“Offering Up One’s Lyric 'I'”: An Interview with Acie Clark about his Debut Collection SMALL TALK
Updated: 21 hours ago
Small Talk | Hub City Press | $16.95
At the end of every poem in Acie Clark’s Small Talk, there is an open door with warm, amber light spilling across the threshold, welcoming us to the next poem. Clark’s poems emit such patience and love even, or especially, in their critiques, that reading the collection feels like small catching up with an old friend. Accept the invitation through the open door and let your mug be refilled, because as the titular poems suggest, the coffee is good here.
William Brown: To get us started, I want to congratulate you on being the winner of the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize. Do you consider yourself a Southern poet, or are you a poet from the South? I was curious as to how you might distinguish between the two.
Acie Clark: You know, it's so funny. When I knew the book was done, I really, really wanted it to be published with a Southern press. That felt really important to me. I've only lived in one other place other than the South, and that's Massachusetts. I knew that this book needed to come from the South and needed to be thought of as a Southern book. That felt inherent to the project of what I was trying to do.
I wholeheartedly identify as a Southern writer, that's always been the lineage that I'm coming from, and I think also a writer from the South. Whenever I've been somewhere else, I've never felt more southern. But also, because of the ways in which I think, especially as a queer person, as a trans person, people assume the South is an inhospitable place, especially people who are not from here. That has been something I've been thinking about since I started thinking about myself as a writer, which I would say started kind of in my early 20s, that people elsewhere would say, “Aren't you so glad to not be where you're from?” I just remember always being so offended by that. Now I've been able to take a deep breath and think, “There's a misunderstanding here, clearly.”
As an educator based in the South, it's something I've thought even more about for a lot of my students. When they think about where the most exciting work is happening, they're not thinking of Arkansas, they're not thinking of the South. They've inherited a coastal elitism or they are thinking only of Chicago or New York or LA, like that's where writers live. Because of that, it's been really beautiful to get to say, “No, let's change the syllabus and let's talk about writers who are from Arkansas. Let's talk about Southern writers. Let's talk about rural writers.” And it's interesting even being in a place like Conway, Arkansas. My friends in Little Rock are like, “You live in a small town,” and I think Conway's big. My students come here and say that this is the largest city they’ve lived in. We have a Target.
I've been thinking a lot about how Southern doesn't equal rural. That suburban and rural, especially in the South, can have this blurred border of when one becomes the other. I guess I'm not sure how I relate to winning the New Southern Voices Prize. I just felt so sure that I wanted the book to be with a Southern press and to win this prize for this book really was a beautiful gift and blessing to receive, and it felt like such a celebration of the work that I feel like I've been doing, that in some ways I feel like I've had the fight to say that writing really quiet poems about walking in the woods is important.
WB: Correct me if I’m wrong, I believe you did your MFA at Alabama. Even in respect to that, Tuscaloosa is a Southern city, but so is Atlanta, and those are very different types of Southern cities albeit still both unequivocally Southern. There's something about being in Atlanta that is not Chicago or Baltimore or New York. You already kind of alluded to this, but I’m wondering for you specifically, what is southern? What is rural to you? Are there any marquee indicators of being a Southern poet? And connected to that, you spoke about how the South has this reputation at times for simply being a prejudiced, backwater place, and in Small Talk are poems such as “Let's Stay Gay in Alabama.” What sort of traditions, both Southern and poetically, are you trying to maintain and dismantle?
AC: Oh, that's a beautiful question. I think one mark that I notice is an attention to land. I think even when poets aren't necessarily eco poets or nature poets, the setting is different. My partner lives in New York and we'll talk about how different our days are. For her, what the weather is doing doesn't necessarily impact what she may or may not do with her day. It completely changes what I may do or not do with my day. Driving to Little Rock is a 30-minute drive on the highway. If there's a tornado warning, I'm not doing it.
I think especially to be in a place where there are large swaths of land that are not owned, or they are owned by the government potentially, but when there are swaths of lands that are either original forests or even reclaimed forests, we have a different kind of conversation with what kinds of trees are here, what kind of birds are here, to live in a place where birds are passing through. It's been really important for me to learn who my neighbors are in that way. And that was a shift even going from Alabama to passing over Mississippi and ending up in Arkansas, that the trees are different. The seasons are a little bit different in terms of what's planted. That kind of temporality or that kind of shift has been an interesting shift to understand.
