T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetic suite, The Waste Land, of 1922, was born of the Götterdämmerung that was The Great War. Its voices (personas) recount the loss of faith, the rubble-proven absurdity of European (colonial) ‘superiority,’ and the brazen (sexual) amorality afflicting its civilzation, i.e., the displacement of Jesus by jazz, of classicism by capitalism, and of law-and-order by the orgasm.
Stephen Kent Roney | A Review of War Canticles
War Canticles George Elliott Clarke Vallum Chapbook Series, 2022 35 pp I was married to a ghost on a mountain in northwest Seoul back in 1994. A trivial enough anecdote; I mention it to suggest that I might know a shaman when I see one. George Elliott Clarke is a shaman. […]
George Elliott Clarke reads an excerpt of WAR CANTICLES
George Elliott Clarke reads an excerpt of his chapbook War Canticles.
George Elliott Clarke | from WAR CANTICLES
Niceties?
We spurn bandages, medicines.
Lee rallies, bids us see Virginia as precious,
ourselves as audacious,
oblivious to high, Deep South percentages
of the deep-sixed…
New Chapbook from George Elliott Clarke | War Canticles
More than a decade after George Elliott Clarke’s first Vallum chapbook, The Gospel of X, we are thrilled to announce the publication of War Canticles in a limited edition of 125 copies. And we’re publishing it in the spring, rather than the fall, because it’s been a long, difficult winter and we deserve some poetry! Visit […]
WHERE BEAUTY SURVIVED: AN AFRICADIAN MEMOIR by George Elliott Clarke | Review by Giovanna Riccio
WHERE BEAUTY SURVIVED: AN AFRICADIAN MEMOIR George Elliott Clarke Knopf, 2021 Renowned poet George Elliott Clarke begins each of his books of poetry with an epigraph on beauty; fittingly, then, the title of his latest book is Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir. In keeping with the former Parliamentary Poet Laureate’s lifelong preoccupation with the […]
POEM OF THE WEEK | George Elliott Clarke | WHITEWASH
WHITEWASH White is waves bright as crinkled sunlight—or sunrise, done up in foam White is Grevens Paerecider, Ironworks Pear Eau-de-Vie, Lunenburg County Winery Montbeliard Pear Wine, and Belle-de-Brillet Poire-et-Cognac White is the missing link* between Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor White is a spic-and-span E.R. with a scatalogical surgeon wielding a shit-smeared scalpel White is a […]
A NONPARTISAN CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE | Interview by Henry Kronk
A NONPARTISAN CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE Interview by Henry Kronk Henry Kronk: You were just elected [or, as I should have said, appointed] to be the parliamentary poet laureate. Congratulations, by the way. George Elliott Clarke: Thank you, Henry. Merci beaucoup. HK: Would you have thought twice about [accepting] that appointment had Stephen Harper’s […]
George Elliott Clarke | ENOCH 1: 1-19
ENOCH 1: 1-19 The end is Horror: Mountains melt in slides of lava and mud; The globe flares sheer fire. So much blood will flood the Earth, it’ll tilt back, wobbling on its axis. Monarchs, millionaires, military monsters, traders, traitors, will be penned in a valley brimmed— rimmed—with flame. They’ll be banded with iron fetters […]