“Screaming to Be Out”
Cheryl Clarke interviewed by Marci Blackman

Cheryl Clarke is one of the organizers since 2013 of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers in the Book Village of the Catskills. She is a poet, essayist, and author of six books of poetry, including Targets, her most recent work from Bushel Editions. In 2023, Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems will be published by Northeastern University Press. She is a Black lesbian feminist and her work has appeared in numerous publications over the past forty years. 

Dr. Cheryl Clarke is an icon. A pioneer and visionary whose storied career as a radical Black lesbian poet, essayist, scholar, educator, and activist continues to span more than four decades.

After self-publishing her first book of poetry in 1982, titled Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (republished and distributed by Kitchen Table Press in 1983), the prolific feminist and revolutionary writer has published four subsequent collections of poetry: Living as a Lesbian (1986, updated 2014), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), and the award-winning By My Precise Haircut (2016). Over the past forty years, Clarke has also published a collection of essays titled After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005); a volume of collected works titled The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005; a chapbook titled Targets (2018 and 2020); and numerous critical reviews and essays in too many anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers to count in this limited space, including Conditions (on which she also served as an editor), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Fiction to name just a few.

As a scholar and educator, the scope of Cheryl Clarke’s career is as breathtaking as her writings. After completing her undergraduate study at Howard University, she went on to earn her MA, MSW, and doctorate degrees at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she was an esteemed and celebrated administrator and faculty member who championed LGBTQ+ rights and programs on campus for forty-one years.

When I was first asked to conduct this interview—as much as I relished the opportunity—my first thought was, “How do you interview an icon, not to mention one of the writers whose work not only helped shape and affirm your younger self’s identity, but also inspired you as a writer, without fanning all over yourself?”

In the end, I managed to keep it together, and Cheryl Clarke and I had a wonderful conversation in which we discussed a number of topics, ranging from her upbringing to her coming out as lesbian, her writing, and much more.

Marci Blackman: In 1982, you self-published your first book poetry, Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women, which was then republished and distributed a year later by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the press cofounded by one of your fellow Combahee River Collective members, Barbara Smith. Five collections of poetry later, a sixth on the way, along with numerous critical essays and a career that spans more than four decades, when you first started writing, did you imagine the impact your work would have on so many Black LGBTQ+ lives?
Cheryl Clarke: No, no, no, no. [laughs] I didn’t. You know, I don’t even think I imagined lesbianism because I went to Catholic schools and was practically raised by nuns in terms of education.

MB: Right.
CC: I went from second grade to twelfth grade in Catholic schools. Okay. And they emphasized the humanities, and they had the worst math teachers in the world [laughs].

MB: [laughs]
CC: Because, you know, women weren’t afforded the opportunity to really study and master math.

MB: No. In fact, women were intentionally steered away from math and science, right?
CC: Yes. Right. So instead, they emphasized the humanities and reading and literature and writing, the mechanics of it. So, no, but I had a desire to publish. I don’t know why, but I always said to myself I wanted to publish. So that’s what I guess I worked toward.

MB: So, did you start writing poetry in high school, with the nuns [laughs] or did that come later, when you were at Howard?
CC: I got into poetry during the Black Arts period, when I was in college at Howard. Not that I took any poetry courses, of course. I did major in English there and had some halfway decent teachers. I went to readings and saw the impact readings had on people so I, you know, worked toward that; I tried to do the public readings. Then when I went to graduate school at Rutgers. I continued to write poetry and tried to find readings around New Brunswick, which became much easier when I came out in 1973 and started going into New York City—The Village—and hanging out with New York lesbians. There were many more opportunities to read and to go to readings. So that was the route I took for about four or five years, doing readings. Then a friend of mine said to me, he said, “Really, really, honey, you need a book.” And I had never thought of that before, and I said, “Oh, you may be right.”

MB: [laughs] I’m so glad he said something!
CC: This would have been in the early eighties. And, you know, also in 1981, I became involved with Conditions.

MB: Yes, I know.
CC: Yeah. And I did that for nine years, until ninety or ninety-one. So, you know, I published quite a few poems in Conditions issues, and we only came out once a year. You know, it was too difficult to come out more than that.

MB: Sure.
CC: You know, for the amount of people we had working on it.

MB: Right. And, I imagine, the resources.
CC: Oh, God! And the resources! Thank goodness for New York State Council on the Arts! They funded us throughout. So, as I say, it became much easier to get the poetry out when I started hanging out with lesbians.