I really feel mentored by Southern poets who are deeply engaged with a conversation with lands and also deeply engaged with the history of this land, not only the indigenous peoples, but reckoning with like the South's history, reckoning with personal narratives, reckoning with the kind of co-opting of the Southern narrative by politicians. Pride Month is Family Month here in Arkansas. There’s this kind of investment that I think our state governments have in projecting this idea of the South as very conservative, and that is also something that I'm interested in pushing back against and questioning, especially because I see so much incredible organizing happening and so many people who are pushing back and trying to advocate for a different South. I think that's where also being a person, being a writer, getting to be a witness to that, getting to be somebody who is contributing to a different story that can be told about the South, that feels really imperative to me. And I think it's something that Southern people, Southern writers, claim and we’re thinking about. It’s like, how do we want to tell this story? How do we want to tell the story of what's happening right now? Especially to an audience that's maybe not from here and doesn't necessarily understand or think to ask us, that is something I think about quite often.
WB: I noticed you were talking about birds and trees and how you reference them as neighbors, which also happens in the collection. The speaker references how the mother used to refer to the trees as neighbors. In addition, you mentioned audience, and I think about how as poets we don't necessarily have the largest platform from which to speak. Do you have a particular audience in mind? And related to that, what impact do you genuinely think that poetry can have? I especially wonder because poetry isn’t something where there’s a one-to-one transfer in terms of writing a poem and suddenly a policy gets enacted. Who do you think your audience is and what impact do you think poetry writ large can have?
AC: Oh man. I think I know my answer to the second part a bit more clearly immediately. One of my favorite essays ever, written by Martín Espada, was a part of a series of essays that were all called “Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?” They asked a few different people to respond, and the long and short of pretty much every essay was, “No, not necessarily.” Can poetry console? Sure. Can poetry offer us a place to grieve? Of course. Can poetry change someone's mind? I think so. Can poetry offer us a hand of company and togetherness? Can a poem change your life? I think so. Can poetry change policy? No. Poetry cannot make anything not have happened, but it can speak about what has happened, and I think about that as being profoundly powerful. I think for me, what poetry can do is also offer us different ways to think or different ways to feel.
A writer who's been extremely formative for me in this was Merwin. That’s when I started thinking about punctuation differently, and Lucille Clifton definitely feels like another really important influence on this. There are certain poems where I start wondering about what changes when you let thoughts combine, when you're not necessarily like, “Here's the end of this thought and now here's this thought.” There are poetic techniques like enjambment, but what really happens hierarchically in terms of thought when there's no separation from one clause to another clause and we're combining these thoughts. To me, that's what it means to think poetically, and to be able to think with poems is such a beautiful opportunity to reframe how we think about reality. Poetry gives us the space where things can be surreal, they can be sort of speculative. In a poem, I can be talking about my child self, then suddenly talking as my child self, then talking to my child self or in consort with.
In regards to audience, at first I was just writing poems. I didn't really think of myself as writing a book until pretty late in the game of working on the collection. I figured I was working towards a book that was aspirational, but I wasn't necessarily thinking I was writing this project that wants to think about these things or with these people or towards this direction. Because of that, different poems have different audiences, and a lot of the time that audience was one person. I would think, “What would I have to say to one beloved or one person who I can't speak to or who's no longer here?” My greatest dream as a poet is to have a poem where someone reads it and they think, “I want to send this to my mom. I want to send this to my best friend. I want to send this to my boo.” That is my dream, to have a poem that you read and you think, “Oh, I felt that. I want to be able to hand that to someone else.” I love writers who are kind of willing to offer up their “I” as something we can share, so I think my audience is at heart, maybe, other queer and trans Southerners. That's who I think my work is here to serve.
WB: I love that idea of offering up one’s “I” as someone we can share as something lyric poetry can do. There was a moment when I was reading “Seven Swans” where you write, “I'm not here to save the child that I was, but I feed her grapes,” and I remember being so struck by that one sentence because even as a cishet person, that sort of reckoning and being kind to a past self really stuck with me. The idea that I can’t go back and save a younger version of myself from everything going on, but I can go back and feed him grapes. It reminds me of a quote I came across years by Galway Kinnell where he says that the secret poem of every good poem might be “Tenderness.”
