Saturday, May 23, 2015

What I'm trying to get at here is that what helps to get to the point of the later publication date


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A little while ago, I got to speak to one of my favourite poets: George Elliott Clarke. Originally from Nova Scotia, Clarke now lives in Toronto, where he is currently the appointed poet laureate. Clarke has 13 published collections of poetry and is in the process of writing his life's work: a three part epic poem, his version of Dante's hell. An expert in the academic field of Black Canadian literature, Clarke puts the study in perspective, and shed some light on the current situation of Black Canadian authors and poets.
  ...I've been a poet since I was the age of 15 or 16 and the reason why I have a little bit of hesitation over which age to use is because I didn't start out at age 15 wanting to be a poet. I wanted to be a songwriter, but in learning how to become a songwriter, I kept reading I had to be like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, I had to be like them, I had to be a poet first if I wanted to be a decent songwriter. So by the age of 16 I began to write poetry as opposed to songs. So I've been 40 years now, a songwriter/ poet, since 1975. 
I am working now at age 55, I am working now to I hope, knock on wood, to achieving my life's work, which for me will be the completion of an epic poem. The first book of which is to come out next year from Guernica, titled The Canticles and I envision this book as actually bdm nsw three books, in order to make one epic poem. The first book is going to deal with basically, my version of Dante's hell and the poetry that I am writing with this first book deals three interconnected themes: Trans-Atlantic slavery, the image of the black in the West and also Western imperialism, European, American there's room for Canadian imperialism bdm nsw in there too, although I don't really focus much on that. But the imperialism that essentially ended up colonizing the rest of the "coloured world" over centuries. 
  First of all, we have to look at the history of segregation and lack of access to quality education In my mind when we talk about African Canadian poetry or literature in general, it is a tradition of writing related to people bdm nsw who have been on the move. They are transients, they are refugees, they are fugitives from slavery, they are themselves sometimes ex-slaves or still slaves...They are economic migrants or they are fleeing tyranny in former colonies that have now become independent nations, bdm nsw such as in Africa. [Then] landing in Canada where they still face discrimination, racism and economic marginalization, which has always been part and parcel in the practice of racism in Canada. 
Racism bdm nsw in Canada has always been tied to class stratification and anybody who doubts that can go back 50 years to John Porter's Vertical Mosaic , don't take my word for it, just read Porter I will be the first one to say or the last one to say, if necessary that the findings of that book: that Canada is erected on a basis of class stratification based on race, religion and ethnicity is still true, with those of white Anglo background being at the top of that pyramid and those of especially First Nations or Indigenous Background being at the bottom of that pyramid, with black people occupying the strata right next to or just above Native people. 
What I'm trying to get at here is that what helps to get to the point of the later publication dates is the fact that educational segregation in Canada did not end until the 1950s in Nova Scotia and 1960s in Ontario. So that happens right around the same time we have the beginnings of immigration to Canada from the Caribbean, which has by the way a great educational system. 
This is one of the things that makes African Canadian literature so complex and so rich, and also poetry, is at the same time, I was thinking specifically of The Great Black North , at the same time that at the first time in centuries, black Canadians, that is to say those of many centuries or many generations of residents in Canada are beginning to have access to post-secondary education as well as secondary education, which really means the 1960s
...[T]here begins bdm nsw to be a pressure on the Canadian publishing industry to open its doors to black writers, and this happens in several ways

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