MB: [smiles] Got it, in New York in the seventies and eighties. So that would have put you in dialogue so to speak with some of our other foremothers—Audre Lorde, June Jordan…In my fantasy, you all were hanging out together being brilliant all the time. Were they part of your crew?
CC: [laughs] I wouldn’t say they were part of my crew, but I certainly knew them. You know, I knew Audre. Had invited her to Rutgers a couple of times. And I knew June. Yeah.

MB: I used to carry you and June Jordan around in my pocket, when I was living in the Bay. Your books, I mean…
CC: Oh, that’s lovely to hear. You know, I had invited June to Rutgers a couple of times as well. I did cultural programming there for a long time. So, you know, I got a chance to meet some of the luminaries. James Baldwin. We invited him one year. He was such a lovely person.

MB: You know, I’ve heard that! I just returned from the Baldwin conference in France. The last day there was a panel of artists and writers who knew him personally as well; all reflected on what a lovely person he was.
CC: I always loved Another Country. That’s still my favorite novel in the world.

MB: That’s my favorite novel of Baldwin’s as well.

MB: So, you came out in 1973, at the age of twenty-six. Can you talk about what led up to the realization that you were a lesbian? I know you have said before that it was a “conscious choice,” but was there any particular impetus?CC: I attended a gay conference at Rutgers. You know Rutgers is the home of the first or second gay student organization.

MB: I did not know that!
CC: The Student Homophile League. It was founded by a Black gay man who died around 1985 of AIDS. Out in the Bay Area. His name was Lionel Cuffie, and we became friends. He gave me a book. What was the name of that book? It’ll come to me in a minute. It was called Homosexuality and Something, written by an Australian man. His name will come to me. The book will come to me, too. But in this book, this writer did a comparative study of the gay liberation movement. He compared it to the Black Liberation Movement, the women’s liberation movement. I think just those two movements, and he talked about the connections between the three. You know, the issue of pride, gay pride, Black pride, the issue of controlling your media. Of self-determination and self-definition. So, I read that, and I said “this is interesting” because he drew a relationship to the Black Liberation Movement. So anyway, I went to this conference, a gay academic union conference, I think, and there was a workshop on homosexuality and race. And in that that workshop, there were four or five Black lesbians making a presentation. They were from this organization in New York called Salsa Soul Sisters, which is now called Ancestral African Lesbians. You know that group?

MB: I do. I didn’t realize that’s how they started.
CC: So that is the point at which I decided I wanted to come out, that I wanted to be a lesbian. Because I said, oh, Black lesbians, you can be a Black lesbian!

MB: [laughs]
CC: I didn’t know anybody gay at Howard. I’m sure there were, but they weren’t out. Well, there were in the theater department, but that was a whole different world.

MB: It was hard to be out back then, especially in Black spaces, right?
CC: Yes, very, very hard.

MB: I want to turn back to writing and publishing. You’ve talked about the great Gwendolyn Brooks as a mentor. In a featured blog post for the Poetry Foundation in 2017, titled “Gwendolyn Brooks at 100,” you wrote that while Brooks had “been writing all her life,” you had “put many things before it.” I’m curious, what were some of the “things” you put ahead of writing, given that you “always knew” you wanted to write and publish?
CC: I think I had always wanted to publish, but I didn’t do the work you have to do to get to the point of publishing. I spent a lot of time putting my job before it because my job was very demanding. Self-publishing my first book, which was distributed by Kitchen Table Press, and once I started working on Conditions, I was seeing from the ground up how books were made. So, I came to really understand the ins and outs of publishing. Proofreading copy, all of those things, dealing with printers. I began to see what it took.

MB: That seemed to be the road to publishing for so many Black women writers at that time. I’m thinking of Toni Morrison working as an editor at Random House so long before publishing The Bluest Eye.
CC: She was thirty-eight.

