Glimpse took bronze in the IPPY poetry category in the States. I didn’t even know it had been submitted for this, so it’s kind of nice. I hear winners actually get medals. The last time I got a medal I was 24 and competing internationally in Judo. So this makes me feel loved and young. I’ll wear it around for a few days like I just left the competition and haven’t had time to take it off yet…
Here’s the nominees for the EJ Pratt Poetry Prize (Patrick Warner, Tom Dawe, and me) talking about poetry on CBC last weekend. Three good books, though my money is on Tom Dawe to win.
I’ll be reading in support of the NL Book Awards, where my book Glimpse has been shortlisted for poetry. The awards are handed out bi-yearly, with this year being poetry and non-fiction.
What: NL Book Awards
When: May 17, 7:30pm
Where: The Ship Pub (265 Duckworth Street, St. John’s)
From the FB Page:
Come celebrate with the finalists for the 2011 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards!
2011 Rogers Communications Non-fiction Award Finalists:
• Glenn Deir
Sick Joke: Cancer, Japan, and Back Again (Breakwater Books, 2010), a quirky travelogue chronicling the author’s experiences with Japanese culture and medical culture.• Greg Malone
You Better Watch Out (Knopf Canada, 2009), a memoir about a young boy who survives, among other things, a school run by the Christian Brothers, encounters with the bullies of New Gower Street and the perfect family.• Rhonda Pelley
Island Maid: Voices of Outport Women (Breakwater Books, 2010), with photographs by Sheilagh O’Leary, the chronicle of a Newfoundland road trip taken by Pelley and O’Leary, this book documents with photos and words the thoughts and lives of women interviewed and photographed during their travels.2011 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award Finalists:
• Tom Dawe
Where Genesis Begins (Breakwater Books, 2009), with artwork by Gerald Squires, a collaboration of two of Newfoundland’s foremost artists: Tom Dawe, a profoundly visual poet, and Gerald Squires, a profoundly poetic painter.• George Murray
Glimpse (ECW Press, 2010), a sometimes-funny, sometimes-touching selection of 409 aphorisms, a form that straddles the line between poetry and philosophy, yet may be more accessible to the general public than either.• Patrick Warner
Mole (House of Anansi Press, 2009), a collection of poems that is levity-laden in places and poignant in others, and reveals surprising meaning in the mundane moments and objects of daily life.
Glimpse has been shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Prize. Nowhere to link to yet (last year’s winners here), but the press release says there will be readings from the finalists on May 17 at 7:30pm (location TBA) and a ceremony to announce the winner on May 18.
Other nominees for poetry are Pat Warner for Mole (Anansi) and Tom Dawe for Where Genesis Begins (Breakwater).
I forgot to mention when the news came out, but I judged the CBC Literary Awards for poetry this year with poets Motion and Weyman Chan. The full list of readers and judges is here and the list of finalist titles and poets are here. The winner will be announced on March 24th.
The National Post has posted the winners and honorable mentions from the Glimpse contest they ran in which they asked readers to submit their own original aphorism. I chose three winners, who will each receive a signed copy of the book, and three honorable mentions, who get nothing except their names in the paper. I judged them blind (meaning I couldn’t see the names of those who wrote what), and yet other poet-types crept in there, most notably Gary Barwin, who won a book, and Christian Bök, who had two honorable mentions.
Last month, in honour of George Murray’s new book, Glimpse, we asked readers to submit their best aphorisms.
We received a fair amount of replies, and forwarded the lot of them to Murray, who agreed to choose the winners. He also pointed out that many of the submissions were either famous quotes or lifted from comedians. So, er, yeah. Maybe we didn’t make the rules clear: we were looking for original aphorisms.
Anyways, here are our winners, who will each receive a signed copy of Glimpse.
The National Post is offering up a challenge: write your own aphorism, a-la Glimpse, and enter for a chance to receive one of three signed copies of Glimpse!
“The slot machine is the idiot’s ATM.”
“Every crowd is a mass grave that death never visