Tiana Clark is currently the 2017–18 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the author of Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her forthcoming full-length collection won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press (December, 2018). She is the winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2015, Crab Orchard Review, the Journal, and elsewhere. An excerpt from her poem “The First Black Bachelorette” can be found here. It appears in the Nov/Dec 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “The First Black Bachelorette”?
I often generate ideas for writing when I’m driving on the road—something about the right, creative brain blossoming, while the left brain is finagling with and filtering the various logistical data streaming in from the car and the highway. For this particular poem, I was headed to the University of North Alabama for a reading. I love to listen to the Commonplace podcast during longer trips. The Sharon Olds episode had just launched, and I was excited to listen and spend a few hours with her voice and wisdom.
Olds has been one of my original poetry inspirations since high school. Her collection The Gold Cell shone from its place on the bookshelf during class like a beacon—a humming, red beam—and I was bitten by that dotted snake on the cover. This new, seemingly forbidden knowledge flooded my sixteen-year-old psyche. Those banging paper dolls “like chips of flint” in “I Go Back to May 1937” lit a flicker in me about the powerful meat of imagery and simile. It was all there: sex and God! The pope’s penis and fathers! Growing up in church, my probing questions about the body were silenced, but Olds answered me in her poems when other adults shooed me away.
So, when my poetry goddess revealed to Rachel Zucker on Commonplace that she saves Monday nights for The Bachelorette series, I legit squealed and swerved my car. What?! The Sharon Olds watches this trashy, glorious show, too!? Again, this felt a like another permission slip from her. This idea that one could be erudite and infatuated with pop culture. Coincidentally, I had just started watching The Bachelorette for Rachel Lindsay’s season, especially since she was the first Black female lead in Bachelor Nation.
I wanted to watch the show to boost the ratings, but the episodes were instantly fraught and riddled with clumsily curated drama around race. I would find myself yelling at my TV screen and sucking my teeth throughout each episode. I didn’t know that my frustration with the season would produce a long poem, but I often hold content for poem-making in my body like a gated dam waiting for a giant release to whoosh. When Olds revealed her fan status, the down-pouring poem starting coalescing in the car. I had to fidget and stop the podcast and open my voice memo app. The lines were speeding out of my lips, and I was rushing to catch up to thoughts that I had held in all season.
Before we go into questions about poetry, do you want to talk a little bit about watching that season, and how you felt about the outcome? What other moments from that season stuck with you, and why?
First off, I was officially rooting for Peter Kraus (the runner-up). Ha! I actually saw him from afar during my first weekend in Madison, WI, at the downtown farmer’s market. I had just recently moved to town for the writing fellowship at UW-Madison. I was with my partner, who I’m happily married to, but I whispered to him, “Peter could get it.”
Overall, Rachel’s season was frustrating to watch because the producers were hyper-focused on race and not on the normal romantic shenanigans that are distinctive to the infamous dating series. I wasn’t surprised, but I was still dismayed by this biased lens. I was beyond tired of seeing black women weeping on TV for the wrong reasons. Crying is a significant feature on the show, and I wanted to see Rachel fret because she was torn between which guy to pick for the final rose ceremony. Instead, she was crying because she was cancelling cocktail hours due to the overwhelming stress of Kenny having to confront Lee for being a racist asshole. I wanted to see Rachel just go on dates without asking if the guy had ever dated a black girl before or if his parents would be comfortable with her. Those are important inquiries, but it felt like the show lingered on difference instead of connection.
I believe that Rachel wanted to get swept up in the fantasy of falling in love and traveling around the world with her amazing 24” weave, and believe me, I did too. But the show kept breaking the fourth wall with all of its mishaps and in-fighting between the men, and that widening fissure was a constant reminder that the rules—whether they pertain to dating or publishing or applying for a home loan—will always, always be different for people who look like me, no matter how straight and flowy our fake hair might look.
I’ve always rooted for the black girl love story—all the way back to Lisa Turtle on Saved by the Bell—but so often it’s relegated to the periphery in mainstream shows that aren’t centered on black lives. In The Bachelorette, Rachel was supposed to be the main narrative, but was continually upstaged by her pain. Black women’s suffering has always been more profitable than our happiness.
Ultimately, Rachel found her man (Bryan), and I’m happy for her. But it just felt exhausting to watch the entire ridiculous journey. Even Rachel herself felt unsatisfied with her story on the show saying, “I was denied my on-camera happy ending.” Black girls want a fairy tale, too.
As a writer and a human, I know that fairy tale endings are a sham. Concluding a story with all the drama resolved in a beautiful bow and a perfect kiss with no lipstick smearing makes for a dull resolution in any genre—there’s just no delicious resonance. Yet, I’m still looking for another possible world within this one—one that seems somewhat believable, and fabulous, even. Sometimes I just want to enjoy entertainment without being reminded of my suffering. But in this particular case, the reality was annoyingly real and familiar to my own messy, complicated life. And wasn’t I trying to escape all of that in the first place by watching TV?
This is anecdotal, but I feel like we’ve seen more submissions that incorporate reality TV in the last couple of years. (Of course your poem uses the show as an entry point to talk about so many larger themes.) Writers are establishing their careers in the world of recaps, like The Cut, and now many of us are viewing these reality shows through the lens of UnREAL, which is a fictional and pretty damning account of producing a reality show like The Bachelor. We are creating worlds within worlds within worlds. Have you noticed an increase in writing about reality TV in your own reading or in workshops you’ve attended? Why do you think it’s captured our collective imagination?
