Stephen Cain1
To readers who primarily associate Austin Clarke with the writing of short fiction, memoirs, essays and award-winning novels, it must have come as some surprise to see him turn to the genre of poetry in the two late publications Where the Sun Shines Best (2013) and In Your Crib (2015). After all, poetry is typically viewed as a young person’s activity—few writers take up poetry in their later years, and even those who have practised poetry throughout their careers rarely create significant verse in old age. Yet those who have followed Clarke’s work closely will know that, in fact, he did begin his writing career by publishing verse—indeed, award-
winning poetry, which I believe represents his very earliest Canadian publications—with five poems in The Review of Trinity College, in 1957. Moreover, thanks to the archival work of Paul Barrett, we now know that Clarke wrote poetry throughout his career and that the issues raised through his poetry resonate throughout his more public prose.
These many issues, ranging from police violence and the surveillance of Black communities in Canada, to the fears of old age and personal regrets, are all certainly worth investigating in his poetry, but what I wish to do in this chapter is to use his early poetry as a basis to examine his later verse, and to highlight two elements that seem to me to most strongly characterize his poetry: form (both generic and metric) and, more importantly, Clarke’s attention to space and spatiality.
The significance of space is apparent in much of Clarke’s verse, but is made overt in his frequent use of adverbs of place, demonstratives, and prepositions, most notably in the very titles of his two volumes of poetry: WHERE the Sun Shines Best, and IN your Crib. But we see this attention to space even in the earliest verse of the 1950s. For example, in the second of two Trinity College poems2 reprinted in The Austin Clarke Reader (henceforth ACR), “From My Lover’s Home,” a lyrical lament regarding the absence of the loved one is represented in explicitly spatial terms: “From my lover’s home to me there is the sea” (ACR 254). However, this is not a topographic poem describing a landscape and state of mind, but rather one in which the poetic speaker’s body is imbricated; as he later writes: “There is the sea from my lover’s home and me. / Right down my side, right down my left side / There is the sea, the dark sea” (254).
In contrast, with regard to the earlier Trinity College poem, “Fishermen Looking Out to Sea,” we do see a more externalized, topographic gaze at work, with a disembodied speaker gazing at fishermen, who in turn, look outside the poetic frame to the sea. An elegy, rather than a lover’s lament, for the deaths of generations of fishermen and a premonition of the subject’s future death by drowning, the poem is marked by the repeated refrain, “Why do you sit beneath the burning August sun”? (253–54).
I mention the presence of a refrain, for this poem is much more formally complex than “From My Lover’s Home”; so complex and obscure, in fact, that many readers would likely require recourse to poetic guidebooks to recognize that the poem closely resembles the medieval French form known as the rondeau redoublé. The rondeau itself is a rather arcane form, especially in English, but the rondeau redoublé is even rarer, consisting as it does of five quatrains and a quintet with refrains repeated on lines 1–4, and then on lines 8, 12, 16, 20, and 25.3 An uncommon form, and certainly not often practised in the twentieth century, one of the few English medieval poets who explored the rondeau (or rondel/roundel) was Chaucer. Clarke’s experimentation with this form indicates the strong influence exerted on his work by the traditional English canon, and his school-days reading of Chaucer is noted at length in the sixteenth chapter of his memoir ’Membering, where Clarke recalls studying Chaucer in 1953 and using the language and style of The Canterbury Tales to write texts that describe his classmates’ “oddities.” In retrospect, he sees these works as his first attempts at poetry: “These character sketches were my first ramblings into creative writing. I enjoyed writing these capsules of character; and I became good at them; and they made the literary magazine which we edited and published, in the long tradition of Sixth Form boys editing college magazines” (247–48). Whether Charles Chadwick, the editor at The Review and judge of the poetry contest for 1957, was more impressed by Clarke’s complex prosody or the poem’s uncommon imagery, “Fishermen Looking Out to Sea” nonetheless became Clarke’s first literary success, garnering him a cash prize of five dollars (Algoo-Baksh 37).
