Among a long list of other honours, George Elliott Clarke has won both the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Canada Reads competition. He occupies a prestigious chair at the University of Toronto, has been a visiting prof at Harvard, sports the Order of Canada, and at last count has five honorary degrees.

That’s quite a résumé for someone who’s still in midlife. You might suppose that the attention he receives is more than enough to guarantee him some very jealous enemies in the fractious and sharp-tongued world of CanLit. Yet if an election were ever held, Clarke might easily be voted the best-liked individual in the writing community. To be sure, he writes from his heart, gut, and soul, but his personality is anything but sullen or angular. He’s funny and full of life—ebullient, in fact—and never too busy to help a colleague, even though his own busyness is almost astounding. He’s someone who makes things happen.

He is an Africadian, his preferred term, which he uses as both noun and adjective. His family, having escaped from the United States at the close of the War of 1812, had already been in Nova Scotia for seven generations when he was born there in 1960. Small or smallish presses in Atlantic Canada have published a half-dozen of his poetry collections, including the amazing Execution Poems, which deals with two members of his family hanged for murder in 1949.

But a number of other works, including Whylah Falls and Black, have been published in Vancouver, as was Beatrice Chancy, perhaps his best-known play. He has a loyal following here and has been hooked up variously with UBC’s Green College, the Cultch, and other local institutions, including, of course, the Vancouver Writers Fest, where he will appear later this month, reading from his latest work, Traverse.

Clarke isn’t the kind of poet who teases out language. Rather, he jumps into it as though from a high diving board. “When I’m writing poetry,” he tells the Georgia Straight by phone from his home in Toronto, “I try to go after its maximum effect as an oral art. I wish I had a toonie for every time someone has asked me why I don’t put out a CD.” He hasn’t done so because he doesn’t need to: you can hear his unique and musical voice clearly in almost everything he writes.

Technically, Traverse is a suite of 71 sonnets—14 lines and all of that. Read together, they seem to hang on the page like a fire escape on the side of an old building. But they’re unlike any sonnets people remember from school. Clarke has called himself a baroque writer and it’s true: his work is full of elaborate ornamentation but in the form of lingo, slang, patois, shouts, cries, plays on words, and blues lamentations. “Yes, these are sonnets, but I’m not sure you could describe them as conservative,” he says understatedly. “Or if they are, they’re radically conservative. They’re meant to be taken aloud. They’re for anyone who enjoys rolling words, tasting words on the tongue, filling the lungs with words.”

This calls for an example. Traverse is really a kind of confessional autobiography in verse. Clarke came of age in Halifax “above the charcoal harbour,/and bid an Underwood 315 cloacal typewriter/replace a real-gone girlfriend,/her spectral, holy eyes burning/holes in my haunted sonnets./Typewriter keys croaked crookedly,/spewing pages askew with garbage feelings…” The narrative takes him through an angry past, an elite education, messy love affairs, successes, failures, flirtations with Liberal politics, and a tangle of longings. He becomes a parent, has a failed marriage, finds inspiration in history, writes like crazy. All this is told through a retrospective glass that is tinted by issues of race and given a kind of music.

Clarke is a writer who is never very far removed from the idea of performance. He’s not one of those poets who drone on into the microphone; he reads for, as well as to, his audience. One of the words in his email address is libretti for he takes great pride in having written the text, or libretto, for an opera. In fact, for three operas, including one about Pierre Trudeau, a personal hero to whom he dedicated one of his books. When separated from the music of an opera, libretti are usually quite short and rather plain—very un-Clarke-like. Compared to his usual work, “they have to be more casual, and looser, though rhymed. I’ve published them in Canadian Theatre Review but also as books of dramatic poetry. You see, they have to be oral but also suited to print. Configured in different ways.”

In addition to everything else he has going on, Clarke is the official Toronto poet laureate. The job “is more inspirational than bureaucratic, but it’s more demanding than you might think. I give one public event every month and address city council every April.” Like Vancouver, Toronto has had four poets laureate so far, each for a three-year term (but with Toronto paying double Vancouver’s annual honorarium of $5,000). It’s typical of Clarke that when he was given the appointment one of his first acts was to pay for a medal to be awarded to his three predecessors.

George Elliott Clarke is slated to make two appearances, on October 25 and 26, at this year’s Vancouver Writers Fest. See the Vancouver Writers Fest website for details.