“My crazy dream now,” he tells me, “is to win a whole lot more prizes so I can build my own tower.”
All poets are liars, yes, but I have no doubt that he means what he says. Sitting in a tiny east-end café on a Monday evening, award-winning poet and U of T professor George Elliott Clarke is telling me about his plans for the land he recently purchased near his hometown of Windsor, Nova Scotia.
With the money from the Portia White Prize and the Governor General’s Award, to name a couple of the honours he has received for his poetry, Clarke and his two younger brothers have managed to complete the purchase of a modest piece of land that has been in their family since the early 1800s. Clarke and his brothers inherited the land from their late mother, though because of some financial risks she had taken, there was some slight danger they might lose the property altogether.
Winning the awards, however, allowed Clarke to secure the land, and as a tribute to his mother and the slaves who fled to Nova Scotia during the war of 1812, he wants to build a tower. Having seen pictures of William Butler Yeats’ tower and Robinson Jeffers’ tower, Clarke, with the help of his architect friend, wants to erect a stone tower—a place where he can write, “just tall enough” he says, “to know that there’s a tower there.”
Over the clamour of drinkers and raw blues piping through the air of the café, his loud, lustrous voice seems to dwarf all others. I first encountered Clarke’s distinctive oratorical style three years ago when he showed up to teach the second semester of Modern Canadian Poetry. Until then, the Wednesday evening class, logically located in U of T’s Zoology Building, had been about as exciting as staring at the sheen of fluorescent light on the arborite countertops in our lab-cum-classroom. And then came Clarke; his booming laughter was encompassing, his passion for poetry palpable. He spoke with an infectious enthusiasm and a fire that recalled Irving Layton’s essays—minus the vitriol.
Today, sitting across from me at a table much too small for his husky frame, he is just as passionate and vocal as he was three years ago when he lectured to us on the importance of poetry to the 1968 general strike in France. In fact, a conversation with Clarke almost necessarily involves politics. When I ask him what five people, living or dead, he would like to have a conversation with, only two of his choices are writers: Henry Dumas and Robert Earl Hayden. Otherwise, he fills out the top five with once powerful, and certainly controversial, political figures Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Malcolm X, and Mao Tse-tung.
Clarke’s eyes light up when I ask him how he feels about being one of very few professors of African descent at a school as large as the University of Toronto. “We’ve got to change that,” he says. “And when I say ‘we’ I mean that very, very inclusively. Look at the undergraduate population, look at the city of Toronto—this is one of the most diverse cities in North America and yet, the professoriate tends to be, especially in terms of the humanities, thoroughly mono-cultural. A group of us have been having conversations about the need to prod our beloved institution, and I say that without irony, to move in a more productive direction. It would be good to see our professoriate come to reflect more of the city and more of the undergraduate population. I feel privileged and honoured to be a professor at the University of Toronto, especially with tenure—underline with tenure. It’s a great institution and I feel very proud of it and I’m glad to be part of it. At the same time, I think we should all feel it to be necessary to move our institution to be even more a reflection of the society in which it finds itself. I’m convinced we will see many good, positive, progressive changes take place over the next few years.”
Though a successful academic, Clarke readily acknowledges that he is a poet first. It is a calling that began as a love for music. “As a fifteen-year-old, I couldn’t be a singer and I couldn’t play any instruments, but I loved music. The closest I could get to it was to write words, so I wanted to be a songwriter. I didn’t think of myself as a poet, I thought of myself as a songwriter.”
Influenced by artists such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Clarke set himself a writing quota of four songs per day. In this way he unwittingly began learning his chops, so to speak, as a poet. Even now, as in the poem “Hard Nails,” from the award-winning collection Execution Poems, you can hear the songwriter’s sensibility: “Drench me down with rum and Coca-Cola/ The gal I kiss be a pretty pretty colour/ I ain’t got a dollar, but I ain’t got no dolour/ Drench me down with rum and Coca-Cola.”
The defining moment, though, came when he was sixteen. Leafing through an anthology of modern poetry he rescued from the trash, he came across the poem “The River Merchant’s Wife: A letter,” translated by Ezra Pound from the Japanese poet Li Po. “I loved it,” he says. “There’s nothing more than that. I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to write like this.’ To me, that poem had a blues register, and that’s how I digested it. Later on, I discovered Pound’s noxious politics of every sort, but that poem will always be very important to me because it’s the poem that said, ‘this is poetry.’ It just sang to me, and I still want someone to record it as the blues.”
Clarke cites leaving Nova Scotia as one the most important events in his life. “I didn’t realize until I left, that first time in 1979, how deeply I identified…with Nova Scotia in particular and the East Coast in general. I never thought I would, but I underwent this very, very severe homesickness. And it surprised me. As a result of that homesickness I began to explore Black-Nova Scotian history. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I started trying to address that in a poetic way. My feelings about the province were wrapped up in a kind of romantic haze at the time. Looking at it from a great distance, I don’t feel that romantic about it anymore. It’s something I had to go through, I guess. At the same time, I started off this interview by saying I’m now proudly a landowner in Nova Scotia, so it’s still at the base of my identity.”
Indeed it is. Clarke tells me, “One of the things I need to do as a writer, and I haven’t exhausted it yet, is continue to make and create, deliberately, myths about Nova Scotia. The Black community of Nova Scotia hasn’t had a lot of competitive myths, at least myths that have made their way into mainstream Nova Scotian life. I’m not going to say that my work has, or ever will, but I still feel the need to write my own ‘Evangeline.’”
And if Clarke has his way, he will continue to mythologize Nova Scotia. He will write his own “Evangeline” on his Nova Scotia land, from the peak of a stone tower named after his mother, Geraldine Elizabeth Clarke.
This year, Prof. George Elliott Clarke has generously agreed to act as the adjudicator for the Third Annual Varsity Short Story Contest. He is a successful essayist and poet who has also written for the screen and the theatre, and edited several books of Africadian and African-Canadian literature. He is the first native-born author of African descent in Canadian history to win the Governor General’s award for poetry, and the first East Coast poet to win it since Milton Acorn did twenty-seven years ago, a fact that excites pride in his East Coast ancestry.
Photograph by Simon Turnbull