AC: Oh, I love that quote.
WB: I felt that sensation so frequently while reading Small Talk, that this is a collection in which the speaker is so polite, respectful, and critical. For me, that's such a valuable thing—to be able to criticize something through love, as though one is saying, “I'm going to show you why this was hurtful in a way that you know this is coming from a place of love,” and that can be so difficult to do. How much of that comes through as conscious thought when you’re writing? Do you still write vitriolic or spiteful poems and they just don't get into the book? And returning to audience, when you're trying to reach other trans or queer Southern people, do you ever feel like a responsibility as maybe even a spokesperson for certain communities that make you tread differently?
AC: That’s amazing, thank you so much. That sentiment of loving critique is very beautiful to hear reflected back. You know, there are first drafts of these poems. I think part of the magic of a poem is that I can achieve grace with enough time and enough patience and enough meditation, enough drafts. There are poems in which the earlier version was angry and hurt and scared, and for the final poem, all of that's still in there, but through writing the poem, I could say really what was at the heart of it. Something that felt really important to me working on this collection was that there are other people I'm talking about and whose information and business and stories I'm working with. Both of my mom's parents went through really severe dementia in the last few years of their life, and I was watching that happen and thinking that I have to talk about this, I think it's important to talk about this, but also how do I talk about this in such a way that is honoring and respectful. And, there were moments that were funny. There were things that were beautiful and interesting, but how do you talk about that in such a way that honors the truth of the experience, honors their privacy and also honors my story that is mine to tell. Something I thought a lot about while writing was this idea that a poem is a place where I'm talking about this one thing I have to say, and if I could possibly say it to the person from a place of complete vulnerability and truth and the privacy of address in the poem, what would I really say? In some ways poetry gave me a way to say it or a way to explain it to myself.
For a long time, I have felt a little bit like the palatable trans person in various professional situations. I have been the person that faculty members have come to with questions such as, “What do I do about pronouns,” and I will try to talk to them about it in a way that hopefully allows them to have this conversation with this other person with all the information and it will not be solely that person's duty to educate or to do the emotional labor. I am generally willing to do that work with people, but I also completely understand why other people are not. I have moved through talking about gender, talking about queerness with friends and parents. I do think there is room for patience and tenderness with people who don't understand, but again, I don't think that's everyone's journey. For me, when I feel like I can do it, it feels important to do it. But there are times that I'm not willing to talk to somebody who doesn't respect my existence. I love that I've had people come up to me after readings and said things like, “I hope my kids could forgive me the way you have talked about forgiving your mom.” You know, hearing something like that was really astounding and made the work of the poems feel worth it. I guess that's also why I hope somebody might read a poem and think, “I want to send this to my mom,” because it makes me think that maybe this will help things, help us understand each other. Poetry is a place where that contact happen, a place where I can say something to my father or a person who is behaving in a hateful way, and I also don't have to receive the response. There's protection in the poetic address and that's an important part of the exchange as well, that I can show up very vulnerably in part because I'm alone in a room in a poem.
WB: One thing I admire about your collection is that your poems can be political without giving the impression of standing at a lectern and preaching to people or that I’m stuck at the town hall meeting listening to local politicians shout at each other, because so often it feels that one is either preaching to the choir or screaming into the void. It's tough to navigate that balance of a conversation so that it is neither placative nor dismissive.
Earlier you talked about punctuation and Merwin, and there are some poems of yours that forego punctuation. There are also those that have punctuation, but maybe the last line is not punctuated or ends with a colon, such as “Turnip Shanty.” It feels like a beckoning where the poem leaves the door open for discourse, and that feels lovely as a reader, too. That II don’t feel as though I’m being told how I should think, but the speaker’s perspective is still clear. I’m not a formalist, though I do love form, particularly how great free verse takes full advantage of being free verse. This feels like a very formal collection, though not in the traditional sense in terms of coming across pantoums or villanelles. It simply feels as though such close attention is paid to the form, so I was wondering what your relationship to form is and how you navigate that as a poet.
