“By a poem’s held beauty, our held terrors become bearable.”
–Jane Hirshfield
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“Art is where what we survive survives”
–Kaveh Akbar
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Between the bookends of Trump’s two presidential terms, I finished my second poetry book. Nine years ago, I started Scorched Earth in response to the mayhem and megalomania of Trump, and now, in my hands, I hold the finished copy with the title spot-glossed in vivid pink—a rule-breaking book I needed to write to claim transgressive joy, to occupy all the space without apology, to lend a hand me stay tender against tyranny. To look back at the ruins and remain alive—defiantly? Is there a way to still feel possible against all this sheer impossibility?
“The very hopelessness of the shattered self is its hope,” writes Gregory Orr. He continues, “because this devasted self-possess a radical freedom…[the] old self cannot survive the suffering it has experienced without succumbing. Thus necessity permits and compels imagination to create a new self, a self-strong enough or different enough to move through and beyond the trauma and its aftermath.”
This idea of a “new self” created from creativity as a means to make it through implacable defeat resonates with me, because I had to construct a bolder, more courageous persona in my poems—a power I couldn’t normally possess in real life but could harness on the page to address the fear I felt in 2016, a fear that has now boomeranged back nine years later.
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When tracing my literary ancestry, I come from that chunk of charcoal, from that strain of self-reliance and persistence from the middle passage till now.
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I am trying not to drown in the deluge of depressing news as I clutch my second book—clutching that which I could not name before, but then gave language to as a dam broke inside of me, bursting with recent language from this “new self” spilling out of me. This rupture allowed me to concertize the chaos into a book of poems that set me free, even if that freedom is felt for just the length of one of my long poems. Maybe that’s why I made them so damn long to begin with—because I just wanted to hold on to that feeling a little bit longer—that incendiary feeling of freedom.
When I think of what it means to be “free” and write poetry in this country, of course, my mind traces back to the first African American poet, Phillis Wheatley Peters. She was named after the slave ship that brought her over the Atlantic to Boston to be sold to John and Susanna Wheatley as a youthful, diseased child, naked body on the auction block. When they found Peters writing with a piece of coal on the wall of their home, instead of punishing her, they fostered her education, encouraging her to read and write poetry. When tracing my literary ancestry, I come from that chunk of charcoal, from that strain of self-reliance and persistence from the middle passage till now. “It’s such a futuristic idea,” Terrance Hayes said, “a world in which the descendants of slaves become poets.”
I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s problematic remarks about Peters, mentioned in the Notes on the State of Virginia, where he states:
“Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. — Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar estrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”
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The problematic operate of the word “estrum” is striking to me as it reduces Black people to lusty animals in heat, ready to mate and conceive. Jefferson argues that Black people write from their strange sexual enthusiasm, which dazzles the senses—the base human registers, but not the imagination, referring to innovative intelligence. Black female slaves were often classified as lascivious beasts and hyper-sexual “Jezebels” by nature, a vicious stereotype Black women still push back and reckon with today. In actuality, it was white male masters who constantly exercised their deviant sexual desires by repeatedly raping slaves to produce more “property” for their plantations. Abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass stated that the “slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master.”
The value of our worth is in what we could produce from our bodies, not our minds, which for a white, slave owning president meant more property, not poetry. It’s clear, to me, that Jefferson only sees Phillis Wheatley as he sees all Black women during this time, as sexual conduits for more profit and personal pleasure, which makes sense when investigating his “relationship” with Sally Hemmings, his enslaved “concubine,” who bore him six children, which he recorded in his “Farm Book” (stares at camera). I put quotations over the word relationship and concubine, since scholars are still parsing and untangling what their actual agreement might have been.
However, certain facts reveal a stark narrative, she was only fourteen years senior when she arrived in Paris in 1787, while Jefferson was forty-four years senior. When she returns to Virginia, two years later, at sixteen, she is pregnant with his child. I will add that I think it’s worth noting that Hemmings negotiated “extraordinary privileges” for herself and emancipation for her mixed children. She, herself, was never legally freed.
When I think of Phillis Wheatley Peters, I think of how she manumitted herself from property to a freed Black poet, through the power of her art and savviness. She had a keen awareness of the law, specifically The Somerset v. Stewart Case in 1772, which ruled that enslaved people in Britain had a legal right to freedom and could not be forced back to the colonies. Her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (published in 1773), brought her back over the Atlantic, this time to England, with the lend a hand of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, who secured a British publisher for her (since she could not find one in the colonies). A reverse Middle Passage made possible by poetry. While abroad, Peters leveraged her freedom in England towards freedom back in America, by agreeing to go back to Boston with her master’s son, Nathanial Wheatley, in return for manumission papers, a copy of which she had made as a backup for insurance.
However, this time when she sailed back to America over the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean—the main thoroughfare of the transatlantic slave trade—she would be aboard a ship, without chains, as a free woman. A testament to her miraculous survival. I can’t lend a hand but speculate, imagining her starboard, leaning her elbows against the side of the ship as mist sprays her newly freed face. I wonder did she stare, scanning the watery waves for the imperceptible graves of her kin who either leapt or were thrown off before her?
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Her brief joy would wane when she arrived back to America. As it turns out, white patrons were more interested in Phillis Wheatley as a genius in bondage rather than a genius unfettered. In the final years of her life, she struggled with poverty, illness, obscurity (given her recent, married last name (“Peters”) and moving around to find work). She was indefatigable as a businesswoman, trying to procure subscriptions for her next volume of poems and correspondence. I often think of her proposed second book of poetry and letters, a book we do not have, a volume she advertised on the front page of the Boston Evening Post in 1779. Without crucial support, she was unable to secure a patron or a publisher for her second collection before her tragic death in 1784 at the age of thirty-one due to pneumonia and possible complications with the birth of her third child who also died that same year.
The whereabouts of her second book along with the location of her unmarked grave are unknown. Even her widowed husband, John Peters, petitioned in the newspaper a year after her death to “the person who borrowed a volume of manuscript poems… of Phillis Peters, formerly Phillis Wheatley, deceased, would very much oblige her husband…by returning it immediately, as the whole of her words are intended to be published.” I constantly think about the poems she wrote when she belonged to no one but herself. Her first book freed her, but unfortunately, we don’t have the second book she wrote when she was free.
Last November, I went to the Boston Tea Party Museum to visit a copy of her first book, which is on display in the tearoom. I didn’t realize until I visited the museum that her shipment of books from London, along with the fated British East India Company tea, was among the Dartmouth’s cargo, one of the infamous ships targeted and boarded by demonstrators taking part in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773.
I walked up to her book, encased in a glass box, opened to the title page and frontispiece, with an engraving by Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved Black artist from Boston, depicting Phillis Wheatley Peters in profile, writing, deep in thought, and looking up with a feather quill pen in her right hand as her left hand rests on her chin with one finger on her check. As if in prayer, I bent my head down, to get a closer look, as if I could get closer to her by proxy. I whispered, “thank you,” several times as I thought of my own journey as a Black poet in America with immense gratitude to her for being the first. Her legacy connected to mine as I leaned in closer, as if the petite, senior book would reveal itself or talk to me. I kept staring at her first book thinking about the eighteen notable, white men from Boston who attested to the authenticity of her authorship in the preface of the 1772 edition, including Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts.
Beaming with gratitude and awe, but bittersweet with ache as I remembered her missing second book, lost to history. I poured out the tea I was sipping, a miniature libation, a petite homage for and to my literary ancestor. “Thank you” I said again, a gesture of my heartfelt gratitude, thankful that I can validate my own work without the approval of distinguished white men. Thankful that I found what Peters unfortunately could not, the incredible support of my literary agent, editor, and press for my second book—a deep gratitude that I do not take for granted, a gratitude indebted to her—the first, Phillis Miracle—renamed by June Jordan, writing about “the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as ‘political’ or ‘topical’ or ‘sloganeering’ and ‘crude’ and ‘insignificant’ because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom.”
