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Poetry is, for most of us, a low stakes game. Most people don't read poetry, having given up sometime around high school, if not earlier, frustrated at being told to make sense of a strange, loose thing, to divine the meaning from a maddening group of words. But some of us fall in love with it. My old high school has a literary magazine, and takes it very seriously. I submitted poems in grade nine. They were rejected. Grade ten, too. I took all the available creative writing courses, read more, wrote more, learned about metaphor and similie and alliteration, about owning what I wrote and never accepting anything less than my best. Finally, in grade twelve, I had work taken. It was, and still is, a very proud moment in my life.
I mention this only because if you haven't thought about poetry, if you can't recall a poem or poet you've read lately, I understand. Readership is dwindling, we're told, and every so often the New York Times publishes a quickly-lambasted article on the death of poetry, the sort of thing concocted to whip up engagement and which is usually successful, pulling at the same tired threads. But whether it's right or not is almost irrelevant, because it has the feel of something true. Rupi Kaur sells hundreds of thousands of books while most others are lucky to sell hundreds. Paid space for poetry reviews has shrunk dramatically. There is a definite precarity in the day-to-day, and I doubt many would say that things are looking up.
Is Poetry Dead? Listen to the Poets.
A number of years ago, Robin Robertson, interviewed by the Guardian, talked about how there's no living in poetry, about how for most poets there exists the necessity of the day job to be able to write and submit. In his case, his day job as editor and publisher at a number of very prestigious companies (Penguin, Cape) has allowed him to get through the mundanities of everyday life so he can periodically retreat to somewhere very quiet, lose the cadences of the manuscripts he's been reading, and spend a few weeks or a month refocusing on his own.
I mention all this as a kind of preamble because the Griffin Poetry Prize has just announced its 2023 longlist. If you missed the furor late last year, and I definitely understand if you did, here's a synopsis: the Griffin used to be one of the two crown jewels of Canadian poetry (the other being the long-estalished Governor General's Award for Poetry). It offered a prize of $65000 (CDN) to the best Canadian collection of poetry, with another $65000 prize offered to the best published internationally.
A lucrative prize. $65000 is a lot of money, but particularly for poets. There's a very particular route that some poets take to make a living. Its conventions involve getting an MFA (maybe even a PhD these days), and off that trying to land a professorship at a provincial or state university, after which comes the grind of publishing in top-tier journals, often working within the safety of a particular style of verse. But for those who step outside those bounds, poetry offers a humbling kind of poverty. I'm thinking of Sylvia Legris, who talks about "trying to piece together enough of a living in order to write", and how for her, that's cleaning toilets, her job as a cleaner being a series of contract and private gigs, perhaps enough to get by, but not much else. A published poem will get you anywhere from nothing to $10 to a few hundred, the latter only at the most prestigious publications, those that might publish the most lauded poets a handful of times in their lives.
Middle Ground: Sonnet L'Abbé in Conversation with Sylvia Legris
Myself, I publish a handful of poems every year in journals that don't have the same cachet as The New Yorker or Poetry, but in which I'm just as proud (or prouder) to see my work. I typically make somewhere between $10 and $150, total. If I'm lucky I cover my domain and hosting costs. The money's not there for just the writing, whether or not you're Canadian. You make decisions about what you want to do, and you absolutely take what you can get.
The Griffin Prize was established in 2000 by businessman Scott Griffin, to increase the prestige of poetry in Canada and around the world. Its trustees are a who's-who of lauded poets: Paul Muldoon, Karen Solie, Mark Doty, Carolyn Forché. Emeritus trustees include Margaret Atwood, Robin Robertson, Michael Ondaatje. You get the idea: this is a prize that uses big names to create and elevate other big names. To glorify Scott Griffin. This isn't grassroots work. Specialists of the small press need not apply. Prestige is mandatory, and it flows upward.
Longlist Announced for $130K 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize
Last September, the Griffin Prize announced a seismic change. They would eliminate the two individual streams (Canadian and international), combining them into a single mega-prize. This would create the most lucrative poetry prize in the world. I think the echo chamber of Scott Griffin and his trustees expected applause, or at least half-hearted murmurs of approval. What they got instead was a backlash from the community from which they draw their prestige.
Cassidy McFadzean: "Congrats to my american friends on their new poetry prize"
The Griffin Prize Shakeup: New Rules, New Controversy
Alicia Elliott: Why the Griffin Poetry Prize combining its awards is bad news for Canadian poets
To say the poets were unimpressed would be an understatement. They called it a betrayal, a weakening of Canadian poetry, the ill-considered edict of a bored industrialist. But despite the outrage making it all the way to the Globe and Mail (which has, for a number of years, barely paid any notice to poets), the Griffin trust stood firm. This was their decision, and they were running with it. There was no point complaining. And anyway, the longlist was now ten books. Plenty of room for Canadian poets, if they're good enough.
Yesterday the Griffin Prize introduced their longlist, and it went about as well as expected. Three Canadians made the longlist, in various capacities: Susan Musgrave for her collection "Exculpatory Lilies"; Cretan-Canadian translator Manolis Aligizakis, who translated Greek Poet Tavos Livaditis' "Poems, Volume II"; and Iman Mersal, an Egyptian-Canadian, whose Arabic "The Threshold" was translated by US translator Robyn Creswell.
On Twitter, past winner Valzhyna Mort offers her congratulations and pumps the Griffin's tires
Much of the rest of the list felt like the judges googled "famous poet + US + alive", and included luminaries such as Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, as well as Ada Limón, the current US Poet Laureate. This is, the poets said, exactly what would fucking happen, the prize reduced to just another stop in the US literary circuit. Pulitzer, National Book Awards, Griffin. And while the shortlist has yet to be announced, the poets are surely taking bets: will a Canadian even make the shortlist? Will there be a dark horse? Or will the prize be as predictable as many are expecting, with the cash prize going to one of the big three? If you're asking me, there'll be a single Canadian on the shortlist, probably Musgrave, the list rounded out by Olds and Vuong, and the latter will win. It's exactly what Griffin would want: plaudits for his award, and ink spilled for the sagacity of its choice. The old queen relinquishes her crown; Vuong adds another major award to his list, and ensures we continue to read his work for decades to come. And as for the Canadians, well, see you next year. Glory to the Griffin; maybe try harder, losers.