Here’s a handy list: Don Coles, Julie Bruck, Ricardo Sternberg, Steven Heighton, Eric Ormsby, Bruce Taylor, Elise Partridge, Michael Lista, Robyn Sarah, Carmine Starnino, Evan Jones, Daryl Hine, Jason Guriel, Mark Abley, Brian Bartlett, Amanda Jernigan, Jeffrey Donaldson, Matthew Tierney, Molly Peacock, David Solway, John Riebetanz, Zach Wells. For now, if “world-class” is to suggest anything other than “looks like something cool I think they might have in New York,” then it has to refer to poets who have actually published poems outside of Canada – those whose poems have made their way out into the big wide dangerous world and found takers in such places as The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and Poetry, to name just three of the more sought-after venues. Just when I’d come to believe that Torontonians might have sworn off the phrase – or at least abandoned it to civic-boosters and condo developers – he drops this gem: “…We have a staggering number of poets, though very few world-class ones.” One day some bemused historian will write a definitive study dissecting all the cultural anxieties and pretensions bound up in the usage of that phrase among a certain strata of Torontonians. Which brings us to the second problem with Bland’s argument. In the meantime, what’s wrong with a prize that celebrates our literature and provides an opportunity for foreign jurors to read our work at the same time? The poet’s hope, as Auden wrote, “is to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.” The prizes that Canadian poets really need to win are the ones handed out in other countries. If our poets had to compete for the International prize, any Canadian winner could be accused of enjoying a “home field” advantage. (Bland may quibble that these prizes are only open to books published in Britain, but, surely, if you’re going to publish foreign books, you’ll publish the best ones you can.) In fact, the more closely you examine other, similar, awards, the better the Griffin Prize looks in explicitly acknowledging its bias. In 20 years, the former has been won by a non-Brit precisely five times, and the latter just once. Eliot and Forward Prizes for the year’s best collections. The math only gets worse when we consider the two literary awards that most resemble the Griffin Prize: Britain’s T.S. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. (These numbers have been a source of controversy but mainly amongst the altruistic Swedes themselves.) And guess what? Of the hundred-odd Nobel laureates since 1902, seven have been Swedish, 14 have been Scandinavian, and well over half have been European. Even the Nobel Prize, which Bland cites, was established to honour “outstanding work in an ideal direction” and thus embodies the particular kind of admirable and idealistic Scandinavian internationalism that produced figures like Dag Hammarskjold and initiatives like the Global Seed Vault.
First of all, literary prizes have a bias – the money always comes from somewhere and the prizes are always founded with a goal. Prizes, however, are not bookshelves, and there are very good reasons for maintaining a Canadian category in the Griffin Prize. On the eclectic, unsegregated bookshelves of our imagination, it’s always been survival of the fittest: Only the best poems have a place on these shelves, and the rest, no matter how worthy, fall by the wayside.
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