your trusted readers are within your MFA cohort. This is a time to be reckless and stretch and chase your imagination and to ask difficult questions of yourself and your peers. It’s a time to be really generous of your time with yourself and your peers. You will never have this time again to get this much feedback during this sacred time. Be really generous with your feedback and hopefully others will be generous as well. To have someone write a poem one week and get feedback the next, that’s a really. It goes by really fast, so I would say have a plan, have a goal of what you want to accomplish or start during your tenure. If you think you might have a chapbook, then push yourself to get it done, because you are going to get that immediate feedback. If you think you might be ready for the big book, then start pulling those poems together. Start asking your cohorts some questions.
Remember that your professors are humans and fallible and creative writers as well. Do not put them high on pedestals like demigods. Know that the workshop model is kind of flawed, it’s beautiful and informative, but it’s also imperfect. We go into workshop thinking what’s wrong with a piece first, but we forget about wonder and we forget about why we started writing. Sometimes we can be in the grind and hustle of academia and forget how we all started as huge writing nerds freaking out over poems and stories and essays. We forget how much we love words! Try not to lose that wonder, that sense of delight. Try to probe things with questions and try to decenter this idea that you know what’s best for other people’s poems. Instead try to figure out what their intentions are for that poem and how to make the poem better for what they want it to do. I’m still, as a professor, even after going through grad school, trying to sharpen my language around talking about poetry and finding better ways to offer suggestions.
The MFA is a hard and glorious time, and every MFA program is so different. Each school has a different culture. There was a lot of stress and shower crying through my experience during my grad school years, and there were times I thought I had to prove myself. I pushed myself a little too hard. I also had amazing support during my program. I made some amazing friends. I finished my chapbook, and started the seed for my full-length. I was busy, and I didn’t take care of myself. So while you are hustling, please take care of your body and mind. Drink water. Rest when you can. Meditate, then slay!
I became a better teacher when I stopped trying to be what I thought a professor should be. When I stopped trying to be what I thought a poet was supposed to be, then I became a better poet. Whatever your conceptions are about how you are supposed to be or act, just be who you are on and off the page. Imposter syndrome is something we all struggle with, and one thing my professors told me at Vanderbilt is that you will struggle with it your entire life, which gave me relief. “Oh, this isn’t going away and we all deal with this.” All you can do is the thing that you do best and do it to the best of your abilities. Try not to compete. Be peaceful and at rest with your decisions. Be proud of the work that you are doing. If you feel like it’s ready to submit, then submit it.
