ANOTHER ACCOLADE FOR YOUNG POET
Billy-ray Belcourt adds Alberta Literary Award to Griffin Prize
At 25, Edmonton’s own Billy-ray Belcourt has amassed an impressive resume. Winner in 2018 of the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize — Canada’s most generous and prestigious poetry award — for his first book, This Wound is a World, the Rhodes scholar has a new job as an associate professor in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
International acclaim, however, has not gone to his head. You can hear the warmth and sincerity in his voice as Belcourt reacts to another accolade — the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards prize for poetry for his second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms (House of Anansi Press). Announced June 4, the ALA’S Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry calls Belcourt’s new work a “tour de force.”
“Feelings of joy and gratitude,” is how Belcourt described his reaction in a phone interview from Vancouver, where he has been living since November.
“It was especially emotionally important to have been considered for the prize, given that I wrote the book entirely while living in Edmonton and it is a study of Alberta,” says Belcourt.
NDN Coping Mechanisms uses poetry, prose and visual art to reveal how Indigenous and queer communities are left out of mainstream media. The slim volume has two parts — the first examines daily life and the second dissects influential texts such as Treaty 8. Belcourt says he wanted to explore “how to write in a way that implicates, rather than simply entertains or propels thought.
“It’s about how to actually argue for a kind of reading practice that is bound up in social action,” he says,
Born and raised on the Driftpile First Nation, a community of 1,200 tucked on the southern shore of Lesser Slave Lake, Belcourt came to poetry during studies at the University of Alberta, where he holds a PHD in English. Always a precocious student — he was the class valedictorian at his High Prairie high school graduation — Belcourt recalls finding “joy in ideas” from a young age.
“It began within myself and was encouraged by my family,” he says. “I had a good education in high school in particular, and teachers who were rigorous and encouraging. They educated us with the assumption that we would continue on.”
Belcourt spoke to the Journal about getting outside his comfort zone at Oxford (where he did his Master’s degree), why poetry was his first artistic medium, and how it feels to draw a crowd of 500 to hear your poems. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q Can you explain the title of the book?
A NDN is internet shorthand used by Indigenous peoples to refer to ourselves. And then with Coping Mechanisms, there is a risk of making people think of pathology, and that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to use those words in a way that brought into focus how so much of being in the world for Indigenous peoples is the experience of succumbing to colonial violence. Hopefully, one of the ways we cope is by making joy. I hope that is also evident in the work. We are not simply defined by what has been done to us, but also by how we have resisted and done things differently and loved one another in the face of it all.
Q Was it intimidating to tackle a second book after winning the Griffin for your first?
A Luckily, I wrote the vast majority of NDN Coping Mechanisms before I was even nominated for the Griffin. I wrote it in a state of urgency; I felt I had left so much out of This Wound is the World. And I was eager to experiment with different forms, and in this book there are different modes — lyric, conceptual, theoretical and visual. Winning the Griffin gave me an institutional legibility that is seldom afforded to new poets, especially those writing outside of the more pastoral Canadian tradition.
Q You started writing poems when you were 19, and a university student. What brought you to that genre?
A I was drawn to poetry partly because it doesn’t have the same problems of access as other genres. One can more easily be a self-taught poet; there is an expectation that one hasn’t gone through the institutional track to become a poet. It’s the genre of the masses. I wrote academic essays in classes and felt the limitations of that. I wanted to write from experience rather than theory.
For readers, the primary impetus of poetry is to offer up a different experience of embodiment. In intellectual inquiry, generally, it is an experience of the mind, whereas poetry lives in the body. I’ve had this said to me before, that even if the language of my poems is abstract and difficult, there is a musicality to it that allows for other kinds of meaning to be made that live in the body. Even if there is a misunderstanding, there is still a felt experience.
Q You’re schooling the next generation of writers at the University of British Columbia. What are students seeking from your classes?
A There is this general desire to live a kind of artful life amongst my students, who are very diverse and from around the world. They have a suspicion that there is something about poetry and creative writing that offers another kind of experience of the world that isn’t what they have received. That’s particularly relevant to our current state of affairs, living in a time of global catastrophe and political crisis of all kinds, all the time. The students hope that creative writing if only slightly, can open room to breathe.
It’s a Herculean task and I don’t think that I, or anyone, can do it perfectly. But if anything, I want them to see in the things that we study that the present isn’t all there is. That we can still create a different kind of future for ourselves and others that doesn’t inhibit freedom and flourishing.
NDN BROTHERS