In her 1994 biography of Clarke, Stella Algoo-Baksh notes that after winning the poetry award in The Review, “Clarke wrote other poems and offered them to Chadwick, but while the latter provided critiques, advice, and support he did not think Clarke’s new work merited publication” (37). However, Clarke did in fact publish two more poems with The Review in the following issue (not indicated by Algoo-Baksh or included in her bibliography of Clarke’s periodical publications), again writing as A.A. Chesterfield-Clarke. Both poems reveal Clarke’s traditional English influences,4 in this case the Romanticism of Keats, but with an E.A. Poe flavour, as in lines from “The Rogue in Me”: “In my fears are the fears of Cleopatra, / Fears of death, fears for the dead. / I have lived one thousand years in trees and bush, / And have died with every fall of leaf, / And withered with each rainless season” (13). The second poem in that issue, “He Walks Beside the Sea,” however, now adds perambulation to Clarke’s established preference for a poetics of static space: “He walks beside the sea, a trifling profile / Mistakenly created. / He walks by the sea, on a cross of sorrows” (33). While somewhat overwrought in its affect, this poem does, however, mark a change from the more imagistic use of landscape in his previous poems to a new interest in combining emotion with spatiality that will become more pronounced in future works.
Clarke’s first post-university publications were two poems in the short-lived Toronto little literary magazine Evidence (ten issues, 1960–67, edited by Kenneth Craig). While the second of these poems, “Kirkland, North by North,” which appeared in issue 2 of Evidence, is mentioned by Algoo-Baksh in her biography, the first untitled poem, which appeared in the previous issue, is not, nor is it listed her in bibliography of Clarke’s publications. This four-page poem is, however, discussed at some length by Clarke in ’Membering, in which he characterizes it as overly influenced by “T.S. Eliot in some of the music and phrasing, and Dylan Thomas’s echoes in the other lines. It is obvious to me, fifty-two years after this was first published, what I was reading, either for pleasure, or for instruction” (351).
Indeed, the Thomas elements are quite pronounced in the poem, with strong echoes of the pastoral “Fern Hill,” such as:
In my barefoot days, under the sun, blackened
By miles of walking, and moons of coming, and never going,
In my bastard days, young and pure; before
I saw everything, but innocence in girls,
Browned and cocoed, on beaches, marbly
Under the sore foot, and lazy as my native-cousins
Stretching in yawns till moonshine come. . . .
Through the track and gully, through the backyard
Of the Bishop’s, strangled with sacred linen
On the sycamore tree, all brambles and no leaves
That wagged its mouth over the Hill. (n.p.)
Beyond its value in indicating Clarke’s early influences, this poem also demonstrates his poetic development from the Trinity College poems, both in its length and its attention to space. Once again we see the emphasis on prepositions (“under the sun,” “on beaches,” “under the sore foot,” “through the track and gully, through the backyard,” “on the sycamore,” “over the Hill”), but what is added in this poem is a more resonant subjectivity, with the poet moving from the use of a generic “he” to a detailed, seemingly autobiographical sketch of a youth spent in Barbados.
“Kirkland, North by North,” the second of the Evidence poems, is a page longer, but even more wide-ranging in its perspectives.5 Likely inspired by Clarke’s experience as a newspaper reporter working in Timmins and Kirkland Lake from Christmas 1959 to the winter of 1961 (Algoo-Baksh 42–43), this poem is ambitious in its geographic invocation and anticipates Clarke’s use of space to structure a sustained narrative that he will master in Where the Sun Shines Best. In what has at this point become a characteristic move, Clarke’s poem begins with a poetic gaze at a fixed landscape:
Here lies tons of driftwood under snow
Summer lakes and winter-rinks
With their fingers twixt the page
Of their thoughts of snow and drink. (n.p.)
