Several of the poems in this collection were written in your official capacity as Poet Laureate. Is it challenging to balance your own creative impulse with that official role?

Happily, the Parliament of Canada (or the Library of Parliament to be precise) allows each Poet Laureate to pursue his or her own agenda. In my case, I decided that I should write poems on behalf of MPs, Crown Ministers, Senators, and the Governor General. I felt that it was important to try to speak for the people of Canada in responding to matters of national interest. So, I wrote and posted poems responding to the Lac Mégantic rail disaster as well as to the Fort McMurray inferno—and to the ongoing trauma of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. But I also wrote a poem on pronouns for Judy Darbusin (to oppose those who do not think that pronominal usage should be open to change), a poem on two national parks for the then Environment Minister Catherine MacKinnon, and also a poem, “No Second London,” for Lindsay Mathyssen, the MP for that Ontario city. I was also pleased to translate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms into free-verse poetry, though the office of the then Justice Minister Judy Wilson-Raybould expressed reservations about my interpretation of section 35, treating Indigenous rights. But I felt—and feel—that my wording was legit. But the greatest satisfaction arose from being asked to write the official poem commemorating the Halifax Explosion on its centenary. I performed segments publicly with Symphony Nova Scotia. Beautiful!

This is a large collection that covers a wide range of styles and subjects. Do you think it has a centre of gravity or an overarching theme?

Yes, the overarching theme of all the ‘colouring books’, beginning with Blue in 2001, is sheer freedom—of expression, of form, of style, to write about anything I choose to discuss, as freely as I wish. I came to write the first colouring book because of the feeling of liberty that I experienced while teaching and living at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, between 1994 and 1999. Yes, I know that the Great Republic can also be a Great Satan at times; however, I did become infected (yes, that’s the right word) with the joy of release from the prohibition that is the Canadian desire for politesse. Upon leaving the US in 1999, due admittedly to the constant threat of violence, I still promised myself to never relinquish the indefinable feeling of liberty that I had begun to enjoy.

In the nearly 40 years you’ve been publishing, do you feel that progress has been made toward meaningful diversity and equity within the Canadian literary community? How do we do better?

Yes, there has been progress. When I published my first book of poetry in 1983, there was no sense of a tradition of Black writing in Canada, nor any sense of a community. Now, African-Canadian or ‘Africadian’ literature is an established fact, and it should be impossible for any decent anthologist to omit our names and works; simultaneously, we can now speak of lineages and genealogies, with many—Dionne Brand, Lawrence Hill, David Chariandy—descending from Austin Clarke; even a few have spoken of their debts to me—or, rather, to Whylah Falls or Execution Poems or George & Rue or Beatrice Chancy—just as I have acknowledged Afua Cooper and researched and written articles on many other Afro-Can writers. Then again, we are being published; we are winning prizes; we are achieving degrees of international recognition; so, yes, there has been progress. (I repeat.) But the problem with Canada is, almost no progress is achieved without countervailing acts of erasure; sheer erasure. So, Austin Clarke was lionized at his death in 2016; but where is the insistent public recognition of his importance? I received the National Magazine Gold Award for my poems from Execution Poems; but the note was dropped very casually from the official website. A journalist challenged my claim to having received the award (luckily I have the framed certificate in my office), which was infuriating; but his refusal to accept my word for the factm drove me to demand the reinstatement of the notice. That example is a minor one, but it is often the case that “Black Excellence” or black achievement is celebrated briefly (even reluctantly), and then forgotten as soon as possible. The real problem is, our ‘community’ is not coherent or cohesive enough, nationally, to provide a critical mass of support for ‘our’ writers. Furthermore, that terminal phrase is itself revealing: we are not sure who is ‘us’, yet; and that fact also makes mutual support more daunting.