Survival Marvels: The Portal Poetics of Cheryl Clarke

This catacomb is a carnival of survival marvels
and language and no unhampered passage.
—Cheryl Clarke, “All Souls’ Day”
 

Time is not straight. Time spirals and veers, embraces and releases. She shows up with a U-Haul after one date. Time doesn’t move stubbornly forward. She comes back and helps an ex-girlfriend mourn the loss of her more recent lover, maybe even helps her raise her kids. Time is not obsessed with progress. She wants you to come back and revisit lessons you thought you had already learned. Time shows up brand new, as an imp and a trickster. Time is guided not by security, but by the risk of love. Again.

This instant. This triumph. Time is a lesbian.

When I sat down to write this essay about the poetic approach of the great Black lesbian poet, literary critic, and educator, Cheryl Clarke, I started with the basics. Cheryl Clarke was born in 1947 in Washington, DC. Her parents were government workers, and she attended all-girls Catholic schools. She is the oldest of three sisters and she names “sister” as one of her primary identities, her other three primary identities being a poet, writer, and lesbian, though not in that order.

Then I pulled up the Poetry Foundation’s page for Cheryl on my phone. “Cheryl Clarke’s life and work offer an enduring rejection of straightness and a constant reorientation to alternative space,” it read, quoting none other than the 2012 version of me, from an essay called “In Praise of the Never Straight.” That essay took its inspiration from a letter that Cheryl wrote to June Jordan in 1982, the year I was born, in which she points out that even her letterhead is not straight, and that her identity as an out lesbian is central to her feminist politics.

Starting in 1973, nothing was straight for Cheryl, and she celebrates that year as the beginning of her life as a lesbian. It was a decision she made in the midst of the Black Arts Movement, which she calls a homophobic movement, and which she credits with having gotten her to start seriously writing poetry as a student at Howard University. As she argues in her foundational book After Mecca: Women and the Black Arts Movement, despite its homophobic and patriarchal foundations, the Black Arts Movement nonetheless inspired and shaped the Black gay and lesbian publishing movement of which Clarke herself is a cornerstone. Coming out in 1973, a year Clarke mentions often, is a badge of honor for the poet who notes that many of her generation stayed closeted long after that. Cheryl’s more than fifty years as an out Black lesbian poet offer a study in contrasts—between a closet and a portal. To engage the timeful queerness of Cheryl Clarke’s impact is to enter a portal.

What I am calling the “portal poetics” of Cheryl Clarke is a poetics of access. The commitment and structure of Clarke’s poetry seeks to provide generations with a way to meet each other on transformative terms. Her engagement with time, her attention to submerged histories, and her queer insistence on Black lesbian existence beyond conformity, mean Clarke’s poems are full of openings into another possible narrative. And then another. Through her work, the queerest among us learn that we are ancient and futuristic, that we have always been here and that we haven’t yet arrived, and that everything is up for change if we only reach for each other. The erotics of Cheryl Clarke’s poetry and her life include expressions of Black lesbian sexual desire and portraits of Black lesbian desirability, and these erotics are intertwined with a broader lust between the living and the dead, fueled by our collective desire for a braver, more loving world.

At the 2013 Future/Retrospective celebration convened by Darnell Moore, Steven G Fullwood, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, and myself, held at the Rutgers Livingston campus, generations of Cheryl’s mentees, students, and admirers gathered to celebrate her work. Among those in attendance were peers in the Black LGBTQ publishing world like Alexis De Veaux and the Trinidadian Black lesbian feminist poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, movement kin from near and far like Aishah Shahidah Simmons, founder of AfroLez Productions, and the preacher and artist Sangodare Wallace. The event included intergenerational conversations as well as readings by writers in Cheryl’s legacy like Marci Blackman, Angelique Nixon, and Vanessa Huang. There was a gorgeous slideshow with both color and black-and-white photos featuring Cheryl’s breathtaking butch style, as well as childhood photos saved by her sister, the prose author Breena Clarke, and a keynote in which Cheryl shared her own thoughts on her body of work and impact so far. Anyone who could be there was. But for me, the most memorable audience member was my dad, Clyde Gumbs, a straight, Black, West Indian man in his sixties, who surprised me by driving in from Edison, New Jersey, to be at the event. I should have known that time was about to come out of the closet when I introduced him to my beloved mentor Alexis De Veaux. After I gushed about Alexis’s impact and brilliance and about how much she had inspired me, my dad didn’t miss a beat: So that must be why we named you Alexis! Time circles back.

