In George Elliott Clarke’s 2006 collection Black, the poet practically challenges mainstream (often white) academics to criticize the “blackness” of his verse: “let them supercilious Caucasian critics/ Praise—slavishly—our ‘exuberant, sing-song/ Poetry,’ our ‘sure-good jive,’ our ‘Rap rhymes’.” Clarke’s frustration at being reduced to a novelty due to the musical rhythm of his work is legitimate, but complicated by the poet’s erstwhile (though regular) forays into the genre of the libretto and the jazz opera. With the recent release of Clarke’s third published libretto, there suddenly exists a faction of his work that is, by its very definition, musical. This paper will consider Beatrice Chancy (1999), Québécité (2003), and Trudeau (2007) not as texts to be set to music, but rather as dramatic poems which take their own musicality for granted and exist as poetry above all else. Beyond the rhyme and rhythm of these three works, how does Clarke’s language perform the postcolonial and post-national resistance of his better-known poetry? The trajectory of his subjects—from eighteenth-century slave to Québéquois jazz musician to Canadian Prime Minister—has proven more intensely and literally political, yet the three libretti have received little consideration in the growing pantheon of Clarke criticism. This paper will read the three texts against each other and argue that their increasingly fiery postcolonial politics and language operate beyond the novelty of their marriage to the imaginary music upon which they are thought to depend.