Planet of the Arts Volume 7 Issue4 page 6

Last year the poet George Elliotte Clarke published a collection of his poems under the title Whylah Falls.

The poems in Whylah Falls explore a fictitious black community in rural Nova Scotia, based upon
Clarke’s own experiences as a social worker in the maritimes. :

His language is wonderfully lyrical, and Clarke incites the most musical and rhythmic attributes of
humanity as it deals with emotion. The book centres around the courting of Shelley by the romantic poet
Xavier. It explores Shelley’s family’s reaction to Xavier's presence as well as broader conflicts within the
community of Whylah Falls.

Last month George Elliotte Clarke visited Vancouver as part of a broad tour of B.C. He read one night,
with mesmerizing style (and a right hand like a metronome) at the Western Front on East Third, an event
sponsored by the Rungh cultural society. On this night | was able to interview him:

Andrew Robulack: I’!] start with the big question: what is poetry?
George Elliotte Clarke: Poetry is concentrated language; it’s words put together in a compact way to convey

emotion; either as an image or series of images or as anidea
or series of ideas. Or perhaps both together. Of course, the

AR: And that is truly something you could do with most of the poems in this book, is go around
singing them. So I wonder if that’s concious, if the musicality and the thematics are concious or not.

GEC: It’s both. One of the biggest differences between this book and my first book [Saltwater Spirituals
and Deeper Blues] is that my first book came out of my reading, more or less, histories and that kind of
thing. I reflected on them and wrote poems about them. | Whylah Falls] comes out of living. It came out
of my life, but also the lives of the people I knew. For that reason | wanted to write something that could
be meaningful for them, too. Not just fora select few academics somewhere who say “Ah! We get the in-
joke here!” There are some in-jokes in the book (chuckling). But, for the most part, | wanted something
that I could give to my people, and, also, to the general public and have people understand what | was trying
to say.

My interest as a writer js not to be locked up in a mausoleum somewhere—not to be like Lenin or
someting like that. It’s rather to write something that people can understand, perhaps appreciate, andeven,
above that, maybe, even, bother to remember or to enjoy.

In terms of being deliberate, | try to avoid the kind of

best poetry seems to have both together.
So, ina sense, at different times, everyone can be a poet,
everyone can speak poetry. Because when our emotions get

the better of us, when we feel something very strongly and |
ourintellect can also recognize that emotion, then the words ey So

that we can give to that experience are often going to be |
quite poetic. So that, in essence, is what poetry is.

AR: So there’s an element of spontaneity- §

GEC: Oh, yeah, indeed, indeed. Poetry can come out of all
kinds of things. It can come out of everyday speech, it can

obscurity that has tended to be the common denominator of
contemporary poetry, modem poetry, post-modem poetry. |

v want ot write things that will, ina sense, be clear, and open.
at And, in that sense, yes, a song, To write a ballad, you write
a song. That’s plain, that’s open. Folk songs, | think, are full of
poetry—it’s the simplest stuff. The reason why that stuff is
powerful as poetry is because it just talks about emotion,
sometimes very simply.

Something like Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant's Tale’,
aletter; he has that line init that goes: “Calledto you athousand
times, | never looked back”. That’s a homely line—it’s not a
line that, | think, would leap up at one. It doesn’t talk about
sparkling clouds in the summer time; it’s just a very straight-

come out of newspapers, it can come out of greeting cards,

song lyrics. Of course, standard poems, poems written as
‘poems’. But it can come out of all kinds of things and |
think it’s important for.the writer, for the poet, to be open
to all those sources of inspiration and ideas, and so forth,
that poetry can take, and use.

AR: As for poetry, pure ‘poetry’, as opposed to speech,
where does that stand to us today? In our society?

GEC: It’s curious, people don’t think about poetry, for the
most part. But it’s in their lives, whether they want it to be

forward expression of feeling. Ultimately it’s very ballad-like.
Asa matter of fact, | would claim that particular poem as a type
of blues. It has to be read as a kind of blues-poem.

AR: In Books in Canada you are described as, I can’t re-
member the term they use, but basically as musically inept.

GEC:(laughter)
AR: However, going beyond Whylah Falls’ ability to be put

to music, it has its own, inbred sense of tonality—a sort of
innate musical resonance.

ornot. Because, again; of this general tendency of language
under a pressure of high emotion, with the gift of some

GEC: Yes, | think what we’re getting into is metre and rhythm

sense of an intellect, you will find poetry being bom again

and again and again. And we can find poetry in, say, song
lyrics: look at rap music. Rappers do not consider them-
selves, | think, to be poets. But, nevertheless, the kind of

language that they are about and that they employ, is very

and all of that. They are important because they pace com-
munication. It’s funny because language is tied so intimately
torhythm and you really can’ tescape it. And when you do, as
some politicians do, you end up with the most boring, bland—
but even that kind of rhythm is quite deliberate; when a

much that of poetry. It may not be Shakespeare, but it
doesn’t have to be Shakespeare. It only has to be something
can move people; and if it does that, then it is effective
language, and therefore it is poetry.

AR: So poetry is pretty broad.

politician is boring sometimes they want to be boring, they
don’t want you to listen to what they’re saying.

