Continuing Peril

Sarah Yanni reviews Cheryl Clarke’s “Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems.”

By Sarah YanniAugust 30, 2024

• Poetry

ARCHIVE OF STYLE: New and Selected Poems, released this month by Northwestern University Press, is an impressive compilation spanning nearly 40 years of work by the Black lesbian writer Cheryl Clarke. Bringing together writing from seven previously published books, along with an eighth section of new works, the book is an homage to Clarke’s singular voice and to the importance of its place within Black and queer histories.

I discovered Clarke some time ago while browsing the poetry shelves of a bookstore in Seattle mere weeks after coming out as queer to my traditional, immigrant family. My eye was drawn to a poetry collection with a bright pink cover and a bright blue spine—Clarke’s 1986 book Living as a Lesbian. The poems in the book tell of queer longing through the indivisible lens of Black womanhood. Clarke catalogs, muses, grieves, questions, lusts, and rambles. She is explicitly sexual and decidedly honest. Placed near the end of the book, the poem “living as a lesbian at 35” has lines that, even years later, I think about often—“the wish for forever / for more often / for more […] in wakefulness wanting / in wakefulness waiting”—as does the next poem, “marimba”: “lick me and cover me. / i am, i am in love with you.”

Of course, Clarke is much more than this small book and my singular encounter. She was born in 1947 in Washington, DC, and is the author of not only many poetry books but also essays, including “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance,” which was originally published in the now-iconic anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). Clarke’s relationship to lesbianism is expansive and revolutionary; she positions it as a foil to compulsive heterosexuality and patriarchy at large. She also critiques members of her own Black community and the way that toxic views on gender and sexuality permeate her cultural spaces.

Archive of Style is a necessary addition to the “collected works” canon, especially since many of Clarke’s books were published with Firebrand Books, which is no longer in operation. Yet perhaps the most exciting pieces of Archive of Style are the newer works. Clarke does not publish often, and she presents the reader with over a dozen new poems that largely focus on violence against Black bodies in the United States. Taking on many of the murders that have made their way through our 21st-century news cycle, Clarke is dedicated to the powerful gesture of naming. The poem “Signs of the Times” repurposes the couplet and triplet forms to do so:

       GEORGE FLOYD’S LIFE
       M-A-T-T-E-R-E-D

              Defund the POLICE Defend
              BLACK
                 PEOPLE

       QUEERS
       Against
       RACISM

              BLACK LIVES
              MATTER

       SAY HER NAME:
       BREONNA TAYLOR
       SANDRA BLAND

       BREONNA TAYLOR
       SANDRA BLAND:
       SAY HER NAME

              GEORGE FLOYD * TAMIR RICE * MICHAEL BROWN *
              ERIC GARNER * BREONNA TAYLOR * PHILANDO
              CASTILE * TRAYVON

              BLACK FUTURES
              MATTER

              P ! O ! W ! E ! R !
 

The choices made around moments of enjambment give new life to what can often feel like exhausted phrasing, and her use of dashes, exclamation points, and other uncommon punctuation forms a through line from the musicality of her previous works, the protest song ever-continuing. Of this poem, Clarke herself states in the preface that it reaffirms her “commitment to writing poetry that calls out the continuing peril of living as a black person in the United States—and anywhere else in the world.”

Following the electric and syntactically varied new poems are selections from Targets (2018), By My Precise Haircut (2016), The Days of Good Looks: The Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980–2005 (2006), Experimental Love (1993), Humid Pitch (1989), Living as a Lesbian, and Narratives: poems in the tradition of black women (1982). To move backward through Clarke’s dynamic works is to witness the ways in which injustice persists. Of course, more modern poems have more modern references: “President Obama takes to Twitter.” Or even titles: “Mandela: 12-5-2013.” But across these works, whether from 2018 or 1982, Clarke is engaged in a justified rage, an ongoing elegy for Black bodies. One can see how the works grow in length and eloquence, or maybe just in grief.

Engaging with Clarke’s works bound together in a single book, I was also deeply struck by the true sense of play she sustains when it comes to form. Some poems are conventionally free verse or do away with punctuation altogether, thrumming forward in an unstoppable rush:

i google-hunt that zapruder film on youtube enhanced with color and slow-mo and pant for the frames where jack thinking to smooth his hair back from his face instead surprised grips his hand over his forehead and the other over his throat as the first bullet enters and exits his neck and turning to jackie falls over on her shoulder as the second shot tears into that cool hyannis-bred brain

Others take on the epistolary: “DEAR FRIENDS: // I am trying to find out where my children are.”

Some make space for prose, some are singular tercets, and many are multipart: for instance, the poem “songs of longing” takes the reader through six swooning movements: i. rainbow at the Regal ’65, ii. South East (S.E.), iii. 2007, iv. ice man, v. falsetto, and vi. coda.

Clarke’s poems take place in prisons, on stages, in living rooms, on city streets. There’s a whole cast of characters present—Willie Kgositsile, NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, Sergeant J. L. Winters, Billie Holiday, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, James Dean, and more. And there’s an omnipresence of sex, which feels aligned with Clarke’s politics and the permeable ways in which she thinks about bodies, pleasure, and rights. From the poem “hard”: “Pack your rubber, latex, and leather, / and go on the make / I know we’ll hook up somewhere.” Or the poem “sexual preference”: “I’m a queer lesbian. / Please don’t go down on me yet.” I think of her writing as a thriving testament to what José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)—“the pleasure and pain of queerness are not a strict binary.”

For a collection so wide-reaching and varied, I did ache for a longer prologue or introduction. I could have imagined Claudia Rankine, adrienne maree brown, or any number of Black feminist scholars writing an opening chapter that would provide context and pay homage to the true expansiveness of the work, for it can be difficult to move through a book of an author’s collected works. It is the type of book that often sits on a shelf as an ode to the author’s particular pieces you love, but which becomes an unalive object, only occasionally rifled through. Yet—maybe that’s okay. Even if one does not sit and consume Clarke’s book front to back, I believe the brilliance of the work can be glimpsed from a chance encounter with a single poem. And I believe that flipping to one page renders not wanting to continue somewhat impossible.

In “songs of longing,” Clarke asks, her tone somewhat desperate, “who will sing passion to us? / who will sing passion?” Open this collection to any page. I believe, too, the answer is clear.

¤

Featured image: Gaston La Touche. Pardon in Brittany, 1896. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, Art Institute of Chicago (1933.1130). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed August 26, 2024.