Skip to main content

Featured Poet: George Elliott Clarke

Eyewear (not bleary from the First) starts its Friday features with a bang in 2011 - with George Elliot Clarke, one of Canada's best-beloved contemporary poets, recently included in the Carcanet anthology, Modern Canadian Poets, which I co-edited with Evan Jones.


As the Carcanet anthology says: "Clarke was born in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, in 1960. He has a PhD from Queen’s University, and is now E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Clarke is a seventh-generation Canadian and is descended from African American refugees who escaped to the British and were relocated to Nova Scotia during the War of 1812. In his criticism, prose, poetry and plays, he explores Africadian issues, a word he coined, combining Africa and Acadia, the historical region of the three maritime provinces—themes which, among other things, deal with race, culture, and what it means to be black in Canada. Clarke has won or been nominated for numerous honours and awards. He received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry (Execution Poems) and was made an officer of the Order of Canada (the nation’s highest civilian honour) in 2008. Clarke is best-known for his multivocal 1990 collection, Whylah Falls, which explores the lives of various characters in a small Canadian town with lyricism, humour and sometimes biblical pathos, building on the early-20th century tradition of American poets like Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson, with the use of Shakespearian and other traditional literary sources, and adding his own local, often performative, inflections."



Royal Audience

Not a slick majesty, she appears
well-kept, if as radiant as Fame:
Her church-appointed whiteness
anoints no icy sparkle.

Say she’s pure skeleton and fancies,
ethereal,
cold glamour among women smelling of soap:
There’s no evil in that.

But the Queen’s knocked-down beauty,
yet elegant, can never elevate
that seminal dastard who simpers alongside,
capering like a capon.

True:  Dog-and-Bitch aristocrats
trot all tarted up, traditionally hideous,
despite tintinnabulation and twittering—
saccharine blather of the Press,

praising, appraising,
each luminous parasite
and their always trashy offspring:
Each face is counterfeit one spends (upon)

with sweaty, apish palm
and complete aplomb.
But Il Principe is especially, brutally pathetic:
He’s the likeness of a mirror, shattered—

a clutch of pompous, bright infirmities.
See:  The grisly creampuff, orthodox scumbag,
minces like a buttock whore,
pedestrian, trifling….

Il Duce is about as dazzling
as fresh, grey paint,
and parades a papier-maché panache.
No, he is so waxen

that it’s hard to get hold of an exact colour.
(He is white,
but needs more paint.)
His demeanour is as stale

as a spinster’s virginity.
The immaculate imbecile—
his wit as difficult as chewing gum—
confuses my priestly garb

for the “dog collar” of a poetaster
spewing “doggerel.”
I answered, “Never!  Never!”
I now add, “Never!  Never!  Never!”,

to curse his old health
à la Shakespeare:
Wagging tongue, then lapping shit,
he’s disgusting even in his bones.

Okay:  I don’t mean to cut out the guts
of the guy:
Everyone knows
he’s been in and out of the muck,

has known commedia dell’arte suffering.
It’s not his fault his pissoir face
displays a mortician’s pretty pallor,
sign of a moribund hierarchy.

Truly, it’s his crudity
that makes me throw completely up.
A corrupt nothing,
his bio is une sale histoire,

an epistemology of feces—
incest that stinks of studs and sows,
of bastardy made right in the womb.
Here’s one bit of good news:

The State taste for funerals.
Let The Prince perish into imperishable dust,
die extinguished, not distinguished,
and maggots eat him utterly to Hell,

so there’s nothing left of him but thorns
in a nauseating cemetery.
Happily, his grave will prove a decorous quarantine,
preserving us from the contaminating function

of his every word, facial tic, and gesture,
those apt opportunities for disease.
Truth issues from my black mouth:
“Your Royal Highness, glisten always in excrement.”


poem by George Elliott Clarke; online with permission of the author


Note on poem: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".