What the Long Poem Says About Me

A mysterious poem appearing midway through Tiana Clark’s new collection, Scorched Earth, details an ambiguous imagined encounter in a Nashville bar. A father lurks over a steak he can’t eat while a daughter he’s never met works her shift. But then, abruptly, the scene collapses, dissolving into the poet’s ongoing confusion over how to end her poem.

Without warning, the uneasy, noirish tone of the poem’s apparent storyline opens a trapdoor into the writer’s process, “until I could / see the scaffolding, until I could see the secret of my poem, love, which / is — father, daughter, reader, lover — I don’t have to tell you everything.”

Through smoldering honesty and formal inventiveness, the poems of Scorched Earth insist on foregrounding the rough truths that shake loose during times of upheaval. From collisions of art, desire, religion, racism, and moments of “transgressive joy, queer joy, and Black joy,” Clark locates the searing heart of her work.  

Clark, who grew up in Nashville and later graduated from Vanderbilt’s M.F.A. program, first established her grasp on these approaches in her memorable debut, 2018’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. That collection brought blistering candor to bear on the continued violence wrought by systemic racism, the fight for authentic self-love and desire after a chafing religious upbringing, and the restless necessity that drives artists to discover forms for their experience.

Now, in Scorched Earth, Clark furthers her explorations of these subjects. These poems spring from a potent inciting incident — the immediate aftermath of divorce. The resulting works deepen and enrich Clark’s voice, fueling the poems with greater emotional risk and more anarchic encounters with formal experiment.

Scorched Earth is about a divorce and also about finding the language to write about a divorce. To survive such times is to negotiate the mundane and the earthshaking, simultaneously. Clark captures this surreal experience with arresting detail and insight.

The opening poem, “Proof,” recalls a small but sharp moment of conflict. The speaker acknowledges her role in the emotional fallout: “I think it’s important to implicate / the self. The knife shouldn’t exit the cake clean. // There is still some residue, some proof of puncture, // some scars you graze to remember the risk.”

Clark never backs away from this sharpened edge of emotional exposure. “My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work” evokes the relentless tumult of a hustle-culture work identity alongside the internal cries for relief. “First Date During Social Distance” recalls the hunger driving an unrepeatable moment in time: “Everything wanted to be touched.”

A striking long poem, “The First Black Bachelorette,” investigates the speaker’s relationship to beauty from numerous points of entry. “I’m not writing / for mastery or legacy. / I couldn’t care less,” she claims. “In fact, I might be / writing against it, / a way of talking back / to beauty, back / to the spoiled fruit / on the altar of my body, / to the pressurized gaze / on my skin.”

At many points, Clark pulls back the curtain to show us glimpses of her poems’ backstage lives. Often these choices illuminate the influences of works by other writers and artists. A powerful example is the titular poem, an ekphrastic work exploring the Kara Walker lithograph Buzzard’s Roost Pass, 2005. Walker’s piece also appears on the front cover of Scorched Earth.

Clark also delights in highlighting the inner workings of poetic forms themselves. The wonderful “Broken Ode for the Epigraph” overflows with praise for these short introductory quotes: “O, intertextuality. / O, little foyer to my poem. / O, little first and foremost.” In “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy,” the speaker straightforwardly describes her formal choice: “I picked the sestina for its obsessive listing and twisting. I selected the sestina to probe a problem I can name but can’t answer.” 

Clark finds particular inspiration in the Old English long poem “The Seafarer” to craft her own exploration of the body as a vessel for desire in “Indeed Hotter for Me Are the Joys of the Lord”: “If my body be a long poem / then I want it to go wherever it needs. / I lick dirty verbs in my teeth and feast. / I go back to the buffet with my dirty plate, / because I want my body to say all it has to say / and not be sorry for the saying. Of. It.”

Here and elsewhere, Clark mingles personal and formal joys, to ecstatic effect: “I am what the long poem says about me.”

“Maybe in Another Life” closes the collection in reflective epilogue. Here, the speaker stands at the ocean’s edge. She considers the ambiguous losses that we inevitably grieve after tough choices that send our lives down one path while relinquishing all other possible paths. Caught up in this fraught process, she laments: “The bargaining — ain’t it a bitch? The bargaining aspect / of grief, to constantly release that which I’ve already // let go of.”

The ocean setting provides a graceful note of exhalation after so many poems that prize fiery, unsparing self-inquiry. The waves soothe, even as they insist upon surrender to life’s implacable rhythms of change, including the kinds of change that elude our attempts to describe them: “I keep looking at the gentle waves // for answers without trying to make another metaphor.”

Scorched Earth imbues this liminal moment with a poignant sense of wonder. Standing between fixed metaphors and self-images, Clark seems to tell us, we do well to respect the mystery of such moments — and our insufficient words — as they drift away from us.