Professor and former poet laureate George Elliott Clarke on politics and poetry
How is poetry like preaching? I’m thinking of your line, “Put down that gun and that bomb: Make your heart a saintly home” (“Ain’t You Scared of the Sacred?”).
To me, all art is political, an exponent of identity, irresistibly shaped by sociopolitical, cultural and economic influences. Thus, Yeats’ love poems for Maud Gonne also convey his views on Irish nationalism and Celtic romanticism.
The new final volume in your Canticles series on Black history focuses on the Africadian Baptist Association of Nova Scotia – why?
I fictionalize “African” as “Africadian” to give myself the freedom to pay homage to that great, brick-and-mortar incarnation of Black Liberation Theology while here-and-there suspending historical fact. The Canticles series treats the birth of the “Africadian” Baptist Association as being the result of anti-slavery and anti-imperialist struggle, but also of oral and aural interpretations of Scripture.
Earlier in Canticles you rewrote sections of Scripture. What do you hope devout believers might get from reading those?
For me, Christianity is an organic response to sin, its crimes, and the tolls of suffering and death. Surely, enslaved and illiterate Black persons were won to a vernacular Christianity. Although they heard preached to them a theology of submission, they reinterpreted it communally to espouse the insurgent gospel of the spirituals. My rewrites of Scripture attempt to sound this fostering of a grass-roots theology.
George Elliott Clarke of Toronto (raised in Halifax) is author of Where Beauty Survived: A Memoir (Vintage, 2023) and Blues and Bliss: Selected Poetry (WLU, 2008), a pioneering professor in African-Canadian literature and former poet laureate of Parliament (GeorgeElliottClarke.net). Illustration: Detail, Melanie Janisse