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Blue
Marking the tenth anniversary of the publication of George Elliott Clarke’s Blue , this new and revised Gaspereau Press edition reminds us why Clarke has become one of Canada’s most read poets. His work is electric, alive, full of fury, beauty and truth. “I craved to draft lyrics that would pour out–Pentecostal fire–pell mell, scorching, bright, a poetics of arson,” writes Clarke. “I am a child of napalm.”
169 pages, Paperback
First published May 7, 2002
1 person is currently reading
108 people want to read
About the author
George Elliott Clarke
75 books90 followersA seventh-generation Nova Scotian, George Elliott Clarke was born in 1960 in Windsor Plans, Nova Scotia. He is known as a poet, as well as for his two-volume anthology of Black Writing from Nova Scotia, Fire in the Water. Volume One contains spirituals, poety sermons, and accounts from 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; Volume Two collects the work of the Black Cultural Renaissance in Nova Scotia, which, in Clarke's words, "speaks to people everywhere about overcoming hardships and liberating the spirit." Currently on faculty at Duke University, he is now writing both a play and an opera on slavery in Nova Scotia, a reformulation of Shelley's The Cenci. He has won many awards including the 1981 Prize for Adult Poetry from the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, he was the 1983 first runner-up for the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry at the Banff Centre School of Arts and 1991 winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry from the Ottawa Independent Writers.
Books: Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Pottersfield, 1983); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990, 2000); Provencal Songs (Magnum Book Store, 1993); Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993 (Pottersfield, 1994); Provencal Songs II (Above/ground, 1997); Whylah Falls: The Play (Playwrights Canada, 1999, 2000); Beatrice Chancy (Polstar Books, 1999); Gold Indigoes (Carolina Wren, 2000); Execution Poems (Gaspereau, 2001); Blue (Raincoat, 2001); Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (UofT Press, 2002)
Books: Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Pottersfield, 1983); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990, 2000); Provencal Songs (Magnum Book Store, 1993); Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993 (Pottersfield, 1994); Provencal Songs II (Above/ground, 1997); Whylah Falls: The Play (Playwrights Canada, 1999, 2000); Beatrice Chancy (Polstar Books, 1999); Gold Indigoes (Carolina Wren, 2000); Execution Poems (Gaspereau, 2001); Blue (Raincoat, 2001); Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (UofT Press, 2002)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 13, 2018
WOOHOO GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE!!!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-sc...
you know how some authors keep writing the same book over and over?? and you wish they would maybe try to write something a little risky or out of character?? that's how i feel here. why does george elliott clarke have to keep writing such beautiful poetry?? why can't he just try, for once, to write something that is boring or poorly executed?? i'm sick to death of his flexible vocabulary, his clear-eyed control of description, his ability to mimic the style of every single poet he admires. i crave the hackneyed, the mundane, the safe. i want something pompous and incomprehensible. do you canadians not do that there??
come to my blog!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-sc...
you know how some authors keep writing the same book over and over?? and you wish they would maybe try to write something a little risky or out of character?? that's how i feel here. why does george elliott clarke have to keep writing such beautiful poetry?? why can't he just try, for once, to write something that is boring or poorly executed?? i'm sick to death of his flexible vocabulary, his clear-eyed control of description, his ability to mimic the style of every single poet he admires. i crave the hackneyed, the mundane, the safe. i want something pompous and incomprehensible. do you canadians not do that there??
come to my blog!
February 7, 2016
...Blue is licorice manufactured from liquor and rice
Blue is what happens when you sleep through your moment of
truth
Blue is snuff films screened in classrooms for literary reasons
Blue is coffee from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica
Blue is a moth huddled in the middle of a sugar bowl as the
spoon is plunged in
Blue is Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues; Lush Dreams,
Blue Exile; and Blue
Fatal, foolhardy poetry.
- from Blue Elegies, I.i.
All I ask from poetry is that it let me look through someone else's eyes and see, really see, just a little. That it break and grind the world, deliver it to me dripping in language. That it make me cringe a little. Maybe laugh. Shudder some. Open up a place I have never seen, or a place I have seen every day of my life and never really seen. So, George Elliott Clarke, I salute you. For letting me look through your black Canadian man's eyes for a little while. For these gems. This is what poetry should be. This is what poetry should do.
