The Unapologetic Verse of Tiana Clark
From Nashville to national acclaim, Tiana Clark’s poetry challenges readers to embrace the fullness of Black experience and the radical act of rest.
It is the job of the poet to help history move from our heads and into our hearts. This has forever been true. Twenty-four-hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote, “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”
So it makes sense that a poet should help the world make sense of one of its biggest recent events.
Over 130 million people around the world watched the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar’s head-spinning Super Bowl halftime show last month. So it was delicious to me, as a poet, to see another poet, Tiana Clark, help the world understand that performance’s significance five days later in The New York Times. More delicious still was that Clark is a poet of the South, raised in Nashville.
What tens of millions were watching, Clark wrote in “Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Was Radically Political If You Knew Where to Look,” was far more than just a television spectacle. It was a red, white, and blue statement of Black joy—“American symbolism through the lens of bold and unapologetic Blackness.” His performance was “a 13-minute masterpiece of profound protest art that compelled me to shout gleefully at my TV in response to the audacity I was witnessing.”
“Kendrick Lamar’s transgressive joy might just be the antidote to political burnout and apathy, which is most evident in the viral image of him wearing a backward hat, smiling wide, looking directly at the camera, dripping in diamonds, exuding maximum delight,” Clark concluded. “We got the message, Kendrick Lamar. We heard you. We saw you—loud and clear and abundantly Black. They can try to erase us. But we shall not be moved.”
Among the new generation of important Southern poets, Tiana Clark is a stalwart, a genuine voice who brilliantly weaves hope and radical joy. She examines culture and history as deities while using memory as a powerful force in her work. Clark’s poetry serves as a reminder that love can rise above the ruins.
When I interviewed Clark a few days after her piece appeared in the Times, she told me she had responded to Lamar’s performance in social media, but felt the need to go further. She reached out to her editor about the idea of writing an article.
“And she was like, go for it,” Clark told me. “As artists, we often don’t follow those sparks, but when we do, it builds self-confidence and trust." To that, I screamed a hearty, Southern “Amen.”
I identify as a Southern poet and writer, and I ask fellow Southern poets about their thoughts on being a Southern writer. Although Clark is now teaching in Massachusetts as the distinguished Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-In-Residence at Smith College, a liberal arts college for women, she strongly identifies as a Southern writer.
“I am a Southern writer who lives and teaches in Massachusetts,” she says.
In a high school English class, I first encountered the term “Neo-Black Southern poets.” Mrs. Simpson, my favorite teacher, was a white Jewish woman working in a predominantly Black high school in rural Alabama. She introduced me to Tennessee’s Nikki Giovanni, and my home state of Alabama’s Sonia Sanchez and Margaret Walker. My world was forever changed. I read everything from these Southern writers, women born and bred in the same region where I recited poems underneath an oak tree in the middle of my front yard. If the leaves could talk, they would tell tales of Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi poetry that read like soft blues and warm jazz.
“As artists, we often don’t follow those sparks, but when we do, it builds self-confidence and trust.”
Clark credits contemporary Southern poets such as former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown as supporters and inspirations.
“The South has its own history to reckon with,” Clark says. “[James] Baldwin says, ‘Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition.’ And for me, that is a perfect amalgamation of how I feel about the South. I am constantly reckoning with my home in Nashville.”
Like me, Clark is the Black daughter of a single mother. She moved with her mother from Los Angeles to Nashville when she was seven—old enough to remember the culture shock. While sitting in her newly found kindergarten class, Clark remembers noticing the lack of children of color who looked like her. These early experiences helped to shape Clark’s writings, giving voice to culture and summoning a radical and delicate sense of purpose.
In late 2024, I heard her read for an event during the November election cycle. Clark read an original political poem, leaving the audience in audible gasps. Observing the cadence in Clark’s voice and the smooth, assured lyrics gave me chills. Clark read each word as a call to action.
After listening to her read, I immediately grabbed her 2018 collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. In it, Clark interrogates the South’s relationship with trauma and lynching. In her newest collection, published earlier this month, Clark invites and welcomes joy. Scorched Earth (Simon and Schuster) is a gravity-lifting collection that implores readers to empathy and radical love. It expresses an unflinching need for everlasting joy, with grief serving as the clay from which joy is molded, mending hard places while remaining soft and honest.
Clark began writing Scorched Earth during the first Trump administration, but she says she believed it was important to give this collection time to breathe. So she avoided the typical rush to get the next thing into the marketplace. This collection was written in protest against the grind culture of capitalism. It reveals the many and various artistic values of Black joy. And she uniquely braids contemporary and historical memory alongside personal narratives of self-discovery and intuition. Scorched Earth bravely explores the truth with such eloquence that you can feel the embrace.
I find it exhilarating to read Clark’s work. She opens poetry to everyday experience, giving readers immediate access. She explores the relationships between modern love, loss, and recovery. I am in love with "The First Black Bachelorette," one of the longest poems in the collection. Each stanza takes its time to reach the waves of the reader’s heart. I found it hard to shake myself loose from her long poems—something about taking the time to read each stanza and explore the rhythm and depth in the poems felt authentic and healing. From beginning to end, Scorched Earth is a beautiful testimony to vulnerability.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Salaam Green: Tell me about the Kendrick Lamar article and what sparked the idea to write a timely piece.
Tiana Clark: I wrote something on Instagram but still felt like there was more that I wanted to say. But I also had so much on my to-do list, I reached out to my editor. And she was like, go for it. As artists, we get those sparks, right? And do we ever follow up on those sparks? Do we translate those sparks? Some days we can chase them, and some days we can’t. We can’t always turn them into external validation, but it sure does feel good when it comes. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield talks about the difference between the amateur and the professional. The professional follows up on those impulses, on those instincts. I think life will often teach you not to trust your intuition. Capitalism will tell you that you must chase and pursue the things in time that will bring you money. I think the older we get, the more time we make for the pulsing of the sparks.
We are all so busy and burned out. The world is on fire and falling apart. How do you continue? That’s why I felt so inspired by Kendrick Lamar. I wrote something about him about transgressive joy in my essay. Seeing him so unapologetically Black. Seeing him was joyful. Oh, wait, this art brings me joy! I paused to reflect. If we lose that, then we are done. We cannot let this current administration steal spaces to create and make art that reflects us back to ourselves and makes space for joy.
We have the tools for resistance and revolution at our disposal.
SG: Are there any poets or artists who have helped influence joy in your writing and world?
TC: There is Lucille Clifton and her poem “won’t you celebrate with me.” The last line—“come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.” And has failed! It failed. And we have to be mindful of that. That is why memory is so important when you look at Lucille Clifton; when you’re writing or reading a piece, we have to have memory to say we lived, we continued. We can’t eliminate Phillis Wheatley’s and Black women’s identities, not just a little. They lived.
“I wanted to take up as much space as possible, which is why the collection is full of so many long poems.”
With Kendrick Lamar, it was just saying that the culture is 100 percent alive. We’re alive 100 percent, we are energetic 100 percent, and we are taking up space. It is that memory that is going to keep us going. There is no minimizing or marginalizing in any way.
won’t you celebrate with me
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
—Lucille Clifton
SG: I am so excited about Scorched Earth. I feel that is exactly what your work does: It takes up space.
TC: It’s so interesting that you said that. That is one of the main drivers for this book and for me. I wanted to take up as much space as possible, which is why the collection is full of so many long poems.
SG: Tell me more about your approach to long poems in this collection.
TC: The reason was radical. I started this book in the first Trump administration because I felt small and impossible. I was listening to a podcast, the Commonplace Podcast. Rachel Zucker was interviewing Roger Reeves and Natalie Diaz. Roger Reeves said something that just absolutely exploded my world. He was talking about how he was writing long poems. And then he realized he started doing it because he was checking his impulses. The idea when he was younger was that when you are in a Black body, you are constantly being watched, you are being legislated, and there is respectability politics.
One day, he found himself in a doorway and was waiting for some of his friends, and a white couple passed him, and he found himself automatically moving out of the way. Why did I do that? But he knows why, right? We all do things like that. I know when a cop pulls me over, I turn into a minstrel show because I want to live. When he said this, a lightning strike came to my mind because Roger Reeves said I don’t want to do that in my work. I want to take up as much space as possible in my work.
SG: I hear that your expansion of self supports the expansion of your poetry. So, you found this space in the poem “The First Black Bacheleorette.” Can you tell me more about this?
TC: I reflected on how I have been putting the borders up in my life and making myself and my work smaller. What would happen if I unleashed myself? What would happen if I let my mind, spirit, and work go fully uninhibited? I didn’t know. That poem was churning inside of me. I just let myself go. I hadn’t done that before, and it was in response to feeling oppressive restrictions. I felt so much unbridled joy when I finished that piece. I released that fire inside me, which had been caged for so long.
SG: Wow, so is this what you think radical is? How would you define radical love? Love as a central theme can be found throughout the collection. When I was reading “The First Black Bachelorette,” I imagined this thread unspooling into other threads, including the modern in juxtaposition with traditional eras, and that felt radical.