Brian Mulroney is an expert att, I’m sure he practices before
a mirror, how to bore people. But also, from time to time, he
knows how to rouse people, particularly audiences of his

GEC: Yeah, you can narrow it down in terms of form, and
you can say that only blank verse is real poetry, only haiku
is real poetry, only free verse is real poeiry. But that’s just
games, on the margin. Really, | mean that’s a game for

: fellow Tories.
by Andrew Robulack
AR: Is Whylah Falls a tragedy, in the classical sense?

GEC: Uh, it’s a tragic-comedy. That's a twentieth-century
word; and | think it’s appropriate here. There are other ex-

academics. And we should play those kinds of games

because it’s kind of nice—it’s fun. Football, basketball,

hockey, baseball: they don’t make sense, either, but people still play them. I mean (laughs), the same thing,
in some ways, the criticism of poetry. Because sometimes it can be like that: it’s a game. Free verse is up this
year and down next year: what team are you part of?

AR: Well, Whylah Falls has been described as ‘narrative’ poetry.
GEC: Yes.

AR: And it has been compared to Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which is also
considered ‘narrative’ poetry. So would you say that the ‘narrative’ poem is in ‘style’ now?

GEC: No, because when this book [Whylah Falls} came out it was really the only one of this nature out there.
Except for the fact that Paulette Jiles’ Jesse James poems—which is very much a reminiscence of Michael
Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid—came out before this. Which was quite nice, because, actually,
that’s what cemented for me my wish to do this kind of book. So, to answer your question, really and truly,
it hasn’t been done very much, this kind of narrative format.

But it is there, it does exist. And there are some poets I hope, I think, in fact, I know now, more and more,
are going to be using it, or looking at using it. | think it helps the reader—it’s good for the reader to have some
sort of threadto follow through. Rather than just to throw together a collection of fifty or sixty different poems:
here’s a poem on sunflowers, here’s a poem on child abuse.

Poetry is very intense, and that’s why it’s very hard to just simply read a poem and then go from that poem
to another poem. Each poem demands its own attention because, again, it’s that concentrated language.

Actually, I look at it as though a poem is a battery. All the words are a power stored up, and it only comes
to life when it’s read, and the energy flows out and moves into the reader. The reader is the conection for the
poem. So when you have just a miscellany of poems you get a bunch of batteries, and sometimes it’s hard for
the reader to get a charge out of each one. Some of them will leave him or her quite cold.

But with the narrative running through it’s a little easier, | think, to go from poem to poem. Whereas it’s not
so much the sense of constsntly getting new shocks every time, there is something to guide the reader through
the book. While at the same time the poems, hopefully, can, for the most part, stand on their own, or even be
totally taken out of the context of the narrative and still have some impact, or some effect.

AR: Whylah Falls quite often returns, in theme, fo what are considered ‘traditional’ poetic ideals: love,

death, beauty. And, also, in the sense of it being a narrative poem, I see a strong return to the ‘ballad’,
as narrative poems were once named.

GEC: Right!

amples, in literature, of this kind of thing. Classically, comedy
has to end in a marriage. This [Whylah Falls] does not end in marriage, although there is some indication
that there might, possibly, be some kind of long-term relationship between X and Shelley. But it’snot clear
ifthat might happen Soitsort ofis left hanging what their future might be. And there is a death which occurs
init.

AR: Yes, I see Othello’s death as a kind of catharsis. Because there is so much about life and love
revolving around death; beauty and pain.

GEC: Yes, beauty and pain. As far as a philosophy goes, that was the only thing that | found stuck out for
me, this whole relationship between beauty and pain. Well, it’s a cliche to say you can’t have one without
the other—of course you can have one without the other. But they do often tend to come together,
intertwine. You can appreciate one more in the context of the other. Feel one more in the context of the
other. Those two contrast...so, in a sense, that’s also the tragic-comedy.

Shakespeare in Love's Labour’ s Lost does it. It’s a tragic-comedy. He would have called it a comedy,
I’m sure, butit’s not because it doesn’t end ina marriage. The marriage is postponed fora year. Andthere’s
death in it—the scholar dies towards the end of the play. He just dies , so it’s not very happy. There’s a
funeral and the lovers say “Well, because of the funeral, we can’t be together for at least one more year”.
And that’s the way the play ends. It’s not a classic comedy. He was definitely playing against convention
in there.*

Inthe future Clarke plans to continue working with narrative poetry, perhaps in a series of love poems
(what a romantic guy, eh?). He also has an idea for a poetic novel:”’But it will be very short. Which is
the only way you can do a poetic novel; if you do them long, they get really bad (laughs). Everything
becomes poeticized. And the problem with that kind of thing is that poetry has to be concentrated, and
when it expands into prose, and it’s still kind of poetic, then it can get really messy.”

Whylah Falls, by George Eliiotte Clarke, is published by Polestar Press in Vancouver. It should be
available at most book stores.

The Rungh cultural foundation, which sponsored the event last month, is Vancouver's society for
Black and Asian culture.

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Planet of the Arts Volume 7 Issue4 page 6

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