More than that, it is here done by a man who has read both deeply and widely and who has the raw talent and love of language to stand up and talk back to those he has read, to join the conversation and hold his own. (I was absolutely tickled by the assaults on Ezra Pound.) As might be gathered from the title, this is a profane, pornographic little bundle of poems, and the repeated whore imagery did wear just a little. But again, poetry exists to bring me another world view, male gaze and all.
I loved so many of these it's hard to know which one to memorialize here. My very favorite is "Elegy for Mona States (1958-1999)" but it's too long for my purposes at the moment. Several of my favorites are. I'll go with this one:
Self-Portrait
for Arnold 'Ted' Davidson (1936-1999)
I am the lyrical warrior
who eyes the icy moon
and gulps tear-soured rum,
while etching blues to beguile
a difficult, desired lover,
and who imagines his enemies
gashed and battered by God,
and who drifts, enduring exile,
but hallucinating of home, and love, and war.
I'll end my days, withered, sorrowful,
mourning all of these words,
wondering why I was not loved enough,
why I loved not enough.
Blue is what happens when you sleep through your moment of
truth
Blue is snuff films screened in classrooms for literary reasons
Blue is coffee from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica
Blue is a moth huddled in the middle of a sugar bowl as the
spoon is plunged in
Blue is Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues; Lush Dreams,
Blue Exile; and Blue
Fatal, foolhardy poetry.
- from Blue Elegies, I.i.
All I ask from poetry is that it let me look through someone else's eyes and see, really see, just a little. That it break and grind the world, deliver it to me dripping in language. That it make me cringe a little. Maybe laugh. Shudder some. Open up a place I have never seen, or a place I have seen every day of my life and never really seen. So, George Elliott Clarke, I salute you. For letting me look through your black Canadian man's eyes for a little while. For these gems. This is what poetry should be. This is what poetry should do.
More than that, it is here done by a man who has read both deeply and widely and who has the raw talent and love of language to stand up and talk back to those he has read, to join the conversation and hold his own. (I was absolutely tickled by the assaults on Ezra Pound.) As might be gathered from the title, this is a profane, pornographic little bundle of poems, and the repeated whore imagery did wear just a little. But again, poetry exists to bring me another world view, male gaze and all.
I loved so many of these it's hard to know which one to memorialize here. My very favorite is "Elegy for Mona States (1958-1999)" but it's too long for my purposes at the moment. Several of my favorites are. I'll go with this one:
Self-Portrait
for Arnold 'Ted' Davidson (1936-1999)
I am the lyrical warrior
who eyes the icy moon
and gulps tear-soured rum,
while etching blues to beguile
a difficult, desired lover,
and who imagines his enemies
gashed and battered by God,
and who drifts, enduring exile,
but hallucinating of home, and love, and war.
I'll end my days, withered, sorrowful,
mourning all of these words,
wondering why I was not loved enough,
why I loved not enough.
January 27, 2022
History fell upon us like the lash -
Lacerating. Black Baptists wept out prayers -
Passion - to hector tar into nectar,
To harvest undeniable honey,
But out weak eyes were stooped by white faces,
We sank, stupefied by white capital.
We chewed breaded blasphemy in our pews,
Then gulped Welch's grape juice, bile, and venom,
While alabaster Christ carped like a cop,
His lips apocalypsing our asses.
Slavery was dead, wasn't it? But blood
Crusted on our rusty-smelling sermons,
A taint of blood for saint-plush lips. How could
We look at the Atlantic and not cry,
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" We knew
The terror of evacuated faith.
The air swerves cold with such calamity.
I chronicle a dark, pockmarked epoch,
Map a province where trains gnaw their way home,
Blackened mummies pitch, gutted by gypsum,
Frail Baptists fall, their crotches worm-eaten:
Debris escalates when black ice sleets in.
I come from Windsor Plains, a wine-stained poet,
Expecting to imbibe William Williams's
Rain in the galvanized pail by the well.
Well, as a child, I spread blackstrap on bread
Between bitter dollops of the Bible.
I had to. I was guilty. I had spied
My sun-skinned mother's glaring skin. (I eyed,
Damingly, her glimmering, mixed-race breasts.)
Enough snow has fallen without license.
A Putsch arrests my heart. My life's naked.
Listen closely: I am trying to cry.
