ON ENTERING THE ECHO CHAMBER OF EPIC:
My “Canticles” vs Pound’s Cantos
George Elliott Clarke
Clarke introduces his epic poem, “Canticles,” in response to Ezra Pound’s contentious Cantos, a 20th-century postmodern epic both vilified for its integration of fascist propaganda and heralded for its haunting lyricism. Pound, a classicist, nodded to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body,” both of which skirted racist material yet refused to be contained, or restrained, by formalism.
Clarke’s “Canticles” echoes slave and imperialist debates from Cleopatra to Celan, invoking Derek Walcott and NourbeSe Philip to invite harmonious, multiple, and multicultural voices in their revisions of Pound’s controversial masterpiece.
On Entering the Echo Chamber of Epic
George Elliott Clarke
$20.00
Arbutus Editions, 2016
64 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-928172-10-9
“Having read Dante’s “Inferno,” I know that his Divine Comedy is a tripartite affair, and so I’ve accepted a similar division.
Book I is a chronological collage—a series of Poundian dramatic monologues—extending from the early Christian era to 1945, examining the image of blackness in the Occident, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and eventual emancipation and/or abolition, and the enterprise of Western imperialism, especially in terms of its effects on Africa and people of African heritage.
My deliberately kaleidoscopic narrative opens in The Holy Land and closes in Auschwitz.
Book II will be a rewriting of Judeo-Christian and other theological texts that have sustained Africans in the Diaspora and is retold from an Afrocentric perspective.
Book III will be an account of the creation of the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia in the 1850s. While the first two books of “Canticles” will range widely, my ‘paradiso,’ will be literally provincial, ‘bringing it all back home,’ to quote Bob Dylan’s 1964 album title.”
—George Elliott Clarke
George Elliott Clarke has been the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto and holds eight honorary doctorates. He has received the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Order of Nova Scotia, and the Order of Canada. Clarke champions writers of African descent and coined the term “Africadian” to identify the Black culture of Atlantic Canada.
Read an interview with George Elliott Clarke in Portal 2016.
Lecture
Clarke delivered The Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture on October 22, 2015.
Poetry
Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983)
Whylah Falls (1990)
Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems (1994)
Gold Indigoes (1999)
Execution Poems (2001)
Blue (2001)
Illuminated Verses (2005)
Black (2006)
Blues and Bliss (2008)
I & I (2009)
Red (2011)
Lasso the Wind (2013)
Illicit Sonnets (2013)
Traverse (2014)
Extra Illicit Sonnets (2015)
Gold (2016)
Canticles I (MMXVI)
Canticles I (MMXVII)
These Are the Words [with John B. Lee] (2018)
Portia White: A Portrait in Words (2019)
Canticles II (MMXX)
Canticles II (MMXIX)
White (2021)
J’Accuse! (Poem versus Silence) (2021)
Canticles III (MMXXII)
Canticles III (MMXXIII)
Clarke has also published several dramatic poems and librettos including Beatrice Chancy (2000), Trudeau: Long March & Shining Path (2007), Québécité (2003), and The Merchant of Venice (Retried) (2017).
His non-fiction includes Odysseys Home (2002), Directions Home (2012), Where Beauty Survived (2021), and Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (2023).
He has written two novels: George and Rue (2005) and The Motorcyclist (2016).
His editorial work includes two volumes of Fire on the Water (1991, 1992), Border Lines (1995), Eyeing the North Star (1997), and Locating Home (2018).
Poetry
Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983)
Whylah Falls (1990)
Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems (1994)
Gold Indigoes (1999)
Execution Poems (2001)
Blue (2001)
Illuminated Verses (2005)
Black (2006)
Blues and Bliss (2008)
I & I (2009)
Red (2011)
Lasso the Wind (2013)
Illicit Sonnets (2013)
Traverse (2014)
Extra Illicit Sonnets (2015)
Gold (2016)
Canticles I (MMXVI)
Canticles I (MMXVII)
These Are the Words [with John B. Lee] (2018)
Portia White: A Portrait in Words (2019)
Canticles II (MMXX)
Canticles II (MMXIX)
White (2021)
J’Accuse! (Poem versus Silence) (2021)
Canticles III (MMXXII)
Canticles III (MMXXIII)
Clarke has also published several dramatic poems and librettos including Beatrice Chancy (2000), Trudeau: Long March & Shining Path (2007), Québécité (2003), and The Merchant of Venice (Retried) (2017).
