Easily one of my favorite literary analyses to date. Here is a link to the beautiful sestina, written by Tiana Clark. While the context of this sestina is focused on Black lives and living as an African American in this country, one of the things I love most of literature, is that everyone can find immense beauty, shared sorrow, and growing passion within its walls. If you do not read the following analysis, please at least read Clark’s work. You will not regret it.
Literary Analysis of “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy”
As the title of this poem implies, “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” by Tiana Clark uses the breaking of the standardized template of a sestina to emulate how broken she is over the pain Black people face in the United States. While the standard sestina is a poem comprised of six stanzas of six lines, ending with a three-line envoi, we will take a look at how Clark’s changes to the structural composition of the poem reinstates the context of her work. “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” focuses on Clark’s desire to focus on “Black pleasure” rather than “Black pain” in her life, without discounting the existence of that pain.
This sestina is comprised of eleven stanzas with a varying number of lines per, ranging from only four and to as many as seven. By examining the breaking of the ‘rules’ of the format, she is not only creating space to express her conflicting focus, but the reader could also glean Clark’s attempt to instill the ‘broken-ness’ of the history of African Americans in America. In the last line of the second stanza, the only one with seven lines, Clark writes “this stanza broke the rules. So what (?),” asking the reader to reflect on whether the substance on which she wishes to discuss is ‘enough’ to override the rules of a sestina (Clark, line 13). This is one example of several times through this work in which Clark directly remarks on the ‘breaking’ of the sestina’s format, but, so what?
Within the first stanza, Clark states that she has “been trying to write a poem about buried Black bodies” but that all she wants to write about is “Black joy and my pleasure and Black love and Black lives that don’t end with viral death,” implying that there is a need to celebrate “Black joy” and “Black love” and not only the deaths of Black people in our society (Clark, lines 3-5). While the acknowledgement of injustice and murder of African Americans is important to talk about, Clark points out that there is more to Black lives than just their deaths. That society must also acknowledge the beauty that comes from a group of people that has been forced to overcome so much, and still fighting to do so, in and out of that injustice. That it is important to find celebration of accomplishments and happiness in their lives and that society will remain unbalanced until then.
This sense of unbalance in Clark’s life is also seen within the juxtaposition between discussing the beauty of the plants around her with the discussion of death. In the last line of stanza four, Clark references Mary Oliver, a Romantic poet whose own work focused on the Romanticism goals of using nature to express and explore human emotions. I do feel that this sestina is a work fitting well within the Romanticism genre in a way that not only remains current in topic, but holds the light of hope. Clark ends her poem with the envoi befitting a ‘standard’ sestina, comprised of three lines. In reverting back to the rules of a standard sestina, I believe Clark is working to imbued into the reader her hope that pleasure can outweigh the pain.
In the transition from the last stanza to the envoi, Clark is discussing the moment she “stopped obsessively thinking about death for a few moments” which she compares to a tercet (Clark, lines 63-64). A tercet is “a set or group of three lines of verse rhyming together” in which Clarks states that this temporary reprieve lasted the length of, meaning a very short time of peace, of pleasure, before the weight of the ‘pain’ returns (Oxford). She then states outright “an envoi sustained” breaking the proverbial fourth-wall of the poem, to remind the reader that she is indeed in control here of both her pleasure and pain (Clark, line 65).
By breaking the sestina, Clark invokes an uncomfortable feeling in the reader, a feeling of wrong-ness, that she too feels for her people’s situation based off the context of the poem. This is not only a brilliant use of literary normalities and devices but helps to encompass her purpose of the poem. When we look at the last two lines of the envoi, “with pleasure reaching for Black desire, reaching for the transcendence of pain” she states that hope again, bringing full circle her desire of pleasure in her life and the lives of African Americans (Clark, lines 66-67).
Works Cited
Clark, Tiana. “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy.” The Atlantic, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/09/poem-tiana-clark-broken-sestina-reaching-black-joy/619980/
Oxford Libraries. 2024. Tercet. Oxford. https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/
Write. Read. Repeat. 
Leave a comment