Later that day, Cheryl expressed her surprise that my dad was still here. My turn to speak had come and gone, but there he was, enraptured by the gothic lust of Marci Blackman’s fiction (he bought Marci’s book that day). There he was, cheering on and laughing at the double and triple entendres that the proud, out, Black LGBTQ majority of the audience let flow from their tongues within the walls of what was once Rutgers’ women’s campus. There he was, oohing and ahhing and swooning with all of us at the undeniable flyness in every age of Cheryl’s “precise haircut,” as she would say. Why? Cheryl laughed. Well Cheryl, he replied, already on a first name basis after one day, I’m a queer Black feminist too, you know!

Years later, Cheryl and Alexis were the first people my father asked to read the manuscript of his collection of poems, Without Apology, which includes a praise poem for the spiritual leadership of Aishah Shahidah Simmons and poems for all of my lesbian partners. It was his last work, which I published in December 2016, six months after he died.

My approach to the portal poetics of Cheryl Clarke—the way she brings time home, lays time down, lifts time up, calls time back—situates the act of poetry in a Black lesbian tradition. This is the same energy that revealed my father to himself and to all of us as a queer Black feminist. Cheryl’s approach supported my father’s willingness to transform into a freer being.

If you refuse (or Cheryl would say persistently “fail”) to transform, you should stop reading now. Nevermind. It’s already too late.

___

In 2024, Cheryl Clarke published Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, whose title references a poem included in her 2018 collection Targets, called “Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style.” The poem is a sustained engagement with a quote from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, in which Arbus refers to the “really tough amazingly hard-core lesbians” she observed in New York City’s Washington Square Park in 1966. Cheryl interrogates the quote by entering the portal and detailing her own memories of butch sartorial style in the sixties, asking “—this what you mean by hardcore?” Ultimately, the poem overrides the gaze of a famous (ostensibly heterosexual) white woman, whose credits include Vogue and Elle, to offer a more intimate portrait of sixties butches “steadfast in the practice of waiting for and on their femmes.”

In Clarke’s hands, the “archive” becomes a poetic space we can actually enter, a space not of surveillance or mere documentation but of intimate relations, where “hard-core” can be an invitation into a permeable place of love. The archive is a doorway for those who recognize it as one. This is the poetics of the portal, where what would be closed to the reader due to differences in identity, age, or other circumstances, is opened up. But not without a critique of the very terms of distance, identity, and time itself.

Archive of Style closes with what was the first poem in Clarke’s very first book, Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women. The reader thus moves backward through Clarke’s archive to arrive at the first portal she opened: “Hair: A Narrative.” I use the word “opened” advisedly. As an out Black lesbian, it was already an intervention for her to claim a place in the tradition of Black women broadly and to claim Black women as her primary audience. Before she ever says lesbian, Clarke invites Black women readers into the context of not being straight. As Clarke says in her introduction to a 2014 reprint of Narratives, “any of the women, not just the lesbians, characterized in Narratives might have been lesbians.” The non-straightness of Black hair (such that the practice of straightening it takes up so much time) is the precondition of a queer collectivity Clarke insists is relevant to all Black women. In “Hair: A Narrative,” Clarke immerses the reader in the world of Black women, and it is here, in the place of hair styling and straightening, that the critique begins bubbling up, with the straightening iron as a torture device,

salvaged
from some chamber of the Inquisition and given new purpose
in the putative new world
 

Clarke encourages the freedom-seeking Black woman to resist the straightening of hair, and of everything else.

___

In 2024, Cheryl Clarke published Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, whose title references a poem included in her 2018 collection Targets, called “Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style.” The poem is a sustained engagement with a quote from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, in which Arbus refers to the “really tough amazingly hard-core lesbians” she observed in New York City’s Washington Square Park in 1966. Cheryl interrogates the quote by entering the portal and detailing her own memories of butch sartorial style in the sixties, asking “—this what you mean by hardcore?” Ultimately, the poem overrides the gaze of a famous (ostensibly heterosexual) white woman, whose credits include Vogue and Elle, to offer a more intimate portrait of sixties butches “steadfast in the practice of waiting for and on their femmes.”

In Clarke’s hands, the “archive” becomes a poetic space we can actually enter, a space not of surveillance or mere documentation but of intimate relations, where “hard-core” can be an invitation into a permeable place of love. The archive is a doorway for those who recognize it as one. This is the poetics of the portal, where what would be closed to the reader due to differences in identity, age, or other circumstances, is opened up. But not without a critique of the very terms of distance, identity, and time itself.

Archive of Style closes with what was the first poem in Clarke’s very first book, Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women. The reader thus moves backward through Clarke’s archive to arrive at the first portal she opened: “Hair: A Narrative.” I use the word “opened” advisedly. As an out Black lesbian, it was already an intervention for her to claim a place in the tradition of Black women broadly and to claim Black women as her primary audience. Before she ever says lesbian, Clarke invites Black women readers into the context of not being straight. As Clarke says in her introduction to a 2014 reprint of Narratives, “any of the women, not just the lesbians, characterized in Narratives might have been lesbians.” The non-straightness of Black hair (such that the practice of straightening it takes up so much time) is the precondition of a queer collectivity Clarke insists is relevant to all Black women. In “Hair: A Narrative,” Clarke immerses the reader in the world of Black women, and it is here, in the place of hair styling and straightening, that the critique begins bubbling up, with the straightening iron as a torture device,

salvaged
from some chamber of the Inquisition and given new purpose
in the putative new world
 

Clarke encourages the freedom-seeking Black woman to resist the straightening of hair, and of everything else.

___

the work of the lesbian writer is to change the meaning of everything, including time

Clarke’s intervention is not only into the directionality of time, it is also about the narratives through which time gains meaning. Her portal poetics challenges not only our access to each other (and other versions of ourselves) across time, but also to history and poetic genealogy. Her poem “Mavis writes in her journal,” also from Narratives, begins:

... I know Geneva loves me
more than the man she sleeps with every night.
 

The ellipsis lets us know that Mavis has been writing before this, recording in her journal what she knows to be true. Mavis’s record is more important than what the world sees. The man her lover “sleeps with every night” may have a world-validated claim on Geneva’s time, but in her journal Mavis gives herself the role of timekeeper. She memorializes the time that she and Geneva spend together every day while the husband is at work, where Geneva loses “track of time” listening to Billie Holiday with Mavis. Because Geneva still chooses to preserve a seemingly heterosexual life, Mavis must channel her desire through her poetry:

Tonight Geneva keeps him company.
Tonight I write another brazen love poem in secret, alone, patient,
and relentless.
 

It is the relentlessness, the persistent desire of Black lesbian time, that energizes the portal. It is the exclusion of the lesbian from the heterosexually claimed calendar that sustains the critique.

When Cheryl notes on the dedication page of Archive of Style that her work is dedicated “to the memory of Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde, my friends and mentors,” she is honoring the impact of Brooks’s way-making through her advocacy for women poets in the Black Arts Movement (including Lorde) as well as Audre’s support and mentorship of Clarke in the lesbian feminist publishing movement. She is also creating a Black feminist literary history, while letting us know that her practice is dedicated to a form of memory work influenced by both mentor poets. Her queer memorialization insists that our conversation with those we remember is not over, and that we are the portals through which future beings, and future versions of ourselves, can learn about our beloved dead.

Clarke’s poems commemorate moments of collective Black bereavement, as well as twentieth-century lesbian ways of being. Many of the poems in Archive are in memory of Clarke’s loved ones and important historical figures, like Lorde, Brooks, and Assata Shakur, who are elegized alongside victims of police violence Clarke never met, like Sandra Bland and Fannie Lou Hamer. What links them together is all that they survived and did not survive at the hands of a fundamentally racist police system. Her work brings supposedly past experiences into the present as context for and companion to the current moment. In other words, Cheryl is not only remembering what was done, she is remembering what to do. She is reminding all of us of possible ways to be.

When Cheryl sent her congratulations to Audre on the occasion of the dedication of the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center at Hunter College, she was memorializing Audre in advance, knowing her cancer was back. The next semester would be Audre’s last term at Hunter. As part of her commitment to live well with cancer and to support her immune system to give herself the best possible quality of life, Audre had to leave a toxic academic environment and the hustle and cold of New York City. It was the end of an era. Clarke wrote:

I can think of no teacher, writer, hardworking Black woman who deserves to have a poetry center named after her more, except for those nameless Black women workers who’ve gone before in whose name I know you accept this honor.... Thank you for everything you’ve given me and all Black lesbians.

