Keith Waldrop

"If you read a review of Keith Waldrop's 'Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy,' this year's winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, there's a good chance it will include the word 'postmodern' or 'avant-garde.' These are terms that put a lot of readers on guard, signaling experimental verse."

QWF Awards

Congrats to the winners.

GG's

Congratulations to the winners. And all those on the short list too.

Chapbooking: some reflections

Kieth has an interesting post on the intricacies of chapbook production -- a guide for the DIYers. One thing though: for Sky of Ink, I downloaded a chapbook template from the League of Canadian Poets website, here. Downloads are free for anyone. We were able to alter its configuration to take legal sized pages folded in half, which is a size I like for poetry, as it provides "breathing room" especially for long lines. (It does limit, though, one's choices of paper.) The nice thing about this template is that you paste the poems in sequentially and it automatically recto-versos them for you in the right order. Then we take the file to our local copy shop and presto!

Chapbooks, as Keith says, can serve as a poet's business card. They're the literary equivalent of the music EP.

The chapbook length, as I've said elsewhere, is to my view the most suitable for poetry, considering the intense demands poetry makes on its readers; one can conceivably get through a chapbook in one sitting. The full length trade book demands a considerably greater a commitment. Was it Thorton Wilder who said that out of any city we create a village we call our own? Most poetry readers dip into collections; it could be said that out of every full-length collection, we create a chapbook we can call our own.

Besides, look at the organization of many a poetry collection: a lot of them are simply subdivided into parts -- a series of chapbooks.

For all its advantages as a reading experience, the chapbook in our culture has a problem of status. It is akin to the part-time job. Full-length books, like full time jobs, get all the benefits: reviews, prizes, inclusion in libraries, etc. -- even though part-timers may put in the most inspired work! (I know that's true of teaching, at any rate.) In the States particularly, there are a number of chapbook manuscript competitions with promise of prize $$, honour, publication -- some of these may even raise money for their publishers. You can find them listed every month in Poets & Writers. But there are precious few prizes for finished DIY-type chapbooks. The BP Nichol competition is one; the WCDR international chapbook challenge, in which our own Nina Bruck came out a winner for 2008, didn't run this year and appears sporadic, if not defunct. These are the only ones I know of. Can anyone out there suggest another?

Another disadvantage: chapbooks tend to get lost on a shelf.

So why make chapbooks? Well, these productions are a joy to make, and a means to grow. Publishing is an integral part of the creative process: juxtaposing poems in fresh combinations, seeing how they relate to one another, or how motifs repeat can be a real eye-opener. Ones' editorial skills are instantly honed when one prepares one's work for public exposure in this way. If one doesn't have a tradebook publisher ready to publish one's work, this can be a good intermediate step.

Christian Bök on Poetry Awards

Zach Wells this weekend posted a lengthy interview with Christian Bök on literary success, poetry awards, and his unfortunate tour of duty with the GG: quite an insightful and absorbing read. Some highlights:

What I’ve noticed about the fundamental psychology of the process is that, for most people on a jury, a vote for the winner is actually a kind of vote for yourself. You are hoping, in a certain sense, to see yourself either reflected or embodied in the winner. I think that this fact alone may account in large part for the mediocrity of many prizewinners. I think that, if you are a mediocre assessor , you are going to have difficulty advancing the cause of your betters at the expense of your own career.

...it seems to me that, in the history of art, consensus never explains who the best people are in the short term. Really, I think that any statements about the future importance of an author for posterity’s sake are generally made as wagers by charismatic individuals staking an expert claim against history.

I think that it’s very difficult to be a writer of merit in this country without befriending other writers of merit. In a social network as small as this one, I think that you inevitably become intimate with all the people whom you might upstage or emulate, and certainly, given the limited number of coteries in Canada, you would have a hard time bracketing your involvement with other writers who have a perspective sympathetic to your own.

Well, the ‘no good reason’ has to do with the fact that there are no rules of governance—so they’re making up the reasons as they go. And to me that’s unconscionable for a prize that’s supposed to be this important.