His non-fiction includes Odysseys Home (2002), Directions Home (2012), Where Beauty Survived (2021), and Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (2023).
He has written two novels: George and Rue (2005) and The Motorcyclist (2016).
His editorial work includes two volumes of Fire on the Water (1991, 1992), Border Lines (1995), Eyeing the North Star (1997), and Locating Home (2018).
ON ENTERING THE ECHO CHAMBER OF EPIC:
My “Canticles” vs Pound’s Cantos
George Elliott Clarke
Clarke introduces his epic poem, “Canticles,” in response to Ezra Pound’s contentious Cantos, a 20th-century postmodern epic both vilified for its integration of fascist propaganda and heralded for its haunting lyricism. Pound, a classicist, nodded to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body,” both of which skirted racist material yet refused to be contained, or restrained, by formalism.
Clarke’s “Canticles” echoes slave and imperialist debates from Cleopatra to Celan, invoking Derek Walcott and NourbeSe Philip to invite harmonious, multiple, and multicultural voices in their revisions of Pound’s controversial masterpiece.
Arbutus Editions, 2016
64 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-928172-10-9
$20.00
“Having read Dante’s “Inferno,” I know that his Divine Comedy is a tripartite affair, and so I’ve accepted a similar division.
Book I is a chronological collage—a series of Poundian dramatic monologues—extending from the early Christian era to 1945, examining the image of blackness in the Occident, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and eventual emancipation and/or abolition, and the enterprise of Western imperialism, especially in terms of its effects on Africa and people of African heritage.
My deliberately kaleidoscopic narrative opens in The Holy Land and closes in Auschwitz.
Book II will be a rewriting of Judeo-Christian and other theological texts that have sustained Africans in the Diaspora and is retold from an Afrocentric perspective.
Book III will be an account of the creation of the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia in the 1850s. While the first two books of “Canticles” will range widely, my ‘paradiso,’ will be literally provincial, ‘bringing it all back home,’ to quote Bob Dylan’s 1964 album title.”
—George Elliott Clarke
Tom Wayman holds an MFA from the University of California and worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun. He has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto as well as at SFU. His bibliography includes over twenty poetry collections, and he co-founded the Kootenay School of the Arts and the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. He has been the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He received the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2013 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark in 2015.
Read an interview with Tom Wayman in Portal 2008.
George Elliott Clarke has been the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto and holds eight honorary doctorates. He has received the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Order of Nova Scotia, and the Order of Canada. Clarke champions writers of African descent and coined the term “Africadian” to identify the Black culture of Atlantic Canada.
Read an interview with George Elliott Clarke in Portal 2016.
Lecture
Clarke delivered The Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture on October 22, 2015.
Poetry
Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983)
Whylah Falls (1990)
Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems (1994)
Gold Indigoes (1999)
Execution Poems (2001)
Blue (2001)
Illuminated Verses (2005)
Black (2006)
Blues and Bliss (2008)
I & I (2009)
Red (2011)
Lasso the Wind (2013)
Illicit Sonnets (2013)
Traverse (2014)
Extra Illicit Sonnets (2015)
Gold (2016)
Canticles I (MMXVI)
Canticles I (MMXVII)
These Are the Words [with John B. Lee] (2018)
Portia White: A Portrait in Words (2019)
Canticles II (MMXX)
Canticles II (MMXIX)
White (2021)
J’Accuse! (Poem versus Silence) (2021)
Canticles III (MMXXII)
Canticles III (MMXXIII)
Clarke has also published several dramatic poems and librettos including Beatrice Chancy (2000), Trudeau: Long March & Shining Path (2007), Québécité (2003), and The Merchant of Venice (Retried) (2017).
His non-fiction includes Odysseys Home (2002), Directions Home (2012), Where Beauty Survived (2021), and Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (2023).
He has written two novels: George and Rue (2005) and The Motorcyclist (2016).
His editorial work includes two volumes of Fire on the Water (1991, 1992), Border Lines (1995), Eyeing the North Star (1997), and Locating Home (2018).