I have seen some writing about reality TV in my workshops, but I’ve seen a huge uptick in writing about pop culture writ large, which makes me extremely happy. I think as writers we are always responding to the world and worlds around us. This is what I love most about modernizing the idea of ekphrasis (the idea of art responding to another medium of art). I think TV shows, songs, plays, music videos, etc., should belong in that ever-expanding category. The pastoral is no longer cold Keats, but moving with heat.
Your poem features longer stanzas separated not only by space, but also by icons. Can you talk a bit about how your stanzas both relate to and remain distinct from one another? What does this relationship mean in the context of the piece?
I was tired of being small in my life and on the page. I wanted to explore and exhaust myself creatively with a challenge to keep going, to resist compression and separation. During the formation of the poem, I had been ruminating about beauty and pleasure, and I started saving any quotes I could find on those two subjects, which are the main through lines between the sections in the poem.
Here are a few of my favorites:
“Perfection rested on them for a moment like calm on a lake.
Pain rested. Beauty does not rest.” –Anne Carson“Pleasure is black.” –Robin Coste Lewis
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” –Rainer Maria Rilke
I toggled back and forth on whether or not “The First Black Bachelorette” was eleven poems or just one long poem. I even said as much in my cover letter when I submitted the poem to KR. I think I was secretly hoping it would be contained as one poem, but I was worried, because it can be hard to publish a longer sequence. Luckily, David Baker accepted the poem and agreed with my vision, for which I’m beyond grateful. In some ways, it operates almost like a modern cento, a pop culture patchwork of references and quotes from TV shows and pop stars like Dolly Parton, Ru Paul, and Cardi B. I chased the length of my imagination till the duende dried up; Lorca seemed like a good stopping place.
How has your writing or writing process changed since you started out?
I’m learning to trust my imagination by indulging my obsessions and instincts. Instead of trying to shape the poem into what I think a poem should be, I’m trying to be more of myself on the page than ever before: my weird-messy-grasping-at-the-world-by-pulling-in-lots-of-references-and-research self. My mentor in graduate school said I was like a baby, constantly grabbing at objects in my poems for meaning. I was initially offended by this, but now I’ve gone maximum baby-mode in my work. Yes! Let me feel/touch/see/hold/bang together/cry/whine/sneeze/drool on this image until it reveals itself to me!
Chen Chen wrote on Twitter earlier this year, “my poems are braver than i am / but i am constantly trying to catch up,” and I haven’t stopped thinking about this idea of catching up to my own courage, too. Both in my life and on the page. I’ve stopped caring as much about prestige. I am writing to save my own life.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
TV is actually a huge part of my pre-writing process. I used to feel ashamed about how much TV I watched until I re-categorized it in my brain as a part of research and development.
Growing up, I would put on the TV to feel less alone in our apartment. I was an only child and latchkey kid, plus my single mother worked several jobs late into the night. I wanted to have the low chatter of people talking at all times, so much so that I pretended that certain characters on TV were my brothers and sisters, their voices filling the room with a familiar warmth. Monday through Friday, I would fall asleep to Star Trek: The Next Generation, with all those soothing, sci-fi sounds: intergalactic, with that zapping and beeping and booping from Beverly Crusher’s Tricorder device, or the high-pitched and ethereal chimes oscillating from the transporter room. That impulse to feel less lonely in a room and in my head and in the world is a compulsion that I also find comforting in literature.
I have started several poems from something that has piqued my interest on Netflix or YouTube. I tell my students as much all the time: Nothing in this life is off-limits. Use whatever inspires you.
My flood subjects are inside and outside the cloistered halls of academia. For me, there is no distinction between high or low art, which I think is a classist approach, anyway and reminds me of Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “The Backside of the Academy.” The speaker is finding poetry outside of the grandiose (and closed) American Academy of Arts and Letters building New York, and is flooded with sensory imagery from the streets with graffiti reading “Walter and Trina, Goo Goo, I love Trina . . .” and pistachio nuts and organ music and diversity.
Nora Ephron said it best: “Everything is copy.”
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I don’t think it’s the best advice, but I have a saying that I often share with my students, which is: say the damn thing. Some students are so locked up in being clever and opaque that they forget that it’s OK to make it plain in a poem. I think it’s important in all genres to routinely ask yourself: what am I saying and am I actually saying it? I’m certainly not advocating for every poem to be explicitly forthright and reveal all your cards or secrets, but when you’re breaking up with someone, being vague doesn’t work. It’s important to be clear about why you are leaving the relationship. Sure, yes, there are exceptions to all of this, but I believe a shot of clarity and transparency is refreshing and can sometimes help loosen the mud around a stuck tire in a poem. I crave that moment when a writer names the abstraction they are addressing. For example, an excerpt of “Now” by Denis Johnson:
Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,
and I am almost ready to
confess it is not some awful
misunderstanding that has carried
me here, my arms full of the ghosts
of flowers, to kneel at your feet;
almost ready to see
how at each turning I chose
this way, this place and this verging
of ocean on earth with the horns claiming
I can keep on if only I step
where I cannot breathe.
I know why Denis Johnson is breaking up with me here. The direct address to darkness coupled with that almost confession is the emotional core and cipher to this stunning poem.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m thinking about my second collection of poems! “The First Black Bachelorette” will definitely be a cornerstone piece in that book, and I can’t wait. I’ve started to pull all my new poems together, spread them on the floor and get an aerial view of all the themes and threads. This floor stage is my favorite part in the book-making process. I like to see which poems are talking to each other and locate potential holes.
I’ve also been working on essays, which has been exciting and terrifying. Creatively, I feel like taffy being stretched and pulled by the tug of two genres, but I’m loving what prose and poetry are teaching me about my style and taste in the toggle. There’s also a hybridity that’s blossoming between the two genres—I’m leaning into and learning from breaking the boundary of form, which is a part of my background and blood.