Even here, in a letter that Audre’s friend Blanche Wiesen Cook read on Cheryl’s behalf at the ceremony, Clarke opens a portal to Lorde’s eternal impact and also “those nameless Black women,” whose first entry into an academic space may have been through Clarke’s words that day on Hunter’s campus.

Clarke’s elegy for Audre Lorde from her 1993 book Experimental Love similarly extends beyond the individual in order to map the ways threats of violence bind us together. That violence shows itself to be stronger than everything except for the gift and the work of wanting each other. “A Poet’s Death,” which Clarke chose to include in Archive of Style, opens with: “A poet’s death and sex thoughts rode me/through the flashing December hurricane.” While time links us all to death, the quality of our time together and our togetherness beyond our living time are also poetic questions. Clarke creates the portal in which our lives and deaths are not interchangeable and yet are inextricably linked. It is Clarke’s desire for connection that fuels the time machine.

The poem goes on to mourn Audre, while also mourning the forms of Lorde’s own poetic mourning:

Audre, my good neighbor,
I miss your elegy,
your so-long song,
your striking metonyms,
your hermetic lineation.
Raw and grand images breaking splendidly
and turning to new space.
And spare.
 

Repeating the possessive “your” four times after the singular possessive “my,” Clarke gives form to her longing, an invitation to Lorde and to everything Clarke misses about her poetic approach. Clarke also troubles the distinction between “my” and “your” because this is her own “elegy” and “so-long song” for her friend and mentor, Audre.

The portal functions through intimacy and collectivity. The portal cannot only be mine or yours, it must be ours. And what is at stake in this collectivity? New possibilities, like the space Clarke found in Lorde’s poetry and the space she offers in her own, repetition with a slight difference: “and turning to new space./And spare.” Here we see Clarke emphasize futurism (new space) and the visual mirroring of space/spare. Spare describes the open space around Lorde’s short lines of poetry, but it also reminds us of the sacred space Lorde’s poetry provides. And, in the act of this poem, Clarke is creating a sacred space for remembrance, necessary because there is not enough of it. Clarke is also alluding to the fact that Audre Lorde died too young. Would that we could spare Lorde and ourselves that tragedy. Instead, we must inhabit the new spaces she continues to make possible. Some of those spaces are poems.

I entered the poem here, reading Cheryl’s own words from the dedication ceremony of the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center back to her at the National Black Justice Coalition Wisdom Awards in 2023 to celebrate her achievement: I can think of no teacher, writer, hardworking Black woman who deserves this more except perhaps the nameless.... I read the whole passage, testifying to the intimate intergenerational impact of Cheryl’s generosity. I thought of the time she sat with me in a restaurant in New Jersey near the hospital where my father was dying and gifted me the lifeline I needed: signed, original copies of Conditions, the feminist journal with a lesbian focus where she served on the editorial collective for many years. Thank you for everything you’ve given me and all Black lesbians, I said again, echoing Cheryl’s own words through tears I thought no one could clock over Zoom. (It wasn’t until the next year that the National Black Justice Coalition decided to name their Wisdom awards after Audre Lorde. But neither of us were too early or too late.)

___

the work of the lesbian writer is to change the meaning of time

The Black lesbian poet must create her own timeline. Which is exactly what Clarke does in the most enduring and anthologized poem from Narratives, “Of Althea and Flaxie,” which disputes two lies about history. The first lie is that the lesbianism Cheryl was practicing in 1973 was something new. The second lie is that lesbianism is a white thing that Black women are simply adopting after the fact.

“Of Althea and Flaxie” opens by situating itself in a particular time in history, “in 1943.” Clarke follows the lesbian couple, Althea and Flaxie, over the course of their decades-long relationship: “Althea was gay and strong in 1945”; “in 1950 Althea wore suits and ties”; “in 1955 when Flaxie got pregnant.” Clarke reminds us that their lesbianism isn’t nullified by motherhood or even by sex with men. When Althea dies, in 1970, we learn that “Flaxie fought Althea’s proper family not to have her laid out in lace/and dressed the body herself/and did not care who knew she made her way with a woman.”

Notice how the last two lines repeat the unstressed “and,” a prompt to start again. An invitation to participate in the expansion of possibility. The Black lesbian time in “Of Althea and Flaxie” is written time. It is time marked by the refusal to let the state, violent labor, the relief board, the legal constraints of family, or traditional religious rituals overwrite their love. In fact, it is Flaxie who has the last word, insisting that Althea’s butch gender presentation not be overwritten with lace upon her death. Clarke boldly embodies this refusal to be overwritten through her own writing, heeding well Audre Lorde’s warning that “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies and eaten alive.”