More on the GG controversy (en plus)

Just learned via Zach that George Murray of BookNinja fame was interviewed on Q on Monday about the ongoing GG controversy. He handled the issue in a very decent, even-handed way, but if anything a tad too gently, saying the jury process needed to be "tweaked" rather than, as he asserted on his own site, "fixed" because it was "obviously broken", and "clean[ed] as best we can". I can relate to his inclination to tailor his message to the medium: hot heads hardly prevail at the CBC. I'd still be inclined to use an adjective like "overhaul".

Cushy, cushy...

The job posting for the Head of Writing and Publishing at the Canada Council just went up. Hmmm... what a surprise! And nice salary -- it would keep about three of me living in the style to which we're accustomed. Funny -- I am almost qualified for this job. I know a fair bit about writing and publishing in this country. I have both official languages to the degree to which they're required. The only thing I lack is the management skills and experience. How about mismanagement skills? With my own book coming out next year, I could get myself on the short list easily. Maybe I should go for it!

More on the GG fullafaroo

Some lively stuff in the comments chain following the Book Ninja post on the whole GG fullafaroo (I think I just made this word up. Anyone out there -- tell me if I'm wrong). Andre Alexis has quite a different take on the Holmes interview than I entertained -- and he may well be right. Scroll down to comment #18. Holmes' response is comment #36. See the post below for a link to the Holmes interview.

Update on the GG controversy

Today, a National Post interview with Michael Holmes, the ECW Press editor of Jacob Scheier's book. To me, he answers most of the criticisms around this particular award satisfactorily. At the same time, like George Murray, I think the jury process needs to be cleaned up and that the Canada Council should strike a committee to properly address these issues before the next round of judging.

Fighting the hydra

I just learned through Zach that Melanie Rutledge is suddenly departing as head of the Writing and Publishing section of the Canada Council. Was the flack too much for her? Unless the next one comes in with the express purpose of reforming things, this may be enough to derail any attempts to pressure those changes from below... we'll have to redirect letters to the new director, etc. In the meantime, the whole issue could be swept under the rug.

My open letter to the Canada Council

Below is a letter I sent to Melanie Rutledge, head of the writing and publishing arm of the Canada Council. I've sent a copy to Robert Sirman, the head honcho of the Council as well. Practically nothing in this letter is original in the least. All the suggestions were made by others at Book Ninja and on the Canadian League of Poet's List Serve. Much of the wording echoes Zach's letter quite closely because, well, I couldn't think of a better way to phrase my concerns without much unnecessary brain wracking. Those words, though, bear repeating.

Dear Melanie Rutledge,

Doubtless you well aware of the controversy brought about by Jacob Scheier's win of this year’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Rather reiterate the contentions surrounding this decision, I would like to point out some measures that would assure greater objectivity and transparency in the award nomination and judging process. These have been suggested by a number of writers on websites and list serves where Canadian poetry is discussed.

-- having as many as five or six jurors, at least one of whom is not a Canadian poet, on the award jury

-- that the jurors make their decision independently on a points system, instead of meeting up and trying to persuade each other of the merits of their particular favourites

-- that meetings between jurors be recorded and witnessed, as they are in other jury funding processes, where someone can step in and say there's a clear conflict of interest here, or there's a bit too much personal sniping, etc.

Adopting any of these measures would go a long way towards clearing up the problems around this award. At a time when arts funding is being questioned and cut, it is extremely important that even the appearance of unethical or inappropriate dealings vis-à-vis the disbursement of public money be avoided.

Thank you for listening to my concerns.

