ABSTRACT
With the recent publication of Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path, George Elliott Clarke’s third jazz-opera libretto, there suddenly exists an enigmatic and distinctive body of musical texts within the Canadian poet’s pantheon of work. I call these texts “musical” not only because of their operatic assignations, nor only in reference to the blues- and jazz-infused vibrancy of Clarke’s language, but rather because they pose significant resistance to any kind of exclusive classification as libretto or drama. In his afterword to Clarke’s earlier libretto, Québécité, Ajay Heble mused that the jazz opera itself is “not a well-documented genre … but that, I suspect, may well be part of its allure. Alert with the snap of the new and untried, and unfettered by settled habits of convention, this hybrid genre compels us to imagine an alternative vision of human possibility” (2003a: 97, his emphasis). Clarke’s libretti proffer an intriguing enigma for both the literary critic and the musicologist by textualizing a musical genre that itself “stages border-crossings by its very definition” (Obert 2006). In one of the only published analyses of Clarke’s first libretto Beatrice Chancy, Maureen Moynagh argues that “[t] here is abundant textual evidence suggesting that the drama is to be read as poetry rather than performed as a play; stage directions scan, descriptions of the characters are similarly poetic, there are photographs scattered through the volume, and the arrangement of the words on the page is frequently key to meanings,” rendering integral features of the published “verse drama” literally “unperformable” (Moynagh 2002: 101, also see Larson 2006: 113). This is true of the other libretti as well, at least in their incarnations as texts which are, tellingly, made available in the poetry section of most bookstores. Released in 2007, Trudeau has since been reviewed as a work of drama (in The Malahat Review [#162]), but also as a book of poetry (in The Antigonish Review [#151] and The Dalhousie Review [#88.1]), and yet remains exuberantly fickle when it comes to any kind of generic exclusivity.