However, after five quatrains of description of a snowbound mining town, the poem shifts both formally and subjectively to consider the life of an unfulfilled woman in the North whose life is compared metaphorically to a dry well:
Thirty times, in years, has her rope and pail
Touched bottom and come up unadorned
With rope, and pail, and moss: come waterless,
And she had waited at the top, expectant with dried lips
To kiss the drops of any liquid thing:
Water or growth, or well or love. (n.p.)
What unites the first section of the poem to this seemingly incongruous moment, however, is the repeated image of snow. As he writes earlier of the woman: “Thirty years have stretched before her like a road / A road in winter, long, and empty like a winter road. / And snow, her only sure companion which always came” (n.p.). Indeed, just as snow is referenced twice in the first stanza of the poem, it continues to appear throughout the second section, and ultimately connects to the third movement of the poem, which describes the main street of Kirkland Lake:
A man living in the North thinks nothing
But snow; sees nothing but snow; is nothing
But snow, and abomination. (n.p.)
Acting almost as a refrain at this point, the invocation of snow then allows the poet to observe and comment upon various citizens of the town moving along the icy main street, such as the alcoholic Old John, the sex worker Celeste, and a mysterious, unnamed man who walks the street cloaked in a fur coat and whose thoughts then conclude the poem:
A man making his home in God’s north country
Cannot afford to think of God
The snow is too omnipotent. (n.p.)
With “Kirkland, North by North,” then, we can observe Clarke moving from his earlier poems representing fixed landscapes and singular perspectives to a new, more wide-ranging eye, taking in several spaces and subjectivities. The use of snow, both as meteorological and geographical phenomenon (as it falls, as it settles and changes the terrain of the town), and as an element that the various citizens experience and share, is an innovative way of structuring a long poem, one to which Clarke will return in Where the Sun Shines Best, where he uses the space of Moss Park, but also its fallen leaves and environmental conditions, to connect and examine the lives of both the homeless and the military recruits at the armoury.
In her contribution to this volume (“Austin A.C. Clarke Is the Most”), Kate Siklosi discusses a final poem from this early 1950–60 period. Siklosi describes this text as a type of pastoral where the poetic speaker situates themselves at a “second floor” window ledge contemplating the natural world of “unwarmed birds and squirrels / living . . . in trees.” What is striking to me about this short early poem, however, is how it immediately establishes the spatial position of his poetic speaker—a tendency extended across his two last two book-length poems—as an observer at a second-floor window gazing at park-like space.
While Siklosi’s admirably perceptive reading notes that Clarke’s form may be a “Byzantine metre also known as ‘political verse,’” she is also careful to indicate that this does not “imply a political tone or polemic, per se.” Yet the political edge of Clarke’s poetics does become more pronounced in his poetry of the 1980s. Thinking of politics in this later poetry, I am reminded of a quotation from Clarke’s 1992 essay “Public Enemies: Police Violence and Black Youth,” wherein he writes that when faced with injustice, and angry, he turns to poetry: “I am part of that anger. I am aware of the despair. I am part of that despair. The rage is mine. But I, armed with greater age (if not greater wisdom as a consequence), put my reliance on the poets” (343). Certainly we can see, with respect to his two known poems from the 1980s, a new turn to anger and politics on Clarke’s part.
“Do Not Let Them Choose the Fragrance,” published in this collection, addresses the 1979 murder of Albert Johnson by Toronto police, and since it does not directly involve spatiality or poetic form, I will not discuss it at length, but will merely note how it anticipates two issues that he will explore in his last two poetry collections. First, by dedicating the poem to Johnson’s widow and the mother of his children, “Mrs. Lemona Johnson,” Clarke stresses the importance of the presence of the Black maternal, which will be discussed at the climax of Where the Sun Shines Best; and second, by addressing his poem to—by directly speaking to and giving guidance to—Johnson’s children, Clarke makes an early foray into examining the role elder poetic speakers can play in advising a younger Black generation, which he will do at greater length in In Your Crib.