Sincerely,

Brian Campbell
poet, translator, editor

One more tainted Golly G award

Zachariah Wells has been providing a blow-by-blow account of this year's tainted GG Award for Poetry, won by Jacob Sheier for his More to Keep Us Warm. This article in Quill and Quire sums up the details and latest reactions. There's been lots of chatter at Book Ninja, too. Seems one of the judges, Pier Georgio de Ciccio, blurbed the winning book; another, Di Brandt co-wrote a poem in it, and both are mentioned in the acknowlegements -- indeed, the winning author, gives special thanks Di Brandt for her "ongoing advice, support and feedback in the process of writing this book." Even if the writing was absolutely stellar, the obvious connections tarnish this award & the prestige of the prize. But I'm inclined to agree with Fraser Sutherland's review that appeared in the Globe and Mail a few days back -- that a lot of it is pretty facile stuff. See for yourself (just scroll down). That all this end with a bang, not a whimper, indeed.

Foetry.com would have had a field day with this one.

It's hard to imagine these particular judges couldn't feel the heat coming from this decision... nor the author. Readers are encouraged to write letters of concern & protest, as Wells has done, to those in the Canada council in charge.

eating words...

Despite my objections to the CBC's Literary Competition's ridiculous new eligibility requirements, last night between 1 and 3 in the morning I pieced together a pretty nice sequence to grace their airline magazine. And none of it can I recall reading in public. I rather doubt it's a winner, but it may have a shot at the short list. Deadline's tomorrow.... but if you want to participate, keep those poems to yourself! Mumble them down your shirt front -- resist any temptation to declaim them in the streets!

The Tight-ass Awards

Was just going through the eligibility requirements for this year's CBC Literary Competition when suddenly, I couldn't believe my eyes. Italics mine:

All entries must be original and unpublished works. All works that have appeared in print or on the web, including self-published works, as well as works that have been broadcast or delivered in front of a public audience are considered previously published and are therefore not eligible for the competition.

In other words, if you've so much as farted a poem in public, it's ineligible for the CBC Literary competition.

What a ridiculous gag order!

I guess they want to encourage the silent, anal-retentive types who keep their unpublished work to themselves, who never share new work on the spur of the moment in a reading.

Even if most of my poems are eligible, I don't feel like even implicitly condoning this nonsense by submitting to it. I'm sure Robert Weaver, who founded this competition -- and who championed the likes of Irving Layton and Al Purdy -- is doing somersaults in his grave right now.

PS. John Fretz, organizer of the Poetry Plus readings, sent me this e-mail in response, reproduced here with his permission:

Hi Brian:

Thanks for your attention to this salient detail. My view of a public reading is somebody like John Steffler given an honorarium to read/talk before an organized crowd of people who have basically never met the poet - a funded event...and not poems read before a group of friends or circle who mostly know each other, and who do so without a predetermined honorarium. In any case, the CBC should define and clarify what they mean. It's not stopping me this time around.

Cheers
JF

My response, here considerably refined, went something like this:

Even if [public reading] were as you define them, [their restriction on them] is BS. I don't want to make too much of this, but it seems to me an outgrowth of our culture of surveillance -- the over-controlling, neo-con proto-fascism that's becoming more and more pervasive in our times (see CBC's own radio/podcast series, The Suspect Society). I've read for honorarium too -- and sometimes reading new poems for such a public (well, any public) helps me to spot phrases that could be to revised, etc. Considering how spotty attention can be at such readings, how malleable people's memories are, this hardly constitutes "publication". Your reply, though, makes me reconsider sending work to them... at least provides a more reasonable way to word a letter to the CBC on this matter. Another question of a potpourri of questions: if one revises one's poem after reading it out loud, does it constitute the same poem? Perhaps they do indeed need to define their terms. But again, whatever way you cut it, the terms are ridiculous.

Cautionary tale

Considering sending to poetry book publishing contests? Here's a cautionary tale -- a true horror story -- from Stacey Lynn Brown. With freezes and cuts in government arts funding, such contests are also becoming more common in Canada. The same caveat, of course, applies.

UPDATE, Aug. 29: It seems that Stacey has found another publisher. Good for her!

In this doggy dog world...

Since Jan. 3, I've been marking CEGEP English exit exams six and a half hours a day, and this week (Monday to Wed.), doing double duty, teaching my evening ESL class for three. Add in two and a half hours of commuting, and that makes for some full days...

