Traverse

by George Elliott Clarke

  Formatting note:

  In the electronic versions of this book

  blank pages that appear in the paperback

  have been removed.

  TRAVERSE

  GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Clarke, George Elliott, 1960-, author

  Traverse / George Elliott Clarke.

  Poems.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55096-395-3 (pbk.)— ISBN 978-1-55096-396-0 (pdf)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-455-4 (epub)—ISBN 978-1-55096-454-7 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS8555.L3748T73 2014 C811'.54 C2014-900184-3 / C2014-900185-1

  Copyright © George Elliott Clarke, 2014.

  Cover painting “Africadian Pastorale” / front inside painting “Africadian Eve” / end painting “African Baptist Muse” © Laura Anne Martina, 2014; used by permission of the artist. Interior flower painting “Sudden Instant” © William Lloyd Clarke, 1953; used by permission of George Elliott Clarke.

  Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

  144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein ON N0G 2A0 Canada.

  Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2014. All rights reserved.

  Digital formatting by Michael Callaghan

  ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

  We gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), the Ontario Arts Council–an agency of the Ontario Government, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation for their support toward our publishing activities.

  Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights – or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: info@exileeditions.com

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVIII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  LII

  LIII

  LIV

  LV

  LVI

  LVII

  LVIII

  LIX

  LX

  LXI

  LXII

  LXIII

  LXIV

  LXV

  LXVI

  LXVII

  LXVIII

  LXIX

  LXX

  for

  Geraldine Elizabeth Clarke

  (1939 – 2000)

  &

  William Lloyd Clarke

  (1935 – 2005)

  African Baptists, Adepts, Believers.

  CROSSING

  The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.

  —EZRA POUND

  But I

  had been falling for thirty years.

  —ROBIN SKELTON

  PREFACE

  Anniversaries revivify: They justify indulgences, eccentricities, luxuries, and mercies. My private calendar is not as rich with reverent observances as others’ may be, but I do grant select dates transcendent import. See July 1st. True: Canada Day salutes the Dominion’s birth as a British Royal-loyal state constituted to deny the United States absolute suzerainty over this continent. But this date is pivotal personally, for, it was on July 1, 1975, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that I inked several “songs” — as a 15-year-old — and began my apprenticeship to the art of poetry. Thirty years later, at age 45, I decided to review my being and doings as a poet. So, on July 1, 2005, while visiting Halifax, I drafted a verse-memoir to canvass my vital inspirations and the cobbling of my works up to then. What emerged was a series of “Rap Sonnets” – poems to be read aloud. The initial title was direct: Thirty Years (1975-2005). In 2006, I began to publish the poem’s sonnet-stanzas, in numerical/chronological sequence, in jour-nals: ARC, Echolocation, For Crying Out Loud, ELQ/ Exile: The Literary Quarterly. (I thank the editors of these publications for their support.) ELQ/Exile has taken most of the “sonnets,” and so more than half of this book has appeared in print since 2006. Assuredly, ELQ/Exile has liked the poem(s) enough to propose that the work outright now appear under its related imprint, Exile Editions. To aid that purpose, I’ve re-envisioned my title to Traverse, a word pleasing-ly both a verb and a noun. So, I conceive this book as both recording a portage and remarking a bridge. I have added here a closing nonet of “Rap Sonnets,” to catalogue events and publications since July 1, 2005. For those who rue the loss of the original “Thirty Year” rubric, I’ll note that 2013 marks thirty years since my first book of poetry appeared, i.e., Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, on yet another paramount date, namely, June 6th.

  Though Traverse is autobiographical, I have manumitted some names and omitted others. I have also overlooked many signal moments such as my debut tour, in April 1977, to Church Point, Nova Scotia (where I viewed snow flurries round a lighthouse); my Fall 1981 residence in a Toronto subway station; my April 1993 encirclement by gun-hefting border guards at Port Huron, Michigan (where my entry to the U.S. “to give a talk on poetry” inspired alarm); my surf-side, noon-sun mugging by three thugs in Salvador, Brazil, in November 2007; and my receipt of The Queen’s inadvertently deferential nod in Halifax in June 2010 (She mistook me for a cleric: A reasonable error, given my surname.) Nor have I elaborated (or belaboured) my poetics: “Canadian” by origin, but “African” by inclination. Thus, like Canuck poets, I dignify; like Black poets, I signify.

  George Elliott Clarke

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  25/12/13

  * Saltwater Spirituals. Eds. Ronald Tetreault and the class members of English 4010. 23 April 2002. Dalhousie University Electronic Text Centre. http://etc.dal.ca/clarke/index_std.html.

