His Response

The poet George Elliott Clarke has won many awards and distinctions, but he has also found himself one of this country’s most excoriated writers in recent years. The backstory is a long one. In 1995, on the outskirts of Regina, Steven Tyler Kummerfield (“an ex-Crown minister’s grandson”) and Alex Ternowetsky (“a prof’s scion”) raped and murdered a young Indigenous mother named Pamela George. Some twenty years later, Kummerfield struck up a long-distance literary friendship with Clarke, who was completely unaware of the criminal past of his correspondent, now an aspiring poet. Not long after that, a new climate of guilt by association emerged, in which “hectoring, conjecturing rednecks — (some branded with protectorate doctorates)” could take up a bully pulpit and slander a figure like Clarke without compunction. “I praised good poetry by a bad man. / I wasn’t whitewashing Bloodshed. / I was trying to advise a poet — / not help him scrub up as sparkly as...