Whylah Falls 9781554470952, 1554470951

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WHYLAH FALLS George Elliott Clarke

WHYLAH FALLS isa mythic community in the heart of Black Nova Scotia, populated with largerthan-life characters: lovers, murderers and muses. George Elliott Clarke’s sensuous narrative sings with the rhythm of blues and gospel, spinning a complex, absorbing tale of unrequited love, earthy wisdom, devouring corruption and racial injustice. This is a rare and beautiful collection of poetry, as much in demand twenty years after its publication as it was when first released. It has inspired an acclaimed CBC-Radio drama, a popular stage play, and a feature film, One Heart Broken Into Song. we

This is a book to be savoured. A feast of styles and forms, the language is sinuous and sensual. Clarke’s images are simply beautiful ... AFRICAN

AMERICAN

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IN MEMORIAM GRAHAM NORMAN CROMWELL FLORUIT 1953-1985

4 I know that this traitor language can turn One truth into another or even Against itself. Yet, it is all we have.

CANTOS

Introducing Edition the Third 9 Preface 13 Admission 14 Dramatis Personae 15

“Look Homeward, Exile” 17

The Adoration of Shelley 21 1

The Trial of Saul 45

III.

The Witness of Selah 59

EV

The Passion of Pablo and Amarantha

83

The Martyrdom of Othello Clemence 105 MY,

The Gospel of Reverend F.R Langford 133

VII.

The Adoration of Shelley 159

WITT:

The Apocrypha 179

Acknowledgements 201 About the Author 203

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INTRODUCING

EDITION

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Whylah Falls began twenty-five years ago in the spring and summer of 1985. Indirectly.

In late May 1985, after staying up all night in Stratford, Ontario, where I'd just seen a Shakespeare drama (God knows which one), I'd returned by a dawn train to Kitchener- Waterloo (where I'd just passed a year as a student newspaper editor). Upon arrival, I stopped at a donut shop and scrawled “How Exile Melts Into One Hundred Roses.” The poem pleased me because it was about my life, my people, my native geography, and it was written in my own voice. Finally. Then, in July 1985, after having a dream in which Ezra Pound pronounced me a dandy poet, I decamped for Europe. In an Amsterdam laundromat, I scribbled “Look Homeward, Exile.” Again, I tapped into my own brain, heart, soul, and guts, finding, suddenly, that Poetry could refer to Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, to Black Mikmagq (Métis), to beer and blues, to African Baptist spirituals and James Brown wails. Well, allright. By September 1985, I was doing social work in A fricadian com-

munities (villages) in the Annapolis Valley, from Weymouth Falls to Windsor Plains. I cannot say that my interventions bettered anyone’s life. But I did hear a lot of stories, speeches, sermons, and songs that I knew I had to versify. Folks had troubles, but they also

had passion: Meat and drink for a poet. So, twixt 1985 and 1990, this book coalesced—out of mumbled

Bible verses; loud parties with rum and fried smelts; M.A. study in Dr. John Fraser’s Ivy-League, Haligonian livingroom and Ph.D. study at Queen’s University (“Penitentiary,” I say); salt-spray journalism at home and eyeing the Hansard ‘blues’ for Dr. Howard D. McCurdy, M.P., in the House of Commons; and auditing the

vintage Soul wax owned by The Rt. Hon. Gilbert Randall Daye. Nothin wrong with that! I need here to bear witness, too, to all those immortal, AfroAmerican poets who showed me the way: Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, Conrad Kent Rivers, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Jean Toomer.... Can I get an amen? In 1989, I sought a publisher. Julian Ross, of Polestar Press, answered the call, and the book appeared in late October of 1990. Champagne and roses. An illuminating incident occurred prior to the book’s birth. I was on my way by train to Kingston, Ontario, with the final manuscript, making the not-so-final edit, when a woman sitting next to me asked me to read her one of the poems. Excited to have my first impromptu audience for this book, I recited “The River Pilgrim: A Letter,” with some gusto—and even joy. But my listener’s reply

jolted me: “It’s very good, but it doesn’t sound Canadian.” Naturally. Yep, Whylah Falls occasioned some dispute: It praises Beauty too much; it’s Romantic, yes, but late; it fails to field the requisite, Canuck allotment of Nature poems; it doesn’t suit L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics and it isn’t DUB either; it uses

too much blanc vers to be plain, poesy noir; and it features too many songs to be a novel and too many narratives to be pure lyric. Worse, it isn’t poetry that sits still, silently, and that attribute bothers those who prefer their verse as mummified specimens, available only to specialists to adore, I mean, dissect. Amazingly though, it’s won a bunch of whooping, cheering critiques plus the Archibald Lampman Award. Many poems and ‘proems’ have been anthologized or translated. Whylah Falls: The Play appeared in 1999, as did a movie, One Heart Broken Into Song, set in the same time and place. The play was performed in Italian in Venezia in 2002; Tong Renshan published his Chinese translation of the book (titled Three Kinds ofLove: Earthy, Heavenly, and Hell-

ish) in Beijing in 2006. Now, here’s my verse, in a Third Edition, presented beautifully by Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield, of Gaspereau Press. (I thank them for their faith in this work.) Decades on, I’m grateful that Whylah Falls still pleases readers and that scholars deem it canonical. Not bad for a book originating in a café and a laundry.

George Elliott Clarke AUGUST

MMX

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