English CEGEPs graduate about 8 - 10,000 students a year, each of whom has to write a standardized English Exit exam -- a 750 word essay analyzing either a short story or literary essay -- to prove that he or she has achieved an acceptable degree of proficiency in the language of, if not Shakespeare, Hemingway or Atwood. There are about 50 markers -- about half are CEGEP teachers, about half "externals" like me (although I have taught in CEGEP for a session or two...). This session there are about 4,000 exams to be marked -- the papers are graded by two independent evaluators who then consult to come up with a consensus on two of three criteria, going for the higher grade of the remaining criterion if it remains a grade apart. Failures are passed on to supervisors for further adjudication. Ultimately, all this byzantine-sounding complexity adds up a system that ensures a maximal degree of fairness, I believe -- although sometimes I wonder what it says about trust (or trustworthiness) in CEGEP standards that this sort of test has to be given for students who have already passed their way through the system.

I got the news today that I didn't make the CBC shortlist this year. I could have guessed as much: last year they notified me I was on it on Dec. 18. (Therefore, fellow competitors, if you haven't heard from the CBC by Xmas, don't hold your breath -- definitely, send that work elsewhere!)

Funny thing is, this year's submission was much stronger than last year's -- a new-and-improved version. Shows you how subjective these things are. Boo hoo.

A lot of the CEGEP exams this term are quite good (some, of course, are atrocious), but occasionally we come across funny phonetically-based spelling errors. One student wrote, "This is a doggy dog world."

Yes it is. Woof woof.

CEE BEE CEED

I never realized until recently how big the CBC looms in my life. Sometimes I feel like I'm on their payroll. This week I was busy getting a submission together for the CBC literary competition (last year I was a finalist.) This weekend I'll be doing a lengthy translation (French to English) for, let's say, a party closely connected to the CBC. It'll pay most of my rent, so in a way I am on their payroll. Last month I did an interview about Communauto car-sharing service that appeared on CBC 6:00 news; this coming Monday, my friend Raphael Bendahan and I will be interviewed by a Montreal Arts reporter in connection with Nina Bruck's book. (Nina will also be interviewed; details about the broadcast, etc. to come.) I drive to work listening to Home Run (or Radio Canada, the French CBC), drive home listening to Ideas. I watch the CBC National news almost every night. I record choice broadcasts that repeat on CBC Newsworld, transcribe parts of them and play them every so often for an advanced class of ESL students. I have a friend who teaches ESL at the CBC, who every so often calls me up with questions. I once taught ESL at the CBC. Because I donated to the Council of Canadians once, I even get junk mail from an organization called Friends of the CBC. So do I love the CBC? Not exactly -- but far more than our Federal Government does.

Bridge

This weekend I've been practicing, over and over again, a tough fingerpicking piece called Bridge by Bert Jansch. Melodically, it's so beautiful, though, I don't mind the the repetition. Years ago I tried to master it but gave up. With this new guitar, all seems possible. One advantage of developing good guitar callouses is you can handle hot toast with your hands.
_____________________

I've also -- with considerably less enthusiasm -- been trying to complete a poem for CV2's 2-day poem contest. 10 words are provided, you have to come up with a poem of under 48 lines containing those 10 words. Unfortunately, this year half the words come out of a literary dissertation, half the words out of a yellowing issue of "Science Today". The most vivid ones are "gyroscope" and "mole". Last year the selection was not much better: it included "pelican" and "cauterize" and "teapot". What's with those guys out there in Winnipeg? Anyway, in the first half hour last night I strung together something just to see if I could use all those blasted words is quickly as possible and get it over with. Tonight I reworked the piece into something bleak, cryptic, and quasi-"intense" -- but definitely not anything that stirs pride in my frame. Should I send it in? I'll decide at five minutes to midnight.

P.S. I sent it in. Now I'm hoping against hope that I don't win. What's with this guy in Montreal?

P.P.S. Hilarious: I just got this note from them in reply:

Hi Brian,

Impressive, 5 of the words in 2 lines. In all the years we’ve been doing this, I don’t think I’ve seen that done before. Good luck with it.