The second 1980s poem, also published here and entitled “Let Me Stand Up,” invokes space and race in a direct way. Clarke’s poem expresses a desire, or an imperative demand, to feel free to walk the city streets at night without fear, which he hopes to do in his old age, as he cannot do now:
Let me be able to stand up, old,
When I’m past standing up
In youth: when age has bent
Me rusty, a hairpin superfluous
As neglect. . . .
When I can walk the streets
With a simple stick for walking,
Not for knocking necessary heads,
When I can put the pen down, late
In the criminal night, and walk
With a literary thought on my arm (n.p.)
This desire to walk at night, expressed in poetic terms, invokes the French Symbolist tradition of the flâneur—that late nineteenth-
century poetic speaker exemplified by Charles Baudelaire, who wanders the streets freely in the late-night and pre-dawn hours making poetic observations on the marginal—the late-night drinkers, the working classes ending or beginning a shift, the criminals, the homeless, the sex workers. So these subsequent lines by Clarke, with the speaker “So black, so late in this mumbling walk / With a woman in his thought / Walking arm on mind, with me / In the early fornicating hours / Of broken husbands and homeward lovers / Loveless, as four-legged garbagemen / Their heads downward in a sniffing prayer” (n.p.) should awaken in the reader a recognition of Baudelairean imagery and subject matter.
Yet key to the flâneur’s mobility in space and place is his invisibility: the Baudelairean flâneur moves unobserved and unnoticed himself as only a white bourgeois citizen of Paris can. In the case of Clarke, as a Black flâneur, he reflects that he cannot go out at night and not be noticed, and in fact must always fear the “the assaulting bouquet of a cop” (n.p.). At this point in Canadian history, Clarke claims there is no space for a Black flâneur; the Black body is under constant observation and threatened by state violence. The poem is thus an indictment of the present society, and a wish for a future time when—either because he is old, and thereby not seen as a threat to the enforcers of a white metropolis, or because the inherent racism of that society has abated—Black subjects are free to walk unmolested, and unnoted, at night.
Thirty years later, that freedom has failed to arise; and while the poetic speaker of Clarke’s long poem Where the Sun Shines Best does remark that he infrequently walks through the used condoms, cigarette butts, and other detritus of Moss Park during the day, he is now more often than not restricted to a single space—a second-floor window of his apartment. Despite this lack of mobility, the poet’s view, and indeed the entirety of the poem, is still structured through place and space, in this case Moss Park and its environs: its armoury, hockey arena, playground, baseball diamond, Salvation Army shelters, and three cathedrals. We see this emphasis on space, particularly as a site of struggle, in the very opening stanza:
THE YELLOW leaves are trampled over by the black
boots of three soldiers from the Moss Park Armouries;
in uniform, intended not to be seen, nor identified,
for their intention and profession is to kill. . . .
War. War has been declared.
War. It is all that’s on their minds. War;
and the intention for war declared upon Moss Park. (7)
One might also consider that this attention to space is given to the reader paratextually, even before s/he reads the first few lines of the poem, as the cover image of the book, which depicts a park bench with a grove of trees behind and a pool of blood in the foreground, emphasizes that place is paramount, and the interior pages of the book are also “watermarked” with an image of a park bench and dead leaves and debris.
The unfolding of Clarke’s poetic re-imaging of the 2005 murder of Paul Croutch, a homeless man and former newspaper editor, by three Canadian reservists, one of whom was not white, is primarily spatial. That is, as the poet-speaker watches from his second-storey window across the street to the park, various figures enter his line of sight, which then prompts poetic responses and examination of that subject: for example, a group of Muslim women pushing baby strollers prompts a meditation upon family structures, questions of paternity and maternity, Islamophobia, and Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Most often, however, it is a trio of homeless men of different races who walk across the park toward the poet’s window over a series of three mornings that allows the poet to meditate upon poverty, addiction, immigration, and racism. More significantly, their walk parallels the movements of the three soldiers, which then causes the poet to imagine the murder for which they are responsible.
