THE ART OF SPEAKING OUT
The seven finalists for the 2018 Griffin Prize discuss the importance of poetry when times are tough,
In turbulent times, it’s often said that the first voices to be silenced are the poets. Yet, in our turbulent times, poets are giving voice to issues including racism, equality and sexuality. This week, on June 7, the Griffin Prize for Poetry will be presented to two poets — one from Canada, one international — chosen from seven finalists.
The prize was established by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin in 2000; at $65,000 for each winner and $10,000 for each finalist, it is the richest for poets anywhere. He was concerned that “poetry had basically disappeared” and said “the objective was to bring it back.”
Here, brief interviews with the three Canadian and four international finalists. Aisha Sasha John for I have to live. On the title: While I was writing the book the Black Lives Matter movement was taking rise. There was, for me, troubling implications in the fact that Black Lives Matter was in the third person. Who’s the audience of that sentence? To whom are we saying that our lives matter? Part of the politics of my work is that I composite myself as an audience member. When we make ourselves the audience, a version of ourselves, to me it’s loving myself and respecting myself. Because it’s saying about me and people like me: we need books. On reading out loud: Poetry is essentially an oral art. I edit on the page but I always edit also by reading the work to myself because my ear picks up different things than my eye does. Orality and rhythm, the music of it, is essential. There are poems I would have chucked if not for the fact somehow when I listened to it I (was) so compelled by it. There are poems I’m very proud of how they appear on the page but they fall dead to me when I read them. To me reading the poem, speaking the poem is the most sophisticated tool I have for editing it. Donato Mancini for Same Diff On prize culture: Nowadays getting a nomination goes a long way to how people see the work and take it a lot more seriously and pay it a lot more attention. I write what might be called kind of serious poetry, so this kind of a thing can give a new life to my work. Prizes can be bad things, they can be divisive, they can create unnecessary competition and jealousy between writers. The good side is sometimes they really do have this great function of taking people who, for any number of reasons, might not have been getting the kind of attention that they might warrant or deserve and bring warranted and deserved attention to their work. On how poetry helps in hard times: I think a lot of people are feeling there is a general feeling of sadness and grief socially right now. Poems can be about healing, they can be about making clear certain kinds of social antagonism, they can be — in a good sense — escapist; life is hard, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of fun and escapism. The beautiful thing about poetry in particular is every poet and every poem answers that question in its own way. Billy-Ray Belcourt for This Wound is a World On sadness and hope: One of the things I wanted to perhaps dispel in the book was that emotions like sadness and hope were irreconcilable, that they couldn’t exist alongside of one another. So what I wanted to do was show that it’s often from sadness that hope bubbles up, or that one’s experience of heartbreak and grief are, in another vein of thinking, kernels of possibility, because they nod to or point to what life might be like without political violence, without premature and preventable death, etc. On the rhetoric of protest: The language of Indigenous protest and political life … can sometimes be coded. (For example,) the warrior is sometimes invoked to conceptualize the social position of those who refuse colonization. And what I wanted to do was to illuminate other facets of Indigenous social life that are more mundane or less politically loud. So I talk about … my kinship with my grandmother, for example. But also the book is about sex and sexuality, intimacy and desire and how those are places where we enact forms of care that are politically powerful.