A vivid portrait
Poet Laureate composes work that serves to memorialize those who died 100 years ago in the Halifax Explosion.
George Elliott Clarke knew he wanted to write something commemorating the Halifax Explosion as soon as he was named Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate almost two years ago.
“I was very happy that the mayor of Halifax sent me a letter back in March to actually commission me to do this,” said Clarke.
Titled Achieving Disaster, Dreaming Resurrection: The Halifax Disaster of Dec. 6, 1917, Clarke’s work was featured on Wednesday, the 100th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, in Paul O’regan Hall at the Halifax Central Library. Clarke and
Symphony Nova Scotia performed in front of projections of images from December
1917.
“I’m really proud of that commission and that the regional municipality put some faith in me and my ability to produce a reasonable commemorative poem,” Clarke said from Edmonton.
“I ended up writing something relatively long – 57 pages – and the reason why is I wanted to cover, for myself and hopefully for readers, eventually, what
I perceived as the pre-history leading up to the great disaster of Dec. 6, 1917, and then also look at a bit of the aftermath to it.”
Clarke, who was born in Windsor near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains in 1960, said the blast had an immense impact on him as a youngster.
“Answering your question poetically, going back to when I was seven,” he said, “as a seven-year-old, I was haunted by the stories of what had happened 50 years before.”
He read Hugh Maclennan’s Barometer Rising, a novel that examines life in Halifax at the time of the Explosion, when he was 10.
“This story has haunted me my entire life, as I’m sure it has everyone else in Halifax, and I am really grateful I have the opportunity to share the poem with as many folks as possible, and I’m extremely grateful to the library and Symphony Nova Scotia for wanting to propel this work forward in the interest of our mutual commemoration of this event.”
In one sense, he’d been thinking about his poem for a while, “but in terms of the actual writing, a couple of weeks,” he said.
Clarke, the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, was to be part of the ceremony at Fort Needham Memorial Park Wednesday morning.
Clarke’s appointment as poet laureate is up at the end of the year, and Achieving Disaster, Dreaming Resurrection is a significant way to conclude his term. There have been other highlights, including a publicity-generating gesture by the rock band U2 which included two of Clarke’s poems (Elegy for Leonard Cohen and Ain’t You Scared of the Sacred?: A Spiritual) among the literary fragments scrolling across screens before they took the stage at concerts during The Joshua Tree 30th anniversary tour this year.
“Well, I’m looking forward to having a lot more time to do other things, including some writing.
“I feel I have done a lot. I’ve done a lot of writing for parliamentarians, MPS and senators, and by the time my term ends I will have visited every province and territory, some of them more than once.”