That's my condemned on the page.
* * *
Think of the Hell-promising virgin -
Swivelled on a hot white stallion, jouncing.
Imagine her lolling in that mount,
A gospel become flesh, a lifting.
Are hear eyes burnt-gilty-sapphirish?
Think about that, too.
Are her lips deux dévergondées?
Think about that -
And think about her gold hair lashing
Her thighs, milky, honeying.
My pure religion has come to this:
Hushed frigging lust for a yellow-haired
Roughed cut, a naked, cramped space,
My belly jammed on that thin-haired
Mound, succulent, succubine orifice,
Its brown, wiry hairs twined
And twisted into the hairs rooting
My lean bolt plunging and plunging.
Christ, I'd torch a church and sing in Hell
To sink in her just once, that blonde slut,
In Roeg's Walkabout, her grey skirt swishing across
Her ass, her white panties winking swank cunt.
Ce trou trempé va être coïté crapuleusement....
* * *
Words? Bah! They won't work; they never did.
Work out damned Pound like an exorcist.
The phone lines stutter, spit lies across miles.
Best curl up with eau de vie - King Cole tea.
Supreme vices are viscous, sugary:
Sip unkempt liquor, undulant as licorice.
Despite the fucking cold, Poetry oozes
From the heart, foul rag soppign with saltwater.
* * *
Why does the pig-faced virgin of the gross, unutterable size
Waddle down Somerset sobbing about Ondaatje in the rain?
Why does the ex-cashier in the oil-soaked, violet plaid skirt
Piss on the blood-red tulips heaped up at the War Memorial?
Why does the finance minister, leering a papier-mâché face,
Sashay up to me on Bank Street, to profit my unfussy pussy?
Why does The Norton Anthology canonize poetry like this?
* * *
Between shit and Shakespeare,
Shelley lies, and is beautiful.
Fucking annoying distinctions,
his pages glister - furious as April
water, gushing anti-corruption
freshets, extirpating piled-up filth.
Like Shelley, Bains, you were Capital's
bane, slamming its sadomasochism,
and damning the merde that is money,
and damning that shit called money,
then impeaching Nietzsche, and sawing off
economists' blank, horrifying masks.
O, if bankrupts would butcher bankers
in blood-lush pits, we'd not surrender
plushest April, panting coolly in rivers,
nor the graveyard-annihilating blossoms.
We'd let princesses perish in broken cars,
photographers crawling on them like lice.
* * *
Leaves downpour -
a gilt, burnt-smelling rain,
tincture of finality.
Tractors tire in the fields;
the day decline.
We fall, too.
My hand fists in your guipure hair,
fasts your mouth to my caustic kiss.
Here is love -
that body-drenching ache,
that fine rippling -
so much like leaves -
along the spine,
these pretty chills.
* * *
Disturbances of snow-dishevelled woodpiles;
Moonlight, a fluid snow, cankering my sleep;
Horses kicking up tuberculosis
And mud is slushy streets: I weigh these spoils -
Offerings of a love now overripe -
Her heart that worships worm-corrupt roses.
One obstinate eyes and obsidian
Lust, she dragged me back to funeral
Pastures plaguing backwoods Nova Scotia.
Then this second Gonne - Abyssinian -
Hollowed my heart, sculpting it sepulchral,
Leaving Love no second Nova Scotia.
* * *
Grace is excellence performed casually.
*
Virtue is like bootleg liquor:
Don't claim you got any unless you got a lot.
*
Ugly don't age
and it don't wear out.
Ugly be thoroughly dependable.
*
In the slums,
art.
In the suburbs,
ennui.
*
Actors are prostitutes; playwrights are whores.
*
At literary festivals:
Avoid lineage of ego.
Do not play blackface to white crowds.
Ignore cold silence and cold water.
Spurn green rooms of no alcohol.
Forget the basket of decaying flowers.
*
What is the use of writing so many books,
when poetry is song?
*
Poems must not be statues,
but lightning.
*
Does the poem cohere?
Is it grace?
Lacerating. Black Baptists wept out prayers -
Passion - to hector tar into nectar,
To harvest undeniable honey,
But out weak eyes were stooped by white faces,
We sank, stupefied by white capital.