  ** My radical pedagogues—those who taught me how to analyze and question when I was aged 16 to 19—were Jacqueline Barkley, Walter Borden, Carol Gibbons, Bev Greenlaw, Sylvia Hamilton, Fred Holtz, Joan Jones, Rocky Jones, and Terry Symonds. All once-Haligonians, they composed an open-door avant-garde, an open-sesame intelligentsia.

  Scan or access these URLs:

  George Elliott Clarke speaking about his book, along with his reading six of the poems.

  www.tinyurl.com/TraverseTrailer

  (8:18)

  To enjoy a video of George Elliott Clarke speaking about the book:

  A look back to the moment it came into being, on one day, July 1, 2005, marking 30 years of his
writing poetry.

  www.tinyurl.com/ClarkeTraverse

  (8:44)

  DA CAPO: 1 /7/75*

  ...the beautiful seems right

  By force of beauty....

  —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

  *Cf. “Poetry: 1/7/75—1/7/05” in Black (2006) and “July 1, 1975” in I & I (2009).

  I

  What was handed down

  was backtalk—

  “nasty Nofaskoshan” noise—

  black and insolent,

  an A-to-Z menagerie

  of braying—or caterwauling—script,

  “cryin out loud” cryptic adorations—

  Christ and curry and queynte,

  not only in that order—

  via a hodgepodge of fountain pens,

  one quixotic, the rest antique,

  straggling ink between wispy

  lines, letting letters light,

  dead-on, biting into paper.

  II

  Under black—but blazing—eyes,

  I ruled pages, slant-wise,

  because, wayward as a Goliard,

  I thought kazoos could serenade bulldozers,

  or that gold could sun rain.

  I thought I could import Storyville

  to a ghetto of fiddles and bagpipes, eh?

  I was tryin to graduate

  from grape Kool-Aid to Manischewitz wine,

  from illegible crayons

  to illegitimate poems,

  to go howling after white vamps with black hearts,

  and glean hot perfumes from their arctic flesh

  off-and-on any sweaty sofa.

  III

  Upon a domain of Gravitas, I trespassed,

  that beginner’s Dominion Day, falling,

  where rude books made bodies plain,

  spread-eagling Love,

  affixing her— sorta—to a crucifix.

  Lyrics turned as dark as the innards

  of radios, stench of ozone accenting

  cat-piss smells of LP jackets.

  Their genius gave me chills

  and made me want to throw up—

  as if reading were the same experience

  as watching a piano explode.

  Damned be witless Abstraction, gutless Dreams,

  heartless Ideals!

  IV

  My pitched ears slurped up Music’s juices;

  mine eyes gobbled gilt wine plus hors d’ oeuvres—

  the Champagne-and-caviar look of each page.

  Anthologies were subversive—half-Tijuana bible

  and half-marijuana dream:

  Here’s sado-maso Poe diddling Plath;

  there’s slave-tradin Rimbaud buggering Verlaine.

  And, like some Lumpen Black Panther or Vandal,

  I ransacked New Directions Pound,

  Faber T.S. Eliot, City Lights Ginsberg,

  McClelland & Stewart Leonard Cohen,

  Penguin Books Baudelaire,

  Farrar, Strauss, Giroux Walcott,

  and Third World Press Carolyn M. Rodgers.*

  *Cf. Amiri Baraka.

  V

  (I ain’t forgotten Henry Dumas, Conrad Kent Rivers,

  Robert Hayden, or Jean Toomer.

  I don’t shun their Deep South sermons,

  their Harlemonious harmonies.

  Their pages unfurl as thin as moonshine.

  You tip one of their Gypsy poems,

  and it tips you over, tipsy.

  Their words float just like Mary Poppins—

  but sting just like Muhammad Ali.

  Suddenly, Queen Elizabeth’s English

  turns Negroid, Mongoloid, dawdling,

  and lavish in the mouth.

  Now, you know “to draw down poems” means tappin

  born-again, now deathless trees.)

  VI

  I was reading way too much.

  My eyes were as bad as my manners;

  my manners were as bad as my speech.

  Literature set me a-stutter

  cos ma black tongue could ne’er sound learnèd.

  Sounded more like (a) foul play.

  I mean, I was unsound. Dig?

  My Marxism-Leninism enlisted

  Pushkin, Pasternak, Rasputin,

  plus Nabokov’s Lolita.

  My Maoism mixed sake and haiku

  et les bons mots de Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

  But Irving Layton modelled a swaggering guru:

  “Take down a gal. Get taken down by a gal.”

  VII

  Them days, I navigated Halifax like a three-leggèd cat,

  alert but hurt, limping,

  moanin open-heart-surgery blues—

  facin the stink of bad news,

  slop of bad shots, sobs of liquor,

  while syringes stretched buddies on ice,

  cold as burnt-out fire-hydrants;*

  and parading tarts made their privates

  public for a price—

  never too much. I only wanted

  to make love when the moon gleamed sunny,

  white chicks looked coloured, and ink

  streamed from me, fluorescent,

  blossoming luminous....

  *Spotted in Detroit, Michigan, where I was an ACORN agent, in February 1982.

  VIII

  Didn’t I freeze, perambulating frozen,

  peninsular Halifax,

  North End to South End to North,

  crossing and double-crossing Hierarch y

  and Caste and Race and Sex,

  stumblin at times them fault-lines?

  As intoxicated as Lear, I staggered raggedly,

  takin blows of rain and snow,

  or slaps of rain and snow and tears,

  stinging my black face breathless.

  Fog and snow and rain and tears....

  Store windows spit neon to bleach me white.

  My genes were impure,

  my blue jeans were dirty.

  IX

  Once I penetrated the oval, cuntal Legislature,

  where he drove his fist into his seat, that teacher,

  excited by N.S. Question Period hysterics—

  orgasms of elect, silk-suited bawds

  and taxpayer-bankrolled gamblers—

  stunted members snapped in sheets—

  beds, cash, tabloids, and then postage stamps

  (after their scandals kindle, then pall,

  leaving only ashen, blurry rumour).

  Amazing it was to stand outlaw in the womb

  of Law, inside a Palladian-style parliament,

  so near the lawless, unruly Atlantic,

  its waves always rearin to erase

  deeds—and even the memory of deeds.

  X

  YHZ always was tearin

  to go topsy-turvy.

  I fantasized each street turned upside-down—

  dunked deep underwater—

  as if a perverted Atlantis, or an Earthquake version

  of Paul Gallico’s Poseidon Adventure.

  Every tavern radiated rebellion—

  the demented glory of overflowing beer pitchers.

  I held ideas as if holding a party,

  stood sunflowers on the North End Library rooftop,

  lifted French from records voicing suspicions,

  and eyed James Brown vaulting from vinyl

  like light ricocheting off a gold brick.

  But soon Love had me all upside-down.

  XI

  But how could I woo second-cousin Nona—

  no-plain-face Muse, outta Three Mile Plains?

  (Neither miles of small print nor the sprawl of epic

  can image her Majesty.)

  My relation, never true love, nevertheless, her smile

  mimed Mona Lisa elusiveness;

  her Négritude, camouflaged, tinted her skin

  a hint of New Orleans pralines;

  her kiss had—I had to guess—the savour

  of honeyed m
ilk.

  Her romances were always capital-R Romantic.

  Her jokes were as earnest as Romero’s Zombies.

  Her 45s reeled card-table, 60-watt gloom

  and auto-wreck, 60 m.p.h. pain.

  XII

  Hangin out, lingering, with Nona,

  I got cultured in pickles, guitars, car engines.

  She cared less about doing well for herself

  than doing good for others.

  I could spy the legacy of Slavery

  divulged poignantly in our very colours—

  blue-green-grey eyes or molasses ones,

  blond(e) or copper or black hair

  (that was either rambunctiously curly

  or pass-for-white straight).

  The consequence of my unsolicited

  and quite unsophisticated desire

  was to watch blushing roses blossom

  and taste them in apple pie.

  XIII

  Forgive, please, these down-home metaphors,

  but Nona was like a horse

  I couldn’t ride, couldn’t even pet,

  but for whom I was secretly giddy—

  likely enough to plunge over cliffs.

  Thus, my first love mirrored her blondeness.

  (O, Nona, how could you have shot yourself,

  and emptied out all your irreplaceable blood,

  and blasted your gorgeous being, never vulgar,

  into the soulless solace of a casket?)

  That premier girl’s initials are O.K.

  Okay? She was a premium knockout.

  How could I not feel kayoed

  by that svelte and vexing intellectual?

  XIV

  An Acadian fille with a foxy, Okie name,

  only clandestinely English,

  she urged me to be primal, musky, moody,

  while she swallowed the Eucharistic pill.

  But my eyes and ears weren’t yet open,

  not yet truly formed.

  My blood had still to pump

  like a shotgun,

  to charge—or discharge—the lusts tussling

  in my cranium’s Coliseum.

  I thought I could return the sunken Titanic