There seems something uniquely and frustratingly Canadian about the idea of refusing to celebrate ourselves, because that’s unfair to all of the other people. When the Griffin Poetry Prize shifted their focus from separate Canadian and International shortlists to something blended, arguably to hold our poets up to the world market, it reduced a once-grand prize to one untethered from the majority of Canadian literary activity. Through separate Canadian and International shortlists and winners, we were able to simultaneously celebrate our own, and allow for that wider context. For most American poets, it was the first they were hearing of both the prize itself, and an array of Canadian poets, most of whom never make it onto the American radar. To paraphrase Toronto poet and editor Paul Vermeersch’s response to that first post-shift longlist in March 2023, the Griffin Prize thinks it gained legitimacy by spending money, but it gained legitimacy by associating itself with a community of poets and publishers that have now been abandoned. Collapsing underneath the weight of its own lingering provincialism.
If the systems of reviewing and award shortlists and longlists have become required promotion-machines even for those of us within the structures of literary production, then what chance have those same titles when those systems reduce, break down or even shut down? What chance has the public to be aware of anything beyond those two or three already-bestsellers? I keep thinking that if literary titles had the publicity machinery that popular music does, from those halcyon days of MuchMusic and MTV, entertainment weeklies and radio stations, then so many more of us would be able to actually make a living. As Vermeersch himself adds, via email:
In the years the Griffin Poetry Prize has existed, venues and opportunities for regular books reviews of poetry collections or interviews with poets have all but disappeared. As though in response to disappearing book coverage, the Griffin Prize had slowly made itself the only reliable reason a book of Canadian poetry might be noticed in the mainstream media at all. Like Reaganomics, it provided a kind of supply-side artificial scarcity of attention, and the rest of the Canadian poetry community was forced to make do with trickle-down recognition in the shadow of the Griffin. There's nothing else that effectively shines a light on the remarkable range and brilliance of Canadian poetry. The Globe and Mail, for example, hasn’t reviewed a book of poetry in three years. The conditions that made Al Purdy, Irving Layton, and Dennis Lee household names have disappeared. Now, with the elimination of the Canadian Griffin Prize, even the source of that trickle-down attention is gone. Throwing a few bucks behind the Writers Trust Latner Prize doesn’t fix the problem. There’s still one less major prize celebrating Canadian poetry, and the Latner Prize was never on the radar of the mainstream media or the book-buying public. I’m afraid adding more money to it likely won’t change that. Cancelling the Canadian Griffin Prize is like tightening the shut-off valve to the last privately-owned water main serving a community after all the naturally occurring rivers had been dammed. I fear the drought will only get worse.