This week I have decided to center my focus around the poet Tiana Clark and her collection I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood. Throughout the first section of the collection, Tiana primarily focuses on identity, racism, the black experience, and sexual assault. What I have been reminded throughout this process, of reading both Clark and Morgan Parker, is that there is so much intersectionality between things and concepts. She identifies as a mixed race woman which opens up a plethora of assumptions from others about the experiences that she may have encountered and even who she is as a woman. I am interested in finding out if she explores this further on in the collection. Right now, it seems as though the message of these particular poems focusing on identity is that she/people of color are always being perceived and unfortunately there will never be a time where we are not perceived.
they can’t just wink at any woman, Mr. Till,
just walk through any neighborhood, Mr. Martin,
just wear any hoodie, but any iced tea. Someone is watching,
always watching us, so when I think about justice,
I think about eyeballs, the first impression,
the action that follows, George Zimmerman stepping
out of his car. I think what would have happened
if he’d just given him a ride home?
— “The Ayes Have It”
As previously said, primarily the poems focus on identity and race, but she does add poems that focus on sexual assault. As unfortunate and inhumane as it is, I believe this is where we see intersectionality again or even just the fear it is to be a woman, a child. The thoughts of what we could have or should have done and the way that these thoughts plague her mind along with having to hold the fear of her racial identity as well. Again, at all times we are being perceived reminding us that the world is a scary place.
4.) You are in the backseat of a moving car. You are twelve. You want a kiss on the mouth, but he pushes your head down and makes you suck. You are thankful for the potholes on Old Hickory Boulevard that makes the grill of your braces scrape the shaft of his penis.
You get the taste for blood too early.
— “Ways to Be Saved”
I am particularly intrigued by her storytelling. The way that the imaginative is used and the questions that she is able to form. Being able to place yourself into a time that was not kind to you and others who look like you is incredibly hard to do and it becomes such an emotional experience. You start to look at the trajectory of your own life and the ways that it has been affected by history. I wonder what part of the collection so far was hard for her and what part was easier. The way that Clark explores these thoughts is not like any way I have seen before. Her use of formatting applies different things to her poems. It changes the way it should be read and also the tone, sometimes the context. In a way I believe that it can make a poem more emotional or have deeper meaning when formatted a different way. I have decided to play around with my format some more in hopes of achieving something different. I believe that I have constantly thought of poetry as this one thing and put it into such a narrow box/category when in reality it is anything I make it to be. She is able to push the boundaries and I believe through formatting it becomes 2 separate pieces of art, the words and the frame that holds them.
