An Interview with George Elliott Clarke

TNQ Nonfiction Editor, Lamees Al Ethari, catches up with renowned Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke in this exclusive interview. She asks how the Poets Breaking into Song project began, how he stays inspired to keep writing, and what other literary projects he has been working on.

Lamees: How do you stay inspired and motivated to keep writing? 

George: So long as you are alive, and so long as you are thinking, you will always have new experiences, new memories, new ideas, new concerns, new interests, new inspirations. In addition, you will always have new words, new vocabulary, new diction, new ways of thinking about how to put words together; and as one word attracts another, so will you automatically be always thinking of potentially new writing, whatever sort:  Poetry, drama, stories, novels, essays, journalism. Remain attuned to your own sense of how words work and what words mean to you, and what specific words mean to you, emotionally. 

Lamees: What inspires you to write and create?  

George: The challenge. The challenge of trying to see if I can write something that I personally find satisfying and something that I hope will give readers some satisfaction, some pleasure, some entertainment, some information, or help them see things in a way that may be new..

I try to stay alive to all the language I hear or read. The challenge is to find the right words in the right order. And to respect the history of poetic utterance; to know that we are drinking from the springs of Parnassus, as many, many brilliant and great poets have done before us. We need to realize all of the terrific, brilliant, eternal, deathless utterances that have come before us, and then to try to find some way to say something that might measure up. 

Lamees: How did you find the confidence to write when you first started? What would you tell somebody who is just starting to write poetry? 

George: I ask my creative writing students, “What is a poet?” They’ll give me all kinds of different answers, and a lot of them are striking. However, a poet is someone who works with words. And that’s a trick answer, actually. Because it’s not just any words, they are your words. The confidence building exercise for a poet is to understand that your vocabulary is, in fact, your art. 

The challenge is to take your vocabulary, which you have learned from school, which you have absorbed from your parents and siblings and family members, that you have taken in from your religious culture, perhaps, or from your specific minority, linguistic culture, all those words, the slang, that you use with your friends and classmates; plus the vocabulary that you have imbibed from books, including those in translation or in a different language, as well as the canonical books of British, Canadian, American, and the Commonwealth Literature, not to mention movie dialogue and song lyrics; and to take this diction–that is uniquely yours and craft your poetry from this treasury.

So, the challenge is for you as an individual; your duty, as a poet, is to make sure that you exploit your stock of words as powerfully as you can, because nobody else ever will. The more you can understand that your ownership of your vocabulary gives you immense power, the more confidence you can have. 

The poet is ultimately their voice. The job of a poet is to produce an individual voice. 

Lamees: How did the Poets Breaking into Song project begin? When did it begin? 

George: It’s five years this May. The first program we did was in May 2021. But I gotta go way back in time to give you the actual genesis of the whole thing.

 So, I’m 15 years old, 1975 in Halifax, I just completed grade 9. I’m going into grade 10, high school. I’m 15, I want to be a rock star. I don’t play any instruments, I can’t read music. So, what am I gonna do? The answer? “Oh, I’ll write songs.” In truth, that meant writing song lyrics. So, I start studying how to write songs, and I’m reading books about being a songwriter, and they say repeatedly,, “You gotta be a poet, you gotta be a poet, you gotta be a poet.” So, by age 16, I went from writing four lyrics a day to writing 4 poems a day. I had a very simplistic distinction between poetry and song back then. A song rhymed, but poetry didn’t have to.

So, fast forward. I began to leave songwriting behind as I became a published poet more and more. But, I always had an interest in music. Then, when I was 32, I was approached by James Rolfe, a great Canadian composer, to write him an opera libretto. The opera appeared 6 years later, in 1998; it was a big hit: Beatrice Chancy. So suddenly I’m an opera librettist, and I loved the whole experience. 

Then I was approached by the Guelph Jazz Festival, alongside D.D. Jackson, another great Canadian composer, based in New York, to write an opera. We ended up doing two operas together:  Quebecite appeared in 2003, and an opera on Pierre Elliott Trudeau, which is called Trudeau, Long March, Shining Path, appeared in 2007. So now I’m 47, when that opera came out, still a poet, but also very involved with music through those operas, and then, I had people putting music to various lyrics of mine. So, I saw myself validly as being both a songwriter and  a poet. 

Then the pandemic happened. While on sabbatical in 2020-2021, I began to commission artwork from various friends, and then by December 2020, I wanted to get my companion, Giovanna Riccio, a special Xmas gift. I thought to ask my composer friend, James Rolfe, to score one of Giovanna’s poems. I sent him a selection of her poetry, and he chose the poem I really wanted, which is called “Namesake.” It is based on the true story of how she, as an Italian immigrant to Canada, saw her birth name, Giovanna, changed to Joan by the Toronto school system, but she ended up reclaiming her Italian name in her 40s. When I read her poem, it just sent shivers down my spine. 

James wrote a marvelous score for that poem. I had a cousin of mine sing it over Zoom to Giovanna on Christmas Day, 2020. And she wept for joy at the surprise. 

I wanted other poets to have the same experience. Starting with poet friends of mine, who I knew had never had a song done, I asked James to score poems for them. By May 2021, we had five poets who had songs and we put on a show on Zoom. We had 300 people watching online, 5 countries involved, representing 3 continents. 

Poetry, music, song: These are the very roots of what we call humanity. It’s just people sitting around a campfire as cave people talking about the hunt, asking for the gods and the goddesses to give them good luck.

Nothing makes me happier than to hear the audience erupt in applause or have people sit in tears or people just, clap wildly, crazily, because all of a sudden they get the sense of song. They understand poetry suddenly, intuitively. 

Lamees: What are your latest publications or projects, apart from Poets Breaking into Song?

George: I have a forthcoming collection of miscellaneous poetry, Green, my 6th ‘colouring book’, with Gaspereau Press.

I’m working with a Canadian poet, filmmaker, and scholar, David Swartz, who is a professor of English Lit at NOVA University in Lisbon, Portugal, to publish a book of our translations of the late, great Portuguese poet, Nuno Júdice (1949-2024). To be precise, David is the actual translator, while my job is to ‘polish’ the English to keep it as poetic as the original Portuguese! 

My most recent poetry publication is Canticles III (MMXXIII) (2023), from Guernica Editions, which is the sixth and last volume of my epic poetry project, Canticles, of which the first volume, Canticles I (MMXVI), appeared in 2016.