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Two hundred and forty-three years have passed since Thomas Jefferson wrote about Phillis Wheatley Peters, and yet, I wonder what has really changed in how white presidents view Black women’s work that they do not own or control. I can’t lend a hand but think of the harmful words Trump has used to describe Black women journalists. According to AP News, “In 2018, [the National Association of Black Journalists] condemned Trump for repeatedly using words such as “stupid,” “loser” and “nasty” to describe Black women journalists including several Black journalists such as Yamiche Alcindor of NBC News; Abby Phillip of CNN; and April Ryan of The Grio.” Recently, Trump celebrated the cancellation of Joy Reid—a prominent Black, political commentor—and her show, “The ReidOut,” on MSNBC, stating she was “one of the least talented people in television” and a “mentally obnoxious racist” that “should have been ‘canned’ long ago” on his alternative social media platform, Truth Social.
I do have hope from other Black writers that have lit lighthouses in the storm-filled darkness.
Furthermore, I was not surprised—but still deeply bothered—at his signature bullying behavior, when Trump, during the 2024 United States presidential election campaign, called the former vice-president, his presumptive opponent, Kamala Harris, a “D.E.I. candidate,” “dumb as a rock,” and outlandishly questioned her Blackness as opportunistic. And now, his “common sense” administration is attacking diversity daily, demolishing government agencies, erasing any mention or celebration of minorities and trans people in official documentation. Brittany Cooper, informed by the work of Jessica Marie Johnson, summarizes these racist rollbacks succinctly by stating, “It’s not ending D.E.I., or focusing on merit. It’s re-segregation.”
January already felt like a whole year drenched in fear, leaving my frayed nerves and reserves on edge as I struggle to engage with the daily dread dinging and popping up from the constant breaking news alerts like lightning strikes sparking through my devices. I don’t know what horrific threat will happen next in Trump’s second term Shock and Awe regime for America, but I do have hope from other Black writers that have lit lighthouses in the storm-filled darkness, showing me how to stay unthreatening and survive this political hellscape once again.
I continue to lean on the brilliant leftover featherlight still pulsating from James Baldwin’s words, writing a letter to his nephew over sixty years ago, and yet it feels as though he could be writing to us today: “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.” I absolutely prefer this necessary obligation of Baldwin’s last clause over Trump’s loaded and coded “M.A.G.A.” acronym as a political slogan to reckon and rethink America on the brink of annihilation. Baldwin centers love as a key factor for survival to his nephew, writing, “if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.” To make our home what our home must become, we must remember what it means, as Baldwin implores and repeats, “To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”
I don’t know what America will do next, but I have never looked to America to save me. Nevertheless, I do know what I am going to do next as I tend to my Black well-being amidst political burnout, because that is the insidious goal of this administration: to exhaust our bandwidth through violent inundation, to drain our batteries so our personal engines fail to crank, our attentions clicking with no ignition, eager for our fatigue to wear us down to complacency—too tired to organize, revolt, or pay attention, or metabolize our rage into protest.
Imani Perry discusses her newest book Black in Blues in a recent interview with BookPage, stating: “…creativity is a tool of survival. It is a response to the conditions of the world. It’s this constant response to not be completely defeated. But you have to confront the fears in the midst of it.” I will continue to confront in my work that which Trump and his ilk want citizens to forget or fictionalize about America’s truculent past and present. I will continue to remember Phillis Wheatley Peters and what her poems made possible for Black poets like me. I will keep returning to poetry because poetry, for me, is a means to my survival—off and on the page. And I will keep repeating the end of Rita Dove’s poem “Transit,” which states: “Let it be said / while in the midst of horror / we fed on beauty—and that, / my love, is what sustained us.”
I believe it is through my imagination where I can remain free and where no one can touch me. I believe it is through our collective imagination where we can remain free and where no one can touch us.
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Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark is available from Washington Square Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.