In another poem, “Movement,” Clarke combines a timeline of her own growing up years with a timeline of the Black freedom movement, but time cannot remain linear. In a timeline of trauma, violence recurs. Alabama and Mississippi haunt. In one of several vivid moments, in movement eight of the poem, Clarke works with the words Fannie Lou Hamer used to describe the brutality of Mississippi police forcing a Black man to assault her for trying to register to vote. At this point we cannot go forward into what awaits Clarke’s narrator beyond childhood, we can only go backwards into a recounting of the forms of torture enslaved people endured. Which endure. Clarke’s childhood in Washington, DC, and the childhoods of Black children far removed from the segregated south bear witness to a violence that precedes their lifetimes and exceeds description. But the poet must bear witness anyway.

“Living as a Lesbian Underground” is a poem that honors a collective of fugitives—including escaping enslaved people, Indigenous people, practitioners of African spirituality, freedom fighters, lesbians, and people who are all of these at once. It takes place in a landscape that stretches from New Orleans to Vietnam, from Detroit to Libya, from Poland and South Africa to New Jersey and New York (because “Apartheid is the board of education in Canarsie”). Clarke uses repetition to invite us into her practice:

Leave signs of struggle

Leave signs of triumph

Leave signs.
 

Clarke insists on leaving signs for the same reason she insists on going back to catalog those signs, because she values the lives of the women she represents. Buildings can also be valuable signs, as in “14th Street,” which begins “was gutted in 1968,” leaving Clarke’s own “sense of place ... cauterized.” She goes on to describe the city as:

a buffalo
nearly a dinosaur and,
as with everything else white men have wanted
for themselves, endangered or extinct.
 

Clarke connects the erasure of memories tied to urban sites of her coming of age to the eradication of the buffalo in the colonial genocide against Indigenous people and species across the continent. The poem refuses erasure.

At the Hobart Women’s Literary Festival, which Clarke cohosts annually with her sister Breena, Boyce-Taylor once shared that her own poetry is the work of keeping the voices—the sound of her ancestors—alive. Clarke, too, is doing preservation work. Her work seeks to answer the question she asks in her poem “All Souls’ Day”: “How would we see the souls?”

Soul is exactly what is at stake in the poem, in which Clarke goes on to write: “This catacomb is a carnival of survival marvels.” Here, Clarke offers us the vibrational technology and butch magic of the hard C of “catacomb” and “carnival” merging into the propulsive revving V of the same “carnival” which is our “survival.” For those of us who are “survival marvels,” being angry and masking who we are, “pretending we have no history,” is what threatens us, haunting our daily existence, so that “we are in a bad way, directions uncertain,” as Clarke’s speaker laments. Even now I marvel at the electricity lesbian poetics can nurture in the hard places, the deadly places, in the midst of mourning. This catacomb.

Here we stand in the portal, seeking our guides, and as I write this, federal government agencies are erasing mentions of LGBTQ reality from their websites. Here we honor the queer part of each of us and honor the lesbian survival that makes it possible. Here we are breathing, knowing that we are both too early and too late. But time is a lesbian. She loves who and what the state says is unlovable. She loves in the face of punishment and erasure. She remembers what they teach her to forget, seeks the forever forbidden, and preserves buried, taboo possibilities for love. She also lives inside those possibilities, builds a life out of them, risking everything.

In 2013, Cheryl Clarke delivered the distinguished Kessler lecture at CUNY’s Center for LGBTQ Studies, entitled “Queer Black Trouble: Life, Literature, and the Age of Obama,” in which she challenged the normative gay rights paradigm of marriage equality and the liberal so-called post-racial era of Obama’s presidency. Cheryl introduced herself as a “queer Black troublemaker,” a term, she explained to the audience, she had learned not from her teachers, Audre Lorde or Mabel Hampton, but from the internet bio of a young scholar named Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I may have sputtered out the water I was drinking. Time does not move in one direction. Time is never straight.

I am grateful for the bold work of Cheryl Clarke. I am blessed by the Black lesbian ethic of her poetry and her life. I am convinced that she will never stop loving our dead. And so they live. And so we live. I’m so glad that time is a lesbian. She is brash and reckless, precise and relentless enough to love such trouble as me.