Bicentennial Poem

II.

Just ten days after cannons’ kabamming gunpowder
saluted resonantly the college’s (university’s) debut,
Lawd Dal’d slooped off to Ville de Québec,
to govern every Britannic inch of Amérique du Nord
(and latterly India),
if yet right oblivious to the politic primacy
of so-called East Indians, West Indians, and American Indians….
In any event, the founder exited,
and his Halifax, namesake college—
rampant on the city’s Grand Parade—
was just gonna have to duke it out—
go head-to-head, toe-to-toe, face-to-face—
with double-talking preachers and two-fisted priests—
all hotly redneck under their white collars—
agitated by a “non-denominational” school
that might siphon off sect-anointed moolah—
whether taxpayer or top-hatted, public or plutocratic—
so that Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, and Presbyterian
township-and-county edifices of Edification,
would go begging for cash, begging for students,
begging for profs,
and end up bagging only drafty piles, half-scaffolding,
bleak in perspective and empty of prospects,
but resounding with ill winds blaring legislative nyet, nyet, nyet—
that nixing, niggardly fiat—
over foundation cracks bristling
theological nettles….
“Besides,” fretted tonsured, whiskered ecclesiasts,
“��Ů���� ain’t split off ex the Kirk:
It’s a conspiracy of cloak-and-dagger Presbyterians!”

IV.

By 1847, ������ was classless, penniless, friendless,
studentless, professorless, and so less and less a college,
it did seem, said some, well-nigh, worthless….
Except, it could be a High School—
circa 1856—
and languish in such louche, secondary status,
serving up fish-n-chips rather than physics….
Unless the Presbyterians could comport and sport
as the Trojan Horses of Liberal Education
������-à-������ the ABCs—
���Բ����������Բ�/������پ����ٲ�/�䲹�ٳ�DZ�������—
and the mathematical (atom-and-hair-splitting),
anti-human-anatomical Methodists—
by letting ������ docs teach Everyman,
while church-connected campuses corral their clergy
on keeps agog at Haligonian grog shops—
on redoubts spurning petticoats and rum—
the temptations of molasses
and Mephistophelian tobacco,
where Virtue is apprehended by declining always
that Euro-trash, exploitative spectacle—the Waltz….

VI.

Science evolves outta sickness and the Genesis damnation,
declaring Birth ushers Sin-struck mortals
soon-or-late to an earthen berth—
a point as true for Dal Natural Philosophers
lisping the 1870 motto,
“Ora et labora”
(“Pray and work”)
as it be for any lad (and lady).
So, despite the Anatomy Act gravely allowing docs
to carve up any indigent (poorhouse) cadaver,
there befell a shortage of corpses
to analyze—cannibalize—
so as to advance, convincingly,
life-saving Medicine.
The fix demands a Medical Faculty—
a separate body bestowing Dal degrees—
in spluttering fits and seizure starts—
in the 1870s,
until, by degrees,
the Halifax School of Medicine becomes separate—
but mediocre—
by 1885,
shrouding the parturating in prudish, Victorian cloaks,
applying Jack-the-Ripper willy-nilly to callously plucky cadavers,
that is, until Greco-Latinate Flexner came calling
to castigate the med-school as “grossly appalling,”
thus triggering its upbraiding “upgrade”—absorption—by Dal,
circa 1911,
and later, nigh 1920,
access to a tram-line, Public Health clinic
(where students could describe and doctors prescribe),
sponsored by Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie—
pleased to prop up latter-day—if rustic—
salt-spray, hayseed Scots.

VIII.

The other mind-expanding, mood-altering revolution—
besides the fluxing influx
of boffo, ego-stroking, self-aggrandizing,
adventurist donations—
is the entrance of women, politic arrivistes opposing
(unmanly, inhumanly practiced) man-only Empowerment….
Register here that Dal never opposed
registering women,
though the upstart distaff only alighted in the 1880s—
idealistic, church ministers’ daughters
(or lasses consigned purses by deceased papas)—
spurred on by Munro’s gilded disbursements,
and not keen on expected subservience to hubbies,
but pooh-poohing patriarchal folderol
(that mantra that “Male Rule” is an Adamic mandate),
and preferring Economics to that desperately poor sister—
“Home Ec”—
and meditating on Madame Curie rather than mastering cookery.
Tis necessary to place women up-front in the classroom:
Let fellas stand when the ladies enter;
remain seated as the feminists exit.

