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Blue
by George Elliott Clarke
Polestar, 2001
Reviewed by Michael Bryson
Some of the poems in Blue, George Elliott
Clarke's latest full-length poetry collection, first appeared in Execution
Poems, a chapbook published by Gaspereau Press (2000) and reviewed
by Geoffrey Cook in an earlier edition of The Danforth Review.
Here is what Cook said about the poems in that earlier
collection:
With all this language, you get, of course, a defiant,
exuberant, provocative black-on-white (titles-in-blood-red) spirit dance
of politics, racism, religion, psycho-sexual song and grumble, all
whipping the reader on. Shocking, comic, controversial, a liberation of
both fact and fiction for the sake of song, Execution Poems gives
a nastily clear image of “how history darkens against its medium”
(from “Childhood II”).
Here is what Clarke says in a brief introduction to Blue:
These poems are black, profane, surly, American. Their
bitterness came honestly. US-torched, I wept these lyrics twixt 1994 and
1999. I confess: The Great Republic's fiery liberty set me blazing. An
incendiary dérèglement charred by brain black.
Clarke then lists the poets he considers his
precursors ("I pursued poets who immolate themselves in the inferno
of witnessing"): Syl Cheney-Coker, Wanda Coleman, Henry Dumas, Allen Ginsberg,
Irving Layton, Ezra Pound, and Derek Walcott. Clarke: "I craved to
draft lyrics that would pour out - Pentecostal fire - pell mell,
scorching, bright, loud: a poetics of arson."
Exhausted yet?
To accuse Clarke of heated, overblown rhetoric would
be, of course, to miss the point. He has chosen his words deliberately;
he knows what he is trying to achieve; and he succeeds. He is following Keats: "What the imagination seizes as
Beauty must be True" (quoted at the beginning of the book). Which
makes Blue a historical curiosity. Clarke is blatant in his use
of High Romantic tropes and supremely unanxious about his more immediate
modernist precursors, notably Auden: "Poetry makes nothing
happen." How interesting, how odd, how wonderful and dangerous all
at the same time.
Auden had ample reason to reject Romanticism (even if
he didn't manage to escape its shadows), and we should be wary of the
exuberance of many of George Elliott Clarke's narrative voices. Of
course, Clarke's rhetoric is anything but simple - and he's capable of
layering his ironies with the best of the best - but still, let's be
careful. Clarke begins Blue with the warning that he's seeking "a
poetics of arson", after all.
Here is Clarke ("Calculated Offensive"):
To hell with Pound!
What we desire is African:
Europe is so septic, it seeps poisons.
Why abet the mass murderers
and the famine- and munitions-makers?
All Plato and Aristotle ever did
was waste Nat Turner's time.
Europe?
A machine spewing
fat-assed assassins,
piss-sipping whores,
Chaplinesque Napoleons,
porcine professors analyzing feces!
Who needs all those hymns printed on toilet paper?
Put Europe to the torch:
All of Michelangelo's dripping, syphilitic saints,
all of Sappho's insipid, anorexic virgins.
Use the Oxford English Dictionary
and the Petit Robert for kindling.
I like this poem. I think it's very funny; it
articulates - albeit somewhat narrowly - an important cultural struggle; but
it's also obviously problematic. On the one hand, it is a
"calculated offensive"; it is an act of rhetoric, a heated
wail of premeditated anger and contempt. (Interestingly, it also assails
one of the poets Clarke names as an influence in his introduction.) That
is - let me say it clearly - it should not be read literally: "Put
Europe to the torch," etc. In our post 9/11/2001 world,
perhaps we are more sensitive to words like these. On the other hand,
Auden wrote his warnings about Romanticism in the context of the Second
World War. That is, we have been given ample warning. Perhaps Clarke
ought to have given greater weight to Wystan's cooling influence.
A "poetics of arson" isn't something we
should celebrate unconditionally. Blue is a book we should
celebrate, and Clarke is an author who should be read deeply - and (in
some cases) be deeply read against. In many of the poems in Blue, Clarke has
staked out a deliberately provocative position. His provocation should
be taken at face value as a challenge to the communities Clarke lives in
- not just the Canadian literary community, but Canada coast-to-coast,
particularly the nation's many supposedly race-blind citizens. Blue
is many things: the blues, sensuality, the high sky overhead. It is also
a bruise - and a reaction. It is a book that should be read, debated,
studied, and challenged.
Michael Bryson is the publisher/editor
of The Danforth Review.
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