Officially: your poem has been received in good order.

Thanks for playing. We hope to see you back again next year.

The Gang at CV2

Yeah, right. At least I got a good laugh out of it...

TAR/CBC

Heavy snow today as a storm beat its way across Eastern North America -- my street looked like this again, no need to take another picture. Nevertheless, the mail arrived -- found my two contributer's copies of The Antigonish Review (issue #148, containing one poem by yrs. truly) under a big white mustachio of snow in my mailbox. Fortunately, they had shrinked-wrapped the magazine not one, two, but three times -- though I almost tore the reviews in half trying to rip through all that plastic. Will post the poem at a later date, if the The Antigonish Review doesn't. (I notice, though, TAR rarely posts poems on its site... practically all material posted there consists of reviews and fiction.)

***

The CBC broadcast exerpts of poetry winners tonight -- gave them eight minutes each -- and no, the poets did not read, but rather prim, polished actresses. I still think it would have been more interesting to hear the poets themselves, at least (well, especially) on the awards program. The reader of 1st prize winner Moira Cook's Walker in the City sounded like she was practicing for an elocution competition, all those precious syllables so loud and crystal-clear and gushily dramatic. Cook's writing, though, suggests a breathless delivery: it expresses a raw, exuberant delight in words, beginning with some very vivid weather images very Canadian. I transcribe from a tape, using // for caesuras in the actress' delivery:

a stringent day in early April when all the angels have been let out of their cages//the wet blue beak of morning, sky skidding on ahead, or flying, the sky//flying laundry// shunting cirrus back and forth//sky swirving its tracks, boing, boing, rubber as a ball // highing// the bluish bit of hash (?*) at the centre of a jaunty girl's jaunty eye//"kaloo kalay" arias she out // but soft, away

Arresting and fun... but boing, boing, rubber as a ball? I had the impression after this that the narrative got bogged down with a lot of similarly extraneous detail, verging on incoherence. (Forgiveable vice, perhaps...) All those gloves & mittens... one "numbered five and a half", and "gathering in all the world's soiled places where she's too long stared herself down." Another line brings back the unifying motif: "A walker in the city stoops and strides, blush, blush, away". Is the Walker one of those metal supports old people use? Clearly not! Anyway, it's got some quirky, intense, & interesting language. I'll give it that. I would have to read the whole thing to see how it how it hangs together.

The selection read of the 2nd place winner, Kelly Norah Drukker, was a more sombre affair about silk weavers of Leon. A few lines, at random from the tape:

the merchants eyes, round as black sous take in the redness of my hands, the darkness of the room in which we work and live, the slow fire of the loom, burning our thoughts to crimson ends. Our children learn the spectrum slide from red to mauve before they know words. We pluck patterns like birds from the air, and fasten them with strings.

I like a number of images here which leap, as it were, from the darkness: especially those patterns "plucked... like birds from the air".

Neither of these is exactly everyman verse, the kind of plain n' simple Kooser-ish writing one might expect from a public broadcaster competition. Actually my own writing was not that far away, in some respects, from these. And this competition, it should be noted, has never really gone for that. I suppose I should give them credit there. It would have been interesting though to see total contrast in style: one cryptic-elliptic-hypercomplex, the other the extreme of plain & simple. Perhaps I ask too much.

*yes, the actor pronounced hash, not ash, which would seem to make more sense. Unless the girl is smoking dope -- very un-CBC!

... couldn't help but set down some reflections on how silly last night's awards ceremony was. Here they flew the three first-place winners all the way down to Montreal to drink champagne and chat for half an hour with Eleanor Wachtel about how wonderful it feels to win the award, what got them started, what inspired them to write what they did, cite judges' comments, hear a couple of local musicians sing harmonies over strummed guitar -- and, they didn't even read excerpts from the work that won the award to begin with. (Unlike what the above hyperlinked PR indicates.) I hope if the CBC went through all that public expense they at least recorded the writers reading their work for broadcast next week. Even so...

P.S. They didn't.