X.

1887:�� Dal transits off the Grand Parade—
takes to heights above Halifax’s Northwest Arm—
and shows aspects tricked-out in brick, not stone;
that same year, Law �����ٱ���������������—c�DzԳ�����پ������—
with a Constitutional-Law-magisterial dean
who’s a Member of Parliament—
and a decade later,
with a Contracts prof who’s—ditto—
a Member of Parliament—
while Engineering barged into the calendar—
thanks to coal mining for engines, steamships furnaces;
next, all the emitted soot and grit and dirt and cinders
encouraged Civil Engineering—
roads, bridges, tunnels—
the cornerstones and buttresses of Industry,
but also the Marxmen’s forte.
(Yet, conscription Communism entails Construction
as shoddy as Capitalism’s manufactured ephemera….
Seldom does the cement set strong and smooth;
rather, it cracks:
Compare the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall.)

XII.

Is a scholar as manly as a soldier?
Decidedly positive were the Dal recruits
who lined up for Lord Kitchener,
though—soon—Krupp guns chopped down scores….
Assuredly, Krauts were keener in their aim
than were Brit generals in their tactics,
stupidly self-assured that World War One
was just a blow-up of Waterloo,
that guys affixing bayonets—
could charge suddenly, frontally, franticly at machine-guns—
or get splattered by shells
and/or scattered by caustic, lacerating, and/or choking gas—
and still stand triumphant, rosy-cheeked, laurelled,
to warble “Cheerio” to the Kaiser.
No matter:�� The Albion Canucks—
sporting maple-leaf badges on khaki lapels—
enlisted holus-bolus the ������ men,
so that females numbered 2/3 in Arts classes,
and then the Canadian Corps were “over the top”
on the Western Front,
hammering dead the ��ö�ٳٱ����ä��������ܲԲ� “Huns” so damn much,
the “Jerries” slammed em as “Shock Troops.”

XIV.

Postbellum, Jennie Shirreff Eddy found herself wooed
by Dal grad and future Prime Minister of Canada,
(Rt. Hon.) R.B. Bennett,
to pay out a tad of her matchstick-
and-toilet-paper-fortune
(racked up by E.B. Eddy)
to deck out a women’s residence—
Shirreff Hall—
in pink quartzite ex-New Minas.
Next the men’s residence—
Pine Hill—
got promulgated in 1919,
thanks to the purchase of a Northwest Arm hotel
for $160,000
outta the Million Dollar (cash-scoop-up) Campaign.

XVI.

Modernity whelps talkies and speakeasies,
Prohibition (of alcohol) and Revolution (by Lenin’s Reds,
chased by Mussolini’s Black Shirts),
The Waste Land in poetry
and The Great Dictator in film,
Duke Ellington veering Dixieland to bebop
and the Gershwin Bros working Dixieland into Debussy….
Unable to stomach the hunger of Soviet Five Year Plans,
and refusing to eat the lead of Fascist coup and Nazi Putsch,
suddenly cometh the (White) Russians—
landing right after Trotsky the Wobbly
(latterly toppled by a Mexican icepick)
was sprung from his cell in Halifax’s Citadel
to vamoose to St. Petersburg
to bully on the Bolshevik bouleversement of the boulevardier Czar;
Fleeing now also were Europe’s Jews—
antennae’d witnesses of Gulag
and prophets of Darwinian Death Camps—
voyaging to Pier 21 (Halifax),
finding entrée at ��Ů���� (finally)—
reinforcing the possibility of string quartets serenading
otherwise jitterbugging sailors and their Lindy-Hopping molls,
and stressing Old World savoir-faire, savvy,
in a city quite comfy with grungy Vice,
where Adult Education got started
primarily as a way to tamp down
the wartime spike in Venereal Disease….

XVIII.