MB: I know! I want to switch gears a little bit and talk more specifically about your work. One of the first poems I read of yours was “Of Althea and Flaxie,” from your first collection, Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women, and it blew my mind. Here was this sexy-as-all-get-out, fully fleshed Black butch/femme couple with mad swag loving and living, complete and full lives out in the open in 1943, not on the fringe, but right in the center alongside everyone else. I wonder if you can talk about this centering of the margins that seems to be a recurrent them in your work?
CC: Yes, well, like a lot of lesbians, lesbian writers, [laughs] I learned a lot from the Black Arts Movement, and I guess I would say the tradition of Black literature. Which…I think was always screaming to be out, you know, to be recognized. The culture to be recognized, for us to recognize the culture, which is what the Black Arts and the Black Power Movement did during that time. Not only do we have people like LeRoi Jones* and Sonia Sanchez and Don Lee** (I know they have different names now. Not Sonia, but those two), but they also said, look at the Harlem Renaissance. Look at Claude McKay (they didn’t talk about no women). Look at Langston Hughes. Look at that history of Black publishing, which is something Black people struggled to do—to gain control of our literary production. So, I guess I have to say I learned from that. The historical Black literature. And I guess this is where I’ll say Baldwin and Alice Walker. I have to say, Alice Walker really influenced my first book, Narratives. As a Black lesbian, I wanted to give voice. You know, you say moving people at the fringes to the center, but I say: Let’s join them at the fringes. That’s what this friend of mine said once. He said: “We can all come to the center, or we can join each other at the fringes.”

MB: I love that. Let’s all meet up at the margins; it’s so much more interesting out here anyway. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the importance of controlling your own story as it relates to giving voice?
CC: Well, it’s crucial! It’s crucial for us to get into the criticism. Because I think it’s very important for us to be able to not only control our literary production or writing, but to be able to talk about what’s out there and to bring that production to the attention of our audiences. Because, well, people lie about you. I’m talking about people who aren’t Black or who aren’t gay or lesbian or LGBT. They lie about you.

MB: They sure do!

MB: I have always been struck by the humor in your poetry, humor embedded into scenes of rage and pain, as in “no more encomiums”—This anger so visceral I could shit it/and still be constipated. The darkness of the irony in “48 Years,” the King piece. My mother used to say we laugh to keep from crying. I imagine many Black mothers say this. Can you talk about the humor in your work and where it comes from?
CC: Well, yes. I have to go back to my upbringing because my mother, my aunt (her sister), and my father—we grew up with those three people—they were always very funny. My mother laughed at everybody, as well as herself. She was very satirical, you know. Now, my aunt was really funny, too, but she wasn’t satirical. She used humor in a rather kind way. My mother was not kind with her humor, and my father was very dry with his. And then his brother, my uncle, was also very dry and funny. So, it was growing up around them, and, you know, just laughing all the time. Well, a lot of the time.

MB: Well, it shows in your poetry, and it’s wonderful because it presents Black and Black queer lives as human, rather than a statement of some kind.
CC: Thank you.

MB: As I was preparing for this conversation, rereading your work and experiencing the pieces that I hadn’t read yet, not only did the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, but Clarence Thomas actually threatened to roll back LGBTQ+ rights as the court’s next act. You came out in the same year Roe legalized abortion across the land and started writing and publishing in the years right after, when everything changed. Well, now everything has changed again. What does that feel like to have that kind of trajectory? How do you think this new political landscape might impact your writing now?
CC: You know, I was looking at all these laws, the trigger laws that are supposed to come down now in certain states. The gun laws and the January 6 stuff. It’s very scary. All this shit is very scary! So, I think I find some congruence in those three things. And, yes, I think I must write about that climate. The climate we now live in. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be a whole new book of poems.

MB: I hope so! Your work has never lost its relevancy, but in light of the actions of this court, as I was preparing for the interview, I felt a renewed urgency in the Living as a Lesbian poems, particularly “living as a lesbian underground: a futuristic fantasy.” Although it doesn’t seem so much a fantasy now. I mean, the humor and sarcasm aside, we have pretty much arrived in that future, or are on our way at least if the court has its way. LGBTQ+ folks jailed or hiding in basements/attics/alleyways/and tents. It seems the court would like to see that reality.
CC: Yeah, they would. They would. And, you know. You’ve given me an idea. Talking to you has given me an idea of where to start on this.

MB: That’s awesome!
CC: You know, it should be another “living as a lesbian” poem. You know, I have a lot of them. [laughs]

MB: [laughs as well] Yes, you do!
CC: [still laughing] Yes.

Marci Blackman is the author of three novels. Blackman’s first novel, Po Man’s Child, received the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award for Best Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Best New Fiction. Tradition, Blackman’s second novel was noted in Band of Thebes as one of the Best LGBT Books of the year. Their third novel, Elephant, is forthcoming. Blackman lives and writes in Brooklyn. For more information on Blackman, please go to www.marciblackman.com.

*Amiri Baraka **Haki R. Madhubuti