I find this a very innovative way of structuring a long poem—the sixty-three discrete stanzas are not linked by time or linear narrative (for example, the murder of the homeless man is imagined at the beginning, middle, and end of the poem); nor necessarily by theme (one stanza discussing militarism is not necessarily followed by another extending that idea, but can switch to, say, a discussion of betting on horses at Woodbine); nor are they structured purely by memory and associative stream of thought, but by space.
But strangely, in a poem interested in space and place, the title of which points to the question of place, “where the sun shines best” is not upon a place, but—puzzlingly and problematically—upon a person, or image of a person. That is, many readers will recognize “where the sun shines best” as a line from the racist minstrel song “My Mammy.”
My first reaction to the inclusion of this racist lyric is that Clarke is pointing out a false consciousness or false identification; just as the Black soldier, by enlisting, falsely allies himself with white imperialism, and by standing by while a marginalized subject is murdered, with classist militarism, so is Clarke’s evocation of a racist lyric an example of how popular culture interpolates Black subjects to identify with racist images. Maggie Quirt, however, in her review of Where the Sun Shines Best, argues that Clarke’s inclusion of this problematic lyric is thematically important to the poem as a whole as a moment of shared marginality on the part of the characters in the poem, and of resistance to multiple forms of oppression. Noting that the most popular rendition of “My Mammy” is by Al Jolson, “himself the victim of anti-Semitism and a proponent of equal rights for all” (391), Quirt suggests that by referencing Jolson and this song Clarke “makes connections between oppressed communities across space and time, teasing out alliances and postulating bridges to bring us closer to, not away from, understanding” (390).
Indeed, Clarke does directly state that the image of the mammy, even if voiced through blackface, is of value:
MAMMY-MAMMY-Mammy! Take this plea of love
and blood even from the reddened lips in a face
of black shoe polish, recite the confidence in his minstrel (66)
But more than a general call for understanding, as Quirt suggests, I read Clarke’s gesture here as invoking the image of the empathetic and suffering Black maternal as a palliative against the cruelty, racism, class division, hatred, and militarism of the men described in the poem. Moreover, it should also be noted that Clarke dedicates the entirety of the poem to a maternal figure—“For Gladys Irene Jordan Clarke-Luke, My Mother. 1914–2005”—which suggests the image and redemptive power of the maternal may be the central theme of the poem.
Yet immediately preceding, and following, this passage, a maternal figure (a homeless woman who calls 911 for help during the murder) is also assaulted by the soldiers, with Clarke stating, “we have killed the woman into silence” (69). The poem then ends with an invective against the Black soldier, who will be left alone:
fumbling with the cord knotted
round truth and stupidity and loyalty, thick as the dust
you will breathe in Kandahar, if you get there still, to carry
out the killing ordered by war, and patriotism (70)
Turning from the failure, or repression, of the Black maternal, we might then see Clarke’s last book, In Your Crib, as an attempt at responding to social injustice through the Black paternal. The poem is doubly addressed, with an elder male speaker attempting to provide advice to a young Black man in his neighbourhood. We see this double articulation even in the title: if we take “crib” first as vernacular for house or apartment, “in your crib” describes the spatial position of the poem (what the poet thinks about in his house), but “crib” can be taken allegorically to address the young man, who the poet sees as immature—that is, someone failing to leave the crib, as in cradle or playpen.
But the poem is not only spatialized by its title; like Where the Sun Shines Best, the poem is structured by place and by figures who enter the poet’s personal space. Still seated at the second-floor window, the poet’s line of sight seems to have diminished, as he now no longer looks across the park to the playgrounds and benches, but only to the sidewalk and street immediately in front of him. The poem begins with the image of motion through space which is immediately abetted—the inaugural moment of the poem is a car accident outside the speaker’s home where the young man’s vehicle crashes:
The Mercedes-Benz,
statue of wealth and beauty and geometric design:
an inverted Y? An M? Fresh
from a carwash, in this neighbourhood,
with high-powered soap sprays
like those from a gun . . . you know guns.
And how fast they can travel; faster than the Benz
in third shifting gear. Bram! The grill smashed dead.