AC: I'm beyond touched that you noticed my colon. I could retire completely. I would say my relationship with form is wary and sort of nervous. I've never written a successful sestina. I've never written a successful pantoum or a successful Villanelle. Every time I've ever tried, it has failed, but I have been glad for the failure. I love that Joy Priest introduced me to Gregory Orr's “Four Temperaments.”
WB: What a great essay.
AC: Oh my gosh, yes. I don’t know if you’ve seen Hunter x Hunter.
WB: I have!
AC: Wonderful, because my dream way to teach “Four Temperaments” is along with that. Sometimes I’ll ask my students if they’ve seen Hunter x Hunter, because if you’re an enhancer in Hunter x Hunter, it’s going to be easy for you to learn certain tactics but difficult to learn other ones. For me, when I started writing, I was listening to music. I remember listening to “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers thinking, “I'm having a feeling I have absolutely no context for. How do they do that?” I remember being maybe eight or nine and trying to rewrite the song and thinking, “So what is it? Is it the music? Is it the lyrics? How are these things in conversation?” I think a little bit less about sound now, but I can still hear it. I started in spoken word, so even if I very rarely rhyme anymore, it's still a part of how I'm thinking about momentum. Music is something that I know is there, or it feels like a skill I can tap on, but story and imagination have always really been at the forefront for me. Structure feels very over my head, so for me in terms of form a lot of what I think about is syntax more than the shape or the appearance of a poem. Almost every poem started as a sonnet and then became something else, because for a year of my life poems were almost like Sudoku, it was as though I just had to get to fourteen lines.
Someone I look to with such admiration and love is Carl Phillips. I love even just looking at what the poems look like in one of his collections. What that man can do with a sentence is just exhilarating. For me, a lot of it comes down to thinking about what the poem wants to do. Robert Haas has a line in his little book on form says something like, “Form is the way a poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making.” I’m just trying to make sure it looks that way. Earlier this summer, I took a workshop with Marie Howe and felt so humbled being in a room with her, not just because she's brilliant and wonderful and that her work has been a guide and a teacher to me, I just felt so aware of how much knowledge, perspective, practice, and skill lives in her brain. I've been writing poetry for maybe fifteen years, and I still feel brand new to it all the time.
WB: You have a few poems in the collection that share titles in various ways. There’s multiple poems titled “Small Talk,” but also the “Temperance” poems that are sometimes for different named people. I'm curious about how those come to be and how you decide which one comes where in the book as well, because in the penultimate “Small Talk” poem, we get about halfway through and the speaker's makes a remark about the coffee being good, while the first couple open up with that sort of statement. It feels very natural for that specific “Small Talk” to come later in the collection when the statement about coffee was already established as an idea, but for all I know that could have been the first one that was written.
AC: For the “Small Talk” poems, the first four were some of the earliest poems written for the collection. I remember I'd been kind of out of practice, hadn't really been writing, was in my last year of my MFA, was feeling really stressed, was not sure what was going to happen next, it was just kind of a messy time. Because of that, I said to myself, “Okay, every day I'm going to write a poem this whole week, and every poem will start with something about the morning, something about the coffee.” That was the form, and I told myself that I simply had to get to the end. The fourth “Small Talk,” is maybe the closest thing to a formal poem. I really had to think about because I went back and forth about whether to note this in the book and I will note it here. The poem is actually in the exact same, well, I tried to model it on the cadence of “Tom's Diner” by Suzanne Vega, so that poem kind of wrote itself onto a form.
Originally, Small Talk was a chapbook. Then, it became a couple different chat books. Eventually I thought, “Okay, maybe this wants to be longer,” and I printed all the papers and put them on my wall. I'd take them all down, shuffle them, and then I'd put them again. I would listen to music that didn’t have lyrics during this process, even just frequencies, and ask myself, “What is happening in these poems?” When I was putting together the collection at a time when I was forming some really deep new friendships. Being at the Fine Arts Work Center was really strange and cool because you get there and you're in this small beach town and you have like 20 people, and these are the people you now know. I say that it's like being on a dating show or a reality TV show, because here are the people you know for the next seven months. It creates beautiful, adult friendships that feel more like when you're a kid at camp. Because of that, something I was thinking about was how would I tell this story the first time?