Sayeth Wall Street and bayeth Bay Street,
and screecheth the City and the Bourse (until hoarse):
“Sire no more M.A.’s, but only M.B.A.’s:
We want ‘Relevance,’ not ‘Elevation’!”
They’re right?�� Or just brain-dead rightists?
Yet, how does acquaintance with Aristotle
elucidate investment portfolio profitability, really,
and how does memorization of Milton
aid the race to be the first to weaponize atoms—
the very guts of sunlight,
to incinerate a hundred thousand infants
in a thousandth of a second?
Eventually, Dal’s George P. Grant, philosophe,
is gonna scorn the utility of the “multiversity,”
accusing it of most foul Vainglory,
in defining Progress as shifting from enumerating angels
prancing on a pinhead
to counting up the number of rat droppings one encounters
in a typical, polio-, TB-, VD-ridden slum.
That’s the age-old problem of this New Age:
When is knowledge Wisdom?
If ever, even?

XX.

1939 detonates World-Wide War redux—
as Darwin’s devils haste to gobble up territories
and gut, gas, and torch—“scientifically”—millions
asserting mere “vermin extermination”—
thereby expanding to Europe and Asia
past, imperial European—imperious—Evil
in Africa, the Americas, and Asia,
but now all mechanical—as well as mechanized—
industrialized, efficient, mass-produced massacres.
Makes sense to open, in 1941,
Dal’s Department of Psychiatry—
a testament to Reason, Rationality, Mindfulness—
even though the septic bias
of war-dirtied Halifax’s white-coated, downtown doctors
prevents three Austrian, refugee Jews
(escapees from Hitler’s Semitic-genocidal regime)
from being able to Canadianize their med training
(August 1942) at Dal….
Too, while white students, white profs, and white troops
had green lights—carte blanche—to enjoy the Green Lantern’s fare,
Coloured People (Negroes) had to forego taking meals there.
They could aim guns at Hitlerian White Supremacy,
but they couldn’t stick a fork in it in the Halifax eatery.
Might as well ride the ferry footing Oakland Road
cross the Northwest Arm to the Dingle,
then back again, price just 10¢,
while debating Poli Sci with Prez Stanley—
who deplored Dal’s existence as a jewel
begrimed by a city slimy with slums….

XXII.

Recognizing that Dal Law was in a parlous state
due to formerly stingy, belly-tightening finance,
Premier Macdonald remedied the starvation,
tossing scrawny lawyers chunks of red-meat
from the provincial budget (sausage-making) table.
Dentistry’s decaying facilities also needed straightening—
and the filling in of architectural cavities with gold.
However, half the Atlantic governments,
all four of which ought to’ve backed the mouthy school,
gave nada, precisely zilch, just hot air,
leaving N.S. and N.B. to inject 25% of the filling
and/or pain-relief,
so ������ had to repair the maw
¾ solo,
digesting the corrosive, capital debt.
Meanwhile, the Medical Faculty were jaundiced—
distempered to—reflex—revolt—
no matter expertise in jigsawing through cadavers
or in rigging the jigging of an “Eye-Opener”
(gin, lemon, and Eno’s Fruit Salts),
due to the irksome “busybody,” Prez Kerr—
intruding picayune pencil-counting,
while yielding insultingly insufficient funds
to let anyone win at research-grant roulette.
Well, everywhere, Deterioration is cured
by spreading the guilt around,
to petition plutocrats to forego gilt and give gold….
Enter Sir James Dunn and his widow Lady Dunn,
whose largesse cranes up a new Science ���ܾ����徱�Բ�—
despite blandishments and overtures and marriage proposal
(accepted) from U. New Brunswick’s Lord Beaverbrook
(once upon a time sympathetic, appeasingly, to Hitler)—
and despite the dullard and dulling rejection
of celebratory liquor by Dal’s teetotally sobre Prez Kerr—
Dunn’s millions soon mint law scholarships;
and later bequeath Sir James’s name to marquee a theatre;
all this construction adding to the not incorrect perception
that ������ was the most dynamic concentration
of intellects—
and intellectuals
(there’s a distinction)—
on the Nor’East North Atlantic—
even if Beaverbrook hooded glamour-puss J.F.K. himself,
the latter granted a U.N.B.-brand LL.D.
(1957).

XXIV.