Crumpled in water-melon fragility. (In Your Crib 2)
The poem then unfolds with the poet contemplating the appearance and attitude of the young man, watching as he is interrogated by the police. This scene, of a young Black man driving a car being stopped by the police, recurs throughout Clarke’s oeuvre, yet here the poet is positioned at a remove from the incident. Then, in turn, the poet begins to question himself and how he has failed to help this young man at that moment, and through his past actions.
Generically and formally, In Your Crib is much more polyphonic and fluid than Where the Sun Shines Best. In the latter poem, the metre is most often iambic septameter, the long lines suggesting formal meditation and political importance. With In Your Crib, however, Clarke makes full use of varied metrics and lineation—many short lines and single words in white space recalls the jazz-influenced poetry of mid-period Amiri Baraka, and even directly quotes Baraka’s “Black Art” (44). While Steven W. Beattie misidentifies the free verse in this poem as “blank verse” in his Quill and Quire review of In Your Crib, he rightly connects Clarke’s prosody here to jazz and reggae: “the poet’s own influences run more to Coltrane and the reggae of Bob Marley. The latter’s ‘Redemption Song’ looms large over this book, as it did in ‘Old Pirates, Yes, They Rob I,’ from the author’s 2013 story collection, They Never Told Me” (33). Indeed, just as Clarke has used the refrain in several of his earlier poems, the lyrics of Marley’s anthem often function as such here. The poem also moves through various tonal registers and genres, ranging from the didactic, to the invective, to the sermon, to the elegy, and finally, as Clarke begins to quote from his own past works (lines like “when he was free and young and he used to wear silks” and “there are no elders” being the titles of previous story collections), the poem seems to become an assessment of Clarke’s own life and writing career, and in some sense he appears to pen his own poetic eulogy.
That is, after critiquing the young man for his style of dress, his language, his musical taste, his lack of community involvement, the elder poet then turns to his own failings as an activist, a leader, a parent, as a general father figure—and eventually comes to a point of acceptance of both himself and the young man: rap after all, can be considered a form of poetry, and is similar to the blues; the young man’s confidence and toughness is a requirement for survival; and community still exists. The poem then ends, not with advice and instruction, but with a blessing:
Look up; send your glance to the apex of the limbs;
and see the silent declaration in the swifted-up expulsion:
the children of the maples, as you count
the days in your life, will pass through
before summer and light, and love, and you shall walk
on the same threading buds and flowers . . .
exclaiming in a new joy and wonder
that you are now, living amongst neighbours
who see only, the colour of your heart. (53)
Leslie Sanders, in her essay “Austin Clarke’s Poetic Turn,” observes that the last lines of In Your Crib appear to echo the thought of Martin Luther King, whom Clarke criticized earlier in his writing career: “the poem’s conclusion is both stirring and somewhat ironic. Clarke’s 1968 essay ‘The Confessed Bewilderment of Martin Luther King and the Idea of Non Violence as a Political Tactic’ is, as the title suggests, deeply critical of King. . . . Nevertheless the poem concludes with a not dissimilarly expressed hope” (74). Yet, at the same time, it is strangely appropriate for a poem—Clarke’s last poem—in which old ideas, themes, images, and phrases are revisited and revised. Most striking to me is that once again, as in that very early untitled poem of the 1950s, we have the poet by a window, looking out, and pondering the distinction between his interior life and the external world. The reliance on a poetics of space and spatiality has remained consistent throughout Clarke’s writing—from fisherman looking out to sea, to the snowscape of Kirkland Lake, to the flâneur walking at night, to the “battlefield” of Moss Park—but what changes in this final poem is the prosody: whereas these earlier poems are written in a metre and style that emulated the writers of the white English canon (Chaucer, Eliot, Keats, Thomas), in his last poem we now witness Clarke writing about civic and societal issues in freer, more polyphonic language that incorporates the tone and rhythms of Baraka, of Marley, of Coltrane, but is ultimately personal in style; not without its doubts, but nevertheless a powerful, public, and singular voice.