TC: That’s such a beautiful question. “Radical.” What an interesting word. As a poet, I am always looking for ways that aren’t talked about. We think revolution. We think of the burning of the flag. We think of marching on Selma. Yes, those were radical, but there were also ways that were subversive, silent, and incendiary. I am thinking of the enslaved people who may be in the kitchen and slip pieces of glass into the master’s food. As an enslaved person, you have one little plot of land to grow your food. Not all the enslaved persons could run away. There were radical ways they could stay—when they sang songs to each other on Sundays and were allowed to braid their hair. Radical is not always being revolutionary. Radical is sweet, tender resistance, ways that might not ever be seen, but we know it happened. Especially for Black women right now.
“bell hooks talks about this...terrorizing truth that Black women face—the racialized stress and terror that Black women feel. So, to me, the most radical thing we can do is rest.”
What are the ways we are taking care of ourselves? And, of course, it makes me think of bell hooks’s Essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom” in her book All About Love. Also, in James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin says we cannot forget love. Which is easy to do sometimes. I put a letter from Audrey Lorde to Pat Parker on my syllabus every semester. It was written in 1985. She says at the end, don’t let hate stay locked inside of you; remember the tender places. I always tell my students this because I know what a wild time it is to go through college. I want them to remember to be tender and soft with themselves.
bell hooks talks about this in Sisters of the Yam; she talks about this terrorizing truth that Black women face—the racialized stress and terror that Black women feel. So, to me, the most radical thing we can do is rest. We also know from Audre Lorde that rest is an act of self-preservation. Sometimes, the most radical thing I can do is rest; I don’t have to show up for every fight. I will still advocate for myself. But I will rest.
SG: One stunning poem in the collection is “My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship to Work,” and it features Phillis Wheatley and Lucille Clifton.
when a poem undoes me. I underline
Clifton: today we are possible. I start
from image. I begin with Phillis Wheatley.
I begin with Phillis Wheatley. I begin
with Phillis Wheatley reaching for coal.
I start with a napkin, receipt, or my hand.
I muscle memory. I stutter the page. I fail.
Hit delete—scratch out one more line. I sonnet,
then break form. I make tea, use two bags.
Rooibos again. I bathe now. Epsom salt.
No books or phone. Just water & the sound
of water filling, glory—be my buoyant body,
bowl of me. Yes, lavender, more bubbles
& bath bomb, of course some candles too.
All alone with Coltrane. My favorite, “Naima,”
for his wife, now for me, inside my own womb.
Again, I child back. I float. I sing. I simple
& humble. Eyes close. I low my voice,
was it a psalm? Don’t know. But I stopped.
—excerpt from “My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship With Work”
TC: I think about Phillis Wheatley reaching for coal. What she was doing was radical; she used Christian rhetoric to remind abolitionists of her humanity. Another thing I think about is the poem by Lucille Clifton. There’s a line that a lot of people don’t often reference. What I have shaped into a kind of life? I had no model. Because I made it up. Often, we don’t have those models. We had to create models in our mirrors because we weren’t in the canon. So, just like jazz, we have had to improvise from those deep, ancestral roots. And rely on that intelligent intuition to survive. So, for me, the rest is in poetry.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Phillis Wheatley.
SG: What is coming to mind when you think about Phillis Wheatley? [Wheatley was a woman kidnapped in West Africa and enslaved in the home of the Boston businessman John Wheatley, but who began publishing poetry in the 1760s. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has a wonderfully complex book of poetry based on years of research on Wheatley.]
TC: She’s an incredible example but an incredibly bleak example of what exhaustion looks like. When she returns to Boston [in 1783], she’s freed but also penniless and without support. She’s working on her second book but can’t find any patrons or a publisher. Through my research, white people at that time were more interested in Phillis Wheatley in bondage than Phillis Wheatley unfettered. And so she struggles in the last years of her life. She gets married, but as you see in her letters and correspondence, she’s hustling.
“I think you feel satisfied when you take that risk (and) let a poem in. You’re like, oh my gosh, I allowed myself to take a risk. I allowed myself to say the damn thing.”
She even takes out an ad in the paper petitioning for people to subscribe to the book so she can have enough money to get the book published. She unfortunately dies cold and alone, and we don’t have that second book.What would those poems have been like when she was free? We have a couple of them but don’t have the entire collection, and we didn’t have that book when she was free.
SG: You speak of rest so lovingly, which is welcoming; how do you write from a place of rest, and where can we find rest in poems and poetry?
TC: It’s interesting to think of in several ways, right? You know, it’s so interesting with my students. I am teaching them line breaks right now; a line break is a rest in a poem; you’re modulating the breath. It’s the sheet music for the reader. You’re modulating the speed. There’s only so much tension a line can take. And you can disrupt that. You can stretch that. You can manipulate that. I think about fulfilling and thwarting the reader’s expectations. It’s also an expectation of breath at the same time. So, rest is inside a poem, and breath is inside a poem.