The 1960s summoned forth innovative policies,
avant-garde ideas,
but brandished inventive calamities
arising from old bigotries.
Thus, just 2 years after Prof. Guy Henson documented
The Condition of the Negroes of Halifax City (1962),
the sesquicentennial-old hamlet of Africville
began to be bulldozed into rubble,
a devastation imped by Dal Social Work theory,
Dal Urban Planning models,
although Dal scholars also totted up the faults
and tabulated the grim incivility
of “The Africville Relocation”
(that euphemism for South-African-apartheid-style,
“Township Clearance”)…..
While Africville was being reclaimed by city planners
and civil engineers
(and rampaging rats and squabbling seagulls),
Dorothy Killam returned to Dal—
a widow also with a memory to further,
and whose treasure chest would nurture a library
and a children’s hospital
(the latter separate from Dal)—
plus-plus-plus,
essentially 30-million bucks—
Dal’s biggest bequest ever—
to magnet meritorious scientists,
buck up the Graduate School,
lavish scholarships whose gilt-edges
could attract incandescent, foreign students.
Moreover, once New Brunswick aye-ayed funding
the nursing of New Brunswick interns
greenhoused in Dal’s Medical School,
now feasible was the Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building.
Concurrently cemented was the Weldon Law Building,
and Lady Dunn reemerged as Lady Beaverbrook
(doubly widowed now),
to christen the Sir James Dunn Law Library,
prefacing 67’s “Summer of Love.”
And Dal learners put up their own Student Union Building:
Finally, Rebecca Cohn’s estate issues Dal $400,000
to complement all the newfangled, professional ziggurats
with a reminder of the spiritually minded Arts—
an auditorium sounding her name….

XXVI.

��Ů����’s history is now 200 years—and counting,
existing before I (and you),
and likely persisting eternally after us.
I dread to intersect my mortal bio with what is—
in comparison—deathless,
but I’m twice a Dal alumnus
(M.A.—1989, LL.D.—1999),
and long before either passage,
I was a Black Haligonian—
an Africadian—
inspired by an institution that is,
that excellent devise—a schooled insurgency—
summoning, perennially, “Young Turks”
to “Make It New” (pace Chu Tsi)—
make everything new—
by turning sailors into seismologists,
fishers into philosophers.
The ������ difference was in making
all Halifax an extension campus—
a de facto university of the Commons
and the Public Gardens
and the waterfront-harboured, Palladian legislature,
even metaphysically unkillable Africville….
Thus, as a boy, my teeth got filled and fixed
and drilled and extracted
at the Dal clinic;
At 15, to design a Grade-9-junior-high-school, A-bomb,
I biked down to the Killam Library,
and wantonly photocopied so many volumes,
I was practically kayoed by the acrid, ammonia fumes;
Aged 17-19, I fellow-travelled with Rocky Jones’s
T.Y.P. crew, debating “Black Liberation”:
Was it possible?�� In Nova Scotia?
(Well, turntable Malcolm’s agit-prop; turn up for talks on Mao.)
At age 21, visiting the Killam at Christmas,
trying to anatomize “Rabbi(e)” Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,”
I was so engrossed in my amateur Musicology
that I was padlocked therein the library.
Then, age 26, I arrived elect at Dal, selecting,
preternaturally, the John Fraser’s
“Tradition and Experimentation in Modern Poetry,
1880-1920,”
a graduated (in terms of increasing insight) grad course,
that the Calendar certified as “ideal for poets.”
Nicely, Doc Fraser (ex-Cambridge U.)
was easygoing, but no nice-and-easy prof.
His 3-hr, Monday night, living room-staged class
was an arena amid a library amid an art gallery,
with a tabby cat prowling round the coffee
or tea cups
and the cookie tray—
before the vivid, florid oils of Carol Hoorn Fraser—
and ten wise-guys and bluestockings
tussling over Gothicism in Baudelaire,
surrealism in Hopkins,
Uncle Tom Eliot’s Ol’ Possum affecting of gloom-infected Laforgue,
and imagism conjuring sadism in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Sure:�� I was a poet before I ambled into Fraser’s chivalric ring
of knightly, smart-aleck, gladiatorial combat;
but I knew I’d earned the sobriquet, the designation, the lordship,
if one likes—
by fighting off the naysayers.

And this anecdote showcases, I pray,
��Ů����’s daunting history:
Hauntingly dauntless.