Traverse by George Elliott Clarke
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is a sort of autobiography-in-verse by george elliott clarke; a book thirty years in the making, describing his experiences as a writer, lover, son, father, and the poet laureate of toronto – a title he is quick to downplay as: (appointed under a mayor admittedly prone to crack).
he includes a disclaimer that leaves me with a million questions i want to be able to ask him over drinks:
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 belabored) my poetics: “Canadian” by origin, but “African” by inclination. Thus, like Canuck poets, I dignify; like Black poets, I signify.
i mean, how can you not want to hang out with him after that?
the book that follows is filled with his rapid-fire gunshot words and his typically superb imagery:
XXXIV
Lightning could father rainbows, right?
One night in Digby, rain punctured my brother’s roof,
while my voice funneled down an unctuous phone line,
trying to tunnel into Miz Lady’s heart,
but she was laughing, I was flailing.
“Our” Love was truly “lost like lightning” (lb.).
Man, her wrong words hurt my throat
like I was draining absinthe.
Every maverick thought
leapt and pulsed with clean blood.
Now, the only rainbows fathered were black ink
and black vinyl 45s –
dark prisms of spilled gasoline, oozing,
then catching – like a cold or napalm.
XXXV
Round the Falls – epiphanic, nights brought
ice cream scooped up nigh a French Shore cathedral
and fully dressed sirens just as sensual
as undressed nymphs.
(Nay, call them nymphets;
but imagine nymphos.)
They slaved, gutting fish, but vroomed scarlet roadsters,
with room only for hugging, kissing, drinking,
simultaneously, yeah.
What geniuses of Beauty!
So sincerely, searingly, unerringly cute,
acute, cantilevered, frank, they were,
with nudity more naked than any autobiography,
and infinitely more honest…
and lo! the origin of my beloved book George & Rue:
XLIX
While I aided and abetted the apparition
of Beatrice Chancy, opera and play,
and handcrafted a movie picturing, but not depicting, Whylah Falls –
Virgo’s One Heart Broken Into Song (1999) –
my one-and-only, one-and-only, my only-one Mom,
was dwindling away, vertigo pon vertigo.
But amid her passive – yet aggressive – decline,
she recollected two dissected cousins.
I had to dig up each cadaver outta Archives,
restore each, gaudy, to front-page news.
George and Rufus Hamilton demanded a long poem –
a novel – in which to be sumptuously shown,
to cleanse the criminal grime from their bones:
No whitewash, just light.
he is one of my very favorites, and reading this was a nice little insight into some of the inspirations for his pomes. you really need to get your hands on some of his poetry books if you haven’t, because this dude writes poetry the way it ought to be written – all blood and sex and life, and you don’t need to be on crack to recognize his brilliance.