We chewed breaded blasphemy in our pews,
Then gulped Welch's grape juice, bile, and venom,
While alabaster Christ carped like a cop,
His lips apocalypsing our asses.
Slavery was dead, wasn't it? But blood
Crusted on our rusty-smelling sermons,
A taint of blood for saint-plush lips. How could
We look at the Atlantic and not cry,
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" We knew
The terror of evacuated faith.
The air swerves cold with such calamity.
I chronicle a dark, pockmarked epoch,
Map a province where trains gnaw their way home,
Blackened mummies pitch, gutted by gypsum,
Frail Baptists fall, their crotches worm-eaten:
Debris escalates when black ice sleets in.
I come from Windsor Plains, a wine-stained poet,
Expecting to imbibe William Williams's
Rain in the galvanized pail by the well.
Well, as a child, I spread blackstrap on bread
Between bitter dollops of the Bible.
I had to. I was guilty. I had spied
My sun-skinned mother's glaring skin. (I eyed,
Damingly, her glimmering, mixed-race breasts.)
Enough snow has fallen without license.
A Putsch arrests my heart. My life's naked.
Listen closely: I am trying to cry.
That's my condemned on the page.
- Bio: Black Baptist/Bastard, for Dionne Brand, pg. 19-20
* * *
Think of the Hell-promising virgin -
Swivelled on a hot white stallion, jouncing.
Imagine her lolling in that mount,
A gospel become flesh, a lifting.
Are hear eyes burnt-gilty-sapphirish?
Think about that, too.
Are her lips deux dévergondées?
Think about that -
And think about her gold hair lashing
Her thighs, milky, honeying.
My pure religion has come to this:
Hushed frigging lust for a yellow-haired
Roughed cut, a naked, cramped space,
My belly jammed on that thin-haired
Mound, succulent, succubine orifice,
Its brown, wiry hairs twined
And twisted into the hairs rooting
My lean bolt plunging and plunging.
Christ, I'd torch a church and sing in Hell
To sink in her just once, that blonde slut,
In Roeg's Walkabout, her grey skirt swishing across
Her ass, her white panties winking swank cunt.
Ce trou trempé va être coïté crapuleusement....
- À Dany Laferrière, à la manière de Sade, pg. 28-29
* * *
Words? Bah! They won't work; they never did.
Work out damned Pound like an exorcist.
The phone lines stutter, spit lies across miles.
Best curl up with eau de vie - King Cole tea.
Supreme vices are viscous, sugary:
Sip unkempt liquor, undulant as licorice.
Despite the fucking cold, Poetry oozes
From the heart, foul rag soppign with saltwater.
- Absurdio, pg. 44
* * *
Why does the pig-faced virgin of the gross, unutterable size
Waddle down Somerset sobbing about Ondaatje in the rain?
Why does the ex-cashier in the oil-soaked, violet plaid skirt
Piss on the blood-red tulips heaped up at the War Memorial?
Why does the finance minister, leering a papier-mâché face,
Sashay up to me on Bank Street, to profit my unfussy pussy?
Why does The Norton Anthology canonize poetry like this?
- Ottawa Facsimile, à la manière de Pound, pg. 51
* * *
Between shit and Shakespeare,
Shelley lies, and is beautiful.
Fucking annoying distinctions,
his pages glister - furious as April
water, gushing anti-corruption
freshets, extirpating piled-up filth.
Like Shelley, Bains, you were Capital's
bane, slamming its sadomasochism,
and damning the merde that is money,
and damning that shit called money,
then impeaching Nietzsche, and sawing off
economists' blank, horrifying masks.
O, if bankrupts would butcher bankers
in blood-lush pits, we'd not surrender
plushest April, panting coolly in rivers,
nor the graveyard-annihilating blossoms.
We'd let princesses perish in broken cars,
photographers crawling on them like lice.
- Homage to Hardial Bains (1939-1997), pg. 64-65
* * *
Leaves downpour -
a gilt, burnt-smelling rain,
tincture of finality.
Tractors tire in the fields;
the day decline.
We fall, too.
My hand fists in your guipure hair,
fasts your mouth to my caustic kiss.
Here is love -
that body-drenching ache,
that fine rippling -
so much like leaves -
along the spine,
these pretty chills.
