The Poetic Voice in George Elliott Clarke‘s “Blank Sonnet”

Abstract

Invented in Italy in the fourteenth century, sonnets in English first appeared with the early sixteenth century efforts of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though the sonnet‘s popularity may have peaked with the renowned sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, variations of its form have since been used to memorable effect by poets from Wordsworth to Barrett Browning to Yeats. More recently, Canadian poet and Dalhousie alumnus George Elliott Clarke offered another memorable take on a very old form. In the following essay on poetic voice in “Blank Sonnet,” Adam Cameron brings to light many of the ways Clarke‘s pointedly unrhymed poem attests to its author‘s resistance to the tradition the sonnet represents. In the process of inflecting that tradition, however, the poet cannot escape the “white voice” that contrasts and conflicts with the “speaker‘s blackness.”  In a reading of form and content admirable for its depth, breadth, and rigour, the essay makes clear that “every dark corner” of Clarke‘s inscrutable work yet “gleams with the speaker‘s struggle.”  Writing within while longing to escape the constraints of what may be that tradition‘s most representative form, the poet reminds us that users of language are also – and inevitably – shaped by the ideologies that give it form.

Dr. Lyn Bennett