The title of Tiana Clark’s second poetry collection, Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press, 2025), comes from her ekphrastic poem, inspired by Kara Walker’s 2005 lithograph, Buzzard’s Roost Pass. Clark’s poetry collection asks many questions, including “How does a body / even start?” Clark’s speaker takes Aracelis Girmay’s imperative to “Still, live . . .” through a diorama of hurt, forgiveness, and love. In this journey, Clark’s once apologetic speaker confronts her body, “a map/ thumbtacked with shame,” to imagine becoming “cold, yet searing with unmet pleasure.” She addresses the objectification and mutilation of the Black female body, first by “The Black Bachelorette” (“pre-oiled / fluffed, breached, waxed / nubile, licking, staring / down the cameras to ash . . .”) and then by addressing the floating cut paper silhouette of the decapitated woman in Kara Walker’s Buzzard’s Roost Pass (“blacker breasts / point[] in different directions across the gorge”).
Imbibing a maximalist impulse, the form of Clark’s long poems features Diet Coke, mayo dressing, and Paul Celan’s “black milk,” embodying what it means for “the long poem of my body / to not apologize for the space it needs / to make and make up.”
Tiana Clark is the author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, winner of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University; and the chapbook Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver as winner of the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.
I spoke with Clark over Google Docs about second chances in a timeless life, ordering a poetry collection by its kinetic ebbs and flows, diasporic longing through ekphrasis, and reaching toward Black beauty and joy as an antidote to silence and death.
***
The Rumpus: You open Scorched Earth with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Then I know that there is room in me for a second huge and timeless life.” In what ways do you feel the epigraph frames the collection as one where you can make and make up space?
Tiana Clark: Like grasping a lifebuoy, I’ve been holding onto this line from Rilke ever since Maggie Smith posted it on Twitter several years ago, during the nadir of my divorce during the pandemic. Wading through the muck and mess of loss and deep grief narrows your point of view while shattering the future you once imagined.
Reading Rilke’s words, I felt expansive and hopeful again, sensing there was a largesse of second chances and chapters ahead. I wrote the quote down and taped it above my desk for years as I finished this collection. I wanted to start the book with this catalytic epigraph—to situate the reader with the speaker’s anticipation as she reckons with the end of one dream and navigates the wild uncertainties and questions in the next phase of her life.
By beginning in the end, I aimed to subvert the linearity of traditional tragedy, using the finale of my own story as the spark for another new narrative to unfold. In this revised retelling, the speaker descends into their own underworld to save themselves with their own song of survival. Here, the speaker becomes both Orpheus and Eurydice—me, looking back at myself. But in my reclamation of the myth, I am not destroyed by the desire for retrospection, which is why I also included the epigraph from Aracelis Girmay at the beginning of the book, which reads: “. . . I’ve been remembering the story of salt. Lot’s wife. / But you tell me something the story never did: / Look back at the burning city. Still, live.”
This concept of a “timeless life” and the command to “still, live” incite the explosive form of this collection, a blast-wave, radiating outward from the point of pain, while navigating personal loss and political despair. The speaker responds to these imperatives through the entry points of pleasure, a “queer voyage” inspired by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, breaching boundaries, and reaching for Black joy. My book seeks to take up all the space with long poems and an unapologetic penchant for intertextuality—hence my love for epigraphs!
Rumpus: The epigraph is a mode of inquiry and expression that jumpstarts Scorched Earth as not an end, after the divorce, but a new beginning, with the love that is still there and the love that is best served by leaving. That poem is followed by “Proof,” which begins: “I once made a diorama from a shoebox / for a man I loved,” the “origin story of an eight-year marriage.” How does it introduce the poems that follow?
Clark: “Proof” operates as the prologue poem for this collection, establishing the emotional stakes and schema for the mega-narrative of my book. It’s an amuse-bouche, offering a taste of what’s to come—hopefully stimulating the reader’s mind after that first bite, preparing them for the poetry ahead, and awakening them to my voice and vision with a seductive sneak peek of the journey to follow.
“Proof” begins by confronting the ruins through recollection, exploring the universal theme of loss through the specific landscape of personal details and contrasting memories. The poem excavates the end of the speaker’s marriage with self-implication at the root. The last couplet of the poem serves as the menu of subtitles for each of the four sections in the collection:
I. There Is Still Some Residue
II. Some Proof of Puncture
III. Some Scars You Graze
IV. To Remember the Risk
The great Wanda Coleman writes about the arrangement of a poetry collection “as a distribution of energy” in her brilliant essay, “Poetic Dynamics & the Meta-Lingo of the Manuscript” (in the anthology, Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, edited by Susan Grimm). Coleman continues, “The order in which I prefer to place my poems often resembles a wave. The poem-action rises and falls, ebbs and flows.” This was my kinetic goal and hope for Scorched Earth as I often considered the oscillation of wave energy between the flow of poems, fine-tuning the balance of intros and outros, both sonically and stylistically. I wanted “Proof” to be the inciting incident, embodying both failure and fortitude. The poems that follow are the continuous waves propelled by the friction of that first, wind-driven impetus.
Rumpus: The last couplet, being the section titles, is an excellent way to distribute the kinetic energy across the collection’s four sections. It features the speaker: “My thumb, so tired. / My head bent down, but not / in prayer, heavy from the looking.” It also comes from watching the first Blackwoman featured on the Bachelorette, listening to Commonplace, and wading through white spaces wherein, “. . . We do not smile or lie.” What was your process in writing the collection?
Clark: My hope and process for this book was a personal one: to keep my finger pulsing on the “jagged grain”—the blues-drenched impulse from Ralph Ellison—about squeezing, surpassing, and lyrically responding to “the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness.” Considering this, I keep distilling what I know to be true as a writer: seeking, as always, to feel less alone in the world while chasing duende and delight with gratitude and wonder.
The possibility of transcending pain permeates these poems. I kept writing by chasing a type of breathlessness, pushing the line to the limit, so that I could feel more possible off and on the page. Yes, I am relishing in my own too muchness here. We find the form we need to survive.
I used this collection as a loving catalyst to explore myself while taking poetic risks. These poems testify to my endurance after deep loss, with an emphasis on breaking most of the poetry “rules” that I know with glee. In that rebellious spirit, this book is jam-packed with transgressive joy! Amidst the sorrow, this book is lovingly invested in excess, enthralled by an audacious lyric “I,” replete with lush longing, sass, and candor.
Rumpus: I loved the “too muchness,” the rapidity of intertwining thoughts, and the self-pep talks, that questions the portrayal of Black bodies in white spaces. Is there a too muchness that insists on the particulars?
Clark: I’m glad that you resonated with the notion of “too muchness.” I have a line in “Broken Ode for the Epigraph” that speaks to this idea of radical self-acceptance, when the speaker says: “I’ve always been too much, and I am just now / beginning to cherish this too muchness booming late Baroque / rococo in my chest (little shells of scattered light decorating the caves in my poems).”
I used to be self-conscious about my particular—and sometimes overwhelming—personality, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started caring less about what people think about me. Nevertheless, people’s harsh perceptions of me or my work can still occasionally irritate me. Though I’m trying to not let them stop, confine, or hinder me anymore, or as much. I’m learning to embrace my excess, and that gentle acceptance of my extraness waterfalls over into my work.
Rumpus: Can you speak of how the themes of drinking and eating, and an insistence on the particular, help ground your poems? In their wordiness, how do the revelatory twists, turns, bring us to the longing? In your response, perhaps you could speak a bit about your metamorphosis of Celan’s reference to drinking black milk in “Death Fugue” in portraying longing?
Clark: This book is dedicated to abundance—the feast of language, loquaciousness, and the locomotive power of long poems. The idea of taking up space without apology in my work feels radical to me, especially as a Black, queer, female writer. The respectability politics shattered within me as I wrote this book, which taught me not to abandon but to accept myself, unabashedly. This freedom allowed me to invite play, moxie, and permission into my poems.
In terms of food, I return to the idea of a feast that I mentioned earlier. The guiding principle of Scorched Earth was to actively resist self-censorship and concision, not for the sake of precision but to give my mind the liberty of a long runway, empowering me to think out loud without cutting myself off out of fear. I wanted the process and performance of rumination to mostly remain on the page, even if that meant pushing the poem to the brink of failure—or even tipping over into the indulgence of catastrophe—if that recklessness served the overall function of the poem.
If you come over to my house for a meal, then I am first going to serve you a massive charcuterie board bursting with delicious delights—an apt metaphor for the long-ass poems stuffed in this collection. This is how my hungry mind works—unspooling, desirous, discursive, untangling psychological knots by needling language with pivots and prosody and voltas, braiding and breaking the fourth wall, ekphrastic interrogation, and always grasping, reaching for more. If you have seen any of my charcuterie boards on social media, then you will notice the same plentitude and mélange of nibbles: a crunchy chunk of gooey honeycomb, Sicilian olives, pungent and creamy blue cheese, a wedge of buttery Brie, jams with tiny spoons, fine meats, Marcona almonds with rosemary . . . and more, of course! I’m one of those people who usually has multiple drinks on my desk: water, tea, my leftover coffee from the morning, a fresh and bubbly soda water that I just cracked open next to the flat one that I forgot to finish a few hours ago. I like having plenty of options for myself, for my guests, and especially for my readers.
My penchant for being “too much” might be linked to the precarity of my childhood, as well as the abandonment of my father. The mighty lack and the loss, and me wanting to ferociously fill those voids with beauty and care, instead of constant despair, might be clues as to why this might be my process, my way of being in the world. But, alas, I will save that further examination for my therapist.
Ilya Kaminsky, in his incredible essay, “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us” examines the private, lyric world of Paul Celan and how his estrangement and wreckage of language is made evident in the uncanny friction and fiction of translation. Kaminsky asks this compelling question: “What propels this strangeness, this ‘too-muchness’ of a lyric voice? Why such urgency?”
I felt this strange immediacy when the incantatory lines from Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”) came to me when I first encountered Kara Walker’s lithograph, Buzzard’s Roost Pass from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) 2005, at the Smith College Museum of Art. I was commissioned by Matt Donovan, the director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, to write an ekphrastic poem for a book he was editing. In response, I wrote what would later become the titular poem for my second collection.
I was beyond ecstatic when, years later, Walker gave my press permission to use her striking piece for the cover of Scorched Earth. The black silkscreen fully encapsulates the tone and intention of this collection, especially since I was immediately compelled by Walker’s signature cut-paper silhouette: a Black woman’s decapitated head floating in the clouds above the landscape of mountains and soldiers, pierced by blasts from a Civil War cannon. This haunting, violent image transfixed me. While staring at the dead shadow in the sky, perhaps eidetically, Celan’s indelible image and fatal line “the grave in the sky” came to me as the rest of his famous poem spilled like a spell inside my mind, whispering to myself: “Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime / we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night / we drink and drink / we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie. . . .” [Jerome Rothenberg translation].
Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” according to Carlie Hoffman, “draws much of its terrible power from the repeated image at its center: Schwarze Milch, ‘black milk.’ This image was passed down to Celan by another Jewish poet who also survived the Shoah: Rose Ausländer.” In Ausländer’s poem “To Life,” written in 1925, Hoffman states that “the black milk functions as a metaphor relating the experience of mourning to a child’s growth within a womb; the speaker is fed the black milk of grief ‘until [her] suffering ripens with insight.’”
There is much debate about the difficulty of explicating and translating Celan’s work. While I am no expert in this discourse, in my own attempts to grasp and unlock the poem, I find that Celan engages with, broadens, and bloats the borrowed image from Ausländer. This kind of inherited echo is similar to what I recognize in Black culture from the call-and-response tradition of work songs and spirituals, which create “antiphonal phrases [that] repeat and respond to each other,” writes Barbara E. Bowen, “the singers are assenting to membership in a group and affirming that their experience is shared.” As a result, the endless “black milk” floods the “Death Fugue” through a communal voice, culminating in something borrowed and made brand new through repetition–a sui generis metaphor of contradiction, collective suffering, and a complex commentary on the German language itself. For Celan, this meant that his mother tongue (Muttersprache) was a language that must “pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”
The undulating anaphora of “Black milk of morning…” kept repeating in my head like a death knell until I finished the poem as if Celan’s translated words and rhythms became a strange trance, propelling me in a fuguelike state to the finish with the quick, successive epizeuxis of, “I love my Black breasts! I love / my Black breasts! I love my Black breasts!” A passionate proclamation from the speaker resisting the perpetual spectacle of Black suffering by insisting on Black beauty as an antidote to what Saidiya Hartman states is the “death sentence” embedded in the silence and violence of the archive. The question then becomes: How does one create “a home in the world for the mutilated and violated self?” An important inquiry from Hartman, inspired by Veena Das, that I keep reckoning with, especially in relation to diasporic longing.
One answer might be found in this stunning line from John Murillo, “Maybe memory is all the home / you get.” While I ruminate, I continue to find solace in creating the psychological sanctuary often found in what I can reclaim in writing and reading poetry.
In this way, both Walker and Celan interrogate the unimaginable, disturbing historical narratives with intense, destabilizing imagery to, as Hartman suggests, “tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.” Celan accomplishes this feat through the paradox of language, while Walker plays and weaponizes parody through the theater of the grotesque. The “black milk” of Celan and the “Black head” from Walker rouse and rattle the methods of transgression I want to possess, explore, and trouble in my own artistic practice. David Wall writes in response to framing the potent charge in Walker’s work, “To speak of transgression is also and inevitably to speak of excess. Indeed, it is in the very exceeding of limits, rules, and boundaries—the breaking of taboo—that the transgressive resides.”
This idea of excess circles back to your original question, the impulse behind my book, and my long-winded answer, which, unsurprisingly, has turned into an essay–ha! I’ll end my extravagance here with two codas:
(1) “With art go into your very selfmost straits. And set yourself free.” —Paul Celan
(2) I will cite Ilya Kaminsky once again, this time in reference to translating the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, “One of the first reviews of her debut collection blamed Tsvetaeva for too muchness, for an over-abundance of lyricism. Tsvetaeva’s response? ‘There cannot be too much of lyric because lyric itself is too much.’”
***
Author photograph by Adrianne Mathiowetz