SG: How do you find that sense of self-trust to allow yourself to be vulnerable when you were working on the poems in Scorched Earth?
TC: I think you feel satisfied when you take that risk or let that poem in. You’re like, oh my gosh, I allowed myself to take a risk. I allowed myself to say the damn thing. I allowed myself to reveal myself or to be vulnerable. I think about Maya Angelou, who was sexually assaulted at such a young age, but she didn’t speak for five years. It was poetry that brought her back to her body. It was poetry that gave her the language to start using words again. And so I think there’s something about rest that also reminds me of fermentation that happens magically. I tell my students all the time that sometimes, poems need to be permeated in the darkness. Sometimes, poems need time. You need to write because you can have your agenda and your ego; however, the poem hasn’t revealed itself to you fully. Do you trust yourself against capitalism to rest and wait for your poem to reveal itself to you?
I always ask them how many revisions they have made in their poems. Have you let your poem rest? How many times have you returned to it and worked on it again and again and again? Tell me about your relationship with revision and the rest of your work, which will tell me where you are as an artist. I was young and hungry and wanted to get my work out there too. As I mature, I’m seeing the benefit of actually not rushing.
I sat on this book for a long time. I could have published it a lot earlier. With a bit of, maybe not a lot of privilege, I intentionally waited to put this book out because I wanted to push back against that instinct to rush. I wanted to wait for lots of different reasons. I was going through a divorce, and the pandemic happened, and I was like, I need to take care of myself. Rest, for me, it looked like I would wait and publish this book until I was physically, spiritually, and mentally ready.
SG: Scorched Earth is a beautiful read; I loved it so much that I wonder how and where you get your inspiration when you write. Where do you feel it comes from in your body?
TC: You’re asking such excellent questions. Oh, man. My mind’s going in many directions. Well, I always say that poems are bodies that remind us of our bodies. For me, it’s a very bodily experience. Again, going back to that word “turning”—like it does turn inside of me. Interestingly, you brought up that poem “My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship With Work.” I forgot about that poem because that poem, literally, with the line breaks and with the pacing that I am doing in that poem, I am reenacting what my body did.
SG: How do you invite others into this collection of work? I felt the transcendence of pain and the joy of love.
“I don’t want it to be a cheesy book on five steps to get rid of burnout. I want to show real examples. I’m highlighting iconic Black women I respect and how society failed them. We can learn from these lessons.”
TC: It goes back to the archive of our stories. Finding those stories of survival and beauty in our past and present. Black history cannot just be about Black pain. We need to know it. American history is being attacked, and it’s important to know our history, but it can’t just be about the pain. I’m so sick and tired of it just being that we were forced to suffer. I have an insistence on beauty. I want to look for the birds. I want to look for tenderness. I don’t want to ignore the pain, but I also don’t want to ignore the tenderness and the love. I am finally in a place to claim this and write these poems.
SG: I know you are working on a memoir. How are you taking care of yourself and moving through that project?
TC: I am writing this book on burnout, and I think it is perfect timing. I don’t want it to be a cheesy book on five steps to get rid of burnout. I want to show real examples. I’m highlighting iconic Black women I respect and how society failed them. We can learn from these lessons.
There was a time during my first book tour that was incredible, and I was so thankful. I have to be honest; I did end up in the ER from extreme exhaustion. I did not know how to advocate for myself. I did not know how to take care of myself. I didn’t even have a language on how to do it. I mean, you are an emerging artist, they don’t teach this in school. Someone important in my life told me this. They said sometimes you feel like when you’re starting off, you have to be so grateful for everything that you’re not ready to ask for anything. Now, I feel more comfortable and have more support and help.
About the author
Salaam Green is the inaugural poet laureate of the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Green received the 2024 Literary Award of Excellence and was named a Southern Women’s Writers award recipient. She was featured in the Best of Poetry inThe Birmingham Arts Journal. Green is a road scholar for the Alabama Humanities Alliance and a racial healer with theKellogg Foundation. Green is aCertified Listenerpoet and an Artist in Residence with UAB Arts in Medicine at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Green is the author ofThe Other Revival, to be released in (2025) and the chapbookOnce Upon a Magic City. Her poetry can be found inBirmingham Arts Journal, Alabama Southern Women’s Review,Glass House Journal,Scalawag, and theBirmingham Arts Reviewas well as other notable anthologies and publications. Green resides in Birmingham with her lovely dog Gigi and can be found walking in the city.