This article was originally published in the April 2025 Print Issue of The Sophian.
On Tuesday, April 8, the Smith College Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence Tiana Clark introduced her sophomore collection, “Scorched Earth”, tackling issues of pain, loss, survival and joy in a world in ruin. After reading selected pieces from her book, she sat down with Ocean Vuong, a Northampton-based poet and New York University professor. The two discussed capitalism and whiteness in publishing, expectations of queer writers of color and the balance between joy and pain in poetry and in life.
In contrast to her new collection, Clark describes her first book as closely linked to her Master in Fine Arts, which inevitably comes with a degree of people (or professor) pleasing. This, they discuss, is also inextricably linked with both of their statuses as writers of color, a status that requires what Vuong describes as “the necessary performance of legibility that so many [poets of color] have to do.”
“My professors were in that old-school approach of ‘Professor is Bible, professor is canon.’ And I was responding, ‘Yes, sir,’” Clark said. “It took me a while to stand up to those voices, and to learn to trust myself and that process again, to have a fallow period. With this book, I was just like, ‘Screw it, I’m gonna write this book for me.’”
For Clark, part of crafting a book of poetry that ignored the expectations of and limitations placed on writers of color involved exploring ideas of being “too much,” and working outside of the margins of “legibility” or definition.
Vuong emphasized Clark’s feelings of difficulty of breaking through barriers when working on a debut publication. “When you’re a struggling younger poet writing your first book, all the doors are closed, and the answer on the other side of the gate is, ‘This is a meritocracy. Come back when we decide you’re good enough,’” Vuong said.
However, once the door has opened, Vuong continued, a new set of complications emerge for writers of color.
“Then, when you get published, and maybe you have some success, all of a sudden you’re on the inside of that gate and they’re like, ‘Give us more, we’ll publish anything,’” Vuong said. “And so you realize there’s a double standard […][When] you talk about ancestries, any time you see two writers of color coming through these traditions, you must also realize there are thousands who never made it.”
Vuong also reminded the audience of the importance of acknowledging how much those writers, as well as the ones who did “make it,” paved the way for today’s most radical writers and poets.
“I’ve always felt that all writers working in innovative, oppositional works in relation to power are working in the long shadow of Black thought, myself included,” Vuong said. “As an Asian American, immigrant, queer writer — whatever labels you want to put on me — there are no questions that I’ve asked in my own work that a Black writer has not already asked and answered before me on a global scale. Diaspora, immigration, everything — they got it covered. And I feel empowered to continue that.”
Clark expressed similar feelings of gratitude for the writers who came before her, crediting the “pillars” of poetry who contributed to making her into the poet she is today.
“I’ve always had to build my own literary ancestry, build my own sense of freedom through Black poets who were oppressed, and that is where I had personally found my sense of happiness. I feel like they have written that freedom back into me,” Clark said. “I feel so lucky to arrive this late to the tradition, because we get to have Toni Morrison and James Baldwin […][But] they didn’t have themselves. They had to be themselves. Imagine you’re Toni Morrison writing without a Toni Morrison. I’m in a cheat code just because I came late. The archive is bigger; we can think more robustly.”
Thinking about poetic histories inevitably begs the question of literary legacy, or as Clark and Vuong refer to it as, “mastery” — the achievement of poetic timelessness.
“I’ll never forget one time in graduate school I wrote a poem about Rihanna, and my mentor at the time said, ‘You shouldn’t put pop culture in your poems, you should never have a timestamp in your poems.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Well, don’t you care about mastery? Don’t you care about legacy?’ And I was like, ‘No. I don’t,’” Clark said. “And that’s when I realized I was actively working against it. Not only am I not working for mastery, I couldn’t care less. I think when you grew up in a ‘feast or famine’ kind of living; when you grew up poor, there was no saving or thinking about the future. There’s only the urgent need.”
Not only does Clark’s work “question the validity of the questions,” it interrogates why failure is seen as a negative end instead of a beginning possibility.
“I think failure is a form, right? And even in leaping for the thing, even if you fall, I’d rather it fall, right?” Clark said. “I think for me, to be honest with you, I felt like I was reexploiting myself for my first book. Like I was reharming myself. Like I was following into the gaze that was also oppressing me. I wanted to actively push that off of me, and I forgot what joy could make possible in my work.”
Clark said she didn’t know whether it was possible to transcend the pain, but regardless, her second book gave her a blank page on which to try.
“Obviously, a lot of these poems are written from a place of pain, but with this book, I wanted to take better care of myself, especially as a Black artist,” Clark said. “Because I do not want to survive or be sustainable by my exhaustion, by my pain, by my grief. That’s not what I want my legacy to be as a Black writer.”
At the end of their conversation, Vuong spoke to Clark about her considerations of pain and failure as well as joy and happiness: “You said failure is a form, but underneath that, I’m also hearing another form, which is ultimately very antithetical to capitalism and ideas of progress — which is rest,” Vuong said. “Rest is also a form, and I feel so actively rested reading your work, particularly this book. And Tiana Clark, all I want to say is thank you for writing. Thank you for being. Thank you for sustaining us.”
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