Thinking about “First Fiction,” which is one of the first poems, it's like kind of a “haha” poem. There's a way to read it that's sad and there's a way to read it that's funny. I had to reintroduce myself to my grandfather, he didn't recognize me. And later in the collection, there are poems that are about my grandfather dealing with memory loss but I was also transitioning. These two things were functioning at the same time and we were able to have some really beautiful connection about them, but they were also really sad and really funny and really strange. I started thinking about how to deepen some of those threads as we went along almost in a way that a narrative or a creative nonfiction piece might. I would ask myself, “What do you need to know for this to actually have an arc?” I recognized that if I don't have the poems earlier on that were about a more difficult moment in a relationship, it's hard to have the poems later on that are really about like forgiveness and coming into a new relationship.
Something I thought about a lot is structuring. My question was sort of like, “How would you structure a book like a conversation,” and that for me is something cyclical and nonlinear. There are digressions. By the end of the book, there are like these love poems that start popping up because that was now part of what was happening in my life. By the fourth section, just like how the “Small Talk” poem sort of lets go of its form, the book also lets go a little. It's like, “Okay, here's what's else is going on.” But then the last “Small Talk” poem, the one on the last page, was actually one of the last poems I wrote. I went back and forth on a lot of titles before deciding to make it sort of the real final “Small Talk.” I was thinking about what you say at the end of a conversation with someone, how you say goodbye. Our goodbye often looks like, “What are you doing with the rest of your day,” or “Drive safe,” and that poem to me felt like my kind of, “Drive safe. I love you. See you next time.”
WB: There’s a poet I know who was getting her PhD while I was getting my MA, and I remember at an end of semester reading for a workshop that we were both in, she stated, “Instead of writing as though no one will read it, write it as though everyone will read it.” Interestingly, I heard her speak to this same idea more recently, and now she’s recommending her students to write as though no one will read it, so she’s gone back on her own advice. We kind of spoke to this a little bit already when you were discussing how other people can be implicated in your work, but I was wondering how you feel about that idea of everyone versus no one reading it.
AC: Oh, man. Yeah, that's a big question. I immediately flashed to a friend of mine who was gifted a shirt that says, “Careful or you'll end up in my novel.” Something I feel generally pretty strongly about is how the act of naming is so powerful in a poem, to name someone and profess that this is about a person. But also the capaciousness of the poetic “you,” and how sometimes that will seem like the poem is only about one “you” when really it’s about multiple people, a “you” can be a “y'all” very easily. But something I definitely am conscientious of is naming in a poem.
I once believed I wouldn't want to publish a poem if I wouldn't send it to that person, but I've gone back on that a little bit. I believe that we can talk in poetry through death. I do feel as a writer and educator, I think a lot about what it means to talk about one's personal life in your work and to know that that work is going to be potentially read by people who will be your students. That is something I think about frequently, and I would say that is maybe one of my greatest anxieties as a writer. I will be writing something and think, “Oh my God, what if my student read this,” and that is a voice I have to tune out. I have to tell myself that perhaps the greatest gift I can give to my students is to lead by example and say your work must be yours. You have to publish what you stand by and what you believe is true, and you can lean into that. Poetry is a place for speaking what is often not comfortably addressed or spoken about. I feel very grateful to my family who have been supportive of this book and are supportive of my work, but I also recognize that we all have our private and personal experiences of reading work that is about or implicates us. I think there's room for all of it, but I recognize the trickiness or the slipperiness of it as well.
Listen to Acie read poems from Small Talk here.
Acie Clark is a multi-genre writer from Florida and Georgia. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama where he worked for Black Warrior Review and as a farmhand at Snows Bend Farm. He has taught at the University of Central Arkansas, Interlochen, the Provincetown Public Library, and as a mentor with SUNHOUSE. His work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center and the Collegeville Institute, selected for Best New Poets 2025, and anthologized in Divinity in the Margins, I Witness, and The Florida Anthology. His debut collection, Small Talk, was selected by Derrick Austin for the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize from Hub City Press.
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