- Falling, pg. 83
* * *
Disturbances of snow-dishevelled woodpiles;
Moonlight, a fluid snow, cankering my sleep;
Horses kicking up tuberculosis
And mud is slushy streets: I weigh these spoils -
Offerings of a love now overripe -
Her heart that worships worm-corrupt roses.
One obstinate eyes and obsidian
Lust, she dragged me back to funeral
Pastures plaguing backwoods Nova Scotia.
Then this second Gonne - Abyssinian -
Hollowed my heart, sculpting it sepulchral,
Leaving Love no second Nova Scotia.
- No Second N.S., pg. 96
* * *
Grace is excellence performed casually.
*
Virtue is like bootleg liquor:
Don't claim you got any unless you got a lot.
*
Ugly don't age
and it don't wear out.
Ugly be thoroughly dependable.
*
In the slums,
art.
In the suburbs,
ennui.
*
Actors are prostitutes; playwrights are whores.
*
At literary festivals:
Avoid lineage of ego.
Do not play blackface to white crowds.
Ignore cold silence and cold water.
Spurn green rooms of no alcohol.
Forget the basket of decaying flowers.
*
What is the use of writing so many books,
when poetry is song?
*
Poems must not be statues,
but lightning.
*
Does the poem cohere?
Is it grace?
- Marginalia, pg. 152-153
December 31, 2021
The book that finally helped me gain fluency in the foreign tongue of poetry—something I feel Clarke would enjoy, since most of the book swirls around themes of ownership over language, who gets to feel proprietary over capital-P Poetry, and how the Black existence can blossom, bloom and endure in a white-centered world. Clarke delivers a smattering of styles in this feast, which is a boon to poetry newbies like me: Keep reading and you'll be rewarded by discovering a host of delicious poems, as sweet as Sussex Ginger Ale and often as addictive.
January 2, 2025
He elevates spoken word to the upper echelon of academic poetic writing. Whatever that means to you is whatever it means to you. All what it means is that I found myself a poet I'd follow through and through. Work of a genius.
April 10, 2015
Blue is described on cover leaf as "black, profane, surly, damning — and unrelenting in its brilliance." And George Elliott Clarke writes of his poems, "I craved to draft lyrics that would pour out like pentecostal fire — pell mell, scorching, bright, loud: a poetics of arson." I think both these descriptions are fairly accurate.
These poems reveal ugly truths with powerful words. They get into the mud, roll around in it: they go straight for gut and expose the entrails. These are poems that mix abrupt, blunt English with profanity and lilting French. These poems "skillfully turn rage into a violet bruise of love and meaning," according to the spine and I see that, too.
The one thing that unsettled me was how women seemed to be described as sluts and whores, with occasional visions of violence against them (although to be fair visions of violence happen throughout and to many, but it seems to be particularly hostile against women). Positive representations of women were few. But maybe I'm missing something, because these poems are not meant to be nice, but rough, ragged, and brutally real.
Many of these poems were not my cup of tea, they didn't resonate with me. But I can see their beauty, their power and I did love the poems in the last section, called "Ashen Blues". I respect the voice her, the full tilt bravery of the words. This collection is worth a read and many moments of contemplation. I'll have to reread myself at some point to try to reconsider some of these poems from a different angle.
These poems reveal ugly truths with powerful words. They get into the mud, roll around in it: they go straight for gut and expose the entrails. These are poems that mix abrupt, blunt English with profanity and lilting French. These poems "skillfully turn rage into a violet bruise of love and meaning," according to the spine and I see that, too.
The one thing that unsettled me was how women seemed to be described as sluts and whores, with occasional visions of violence against them (although to be fair visions of violence happen throughout and to many, but it seems to be particularly hostile against women). Positive representations of women were few. But maybe I'm missing something, because these poems are not meant to be nice, but rough, ragged, and brutally real.
Many of these poems were not my cup of tea, they didn't resonate with me. But I can see their beauty, their power and I did love the poems in the last section, called "Ashen Blues". I respect the voice her, the full tilt bravery of the words. This collection is worth a read and many moments of contemplation. I'll have to reread myself at some point to try to reconsider some of these poems from a different angle.
"A pen burns paper. A black Blitzkrieg
Blazes, leaving the glinting odour of charred
Diction, a vocabulary in ashes: Detritus.
The word-scorched paper smells darkly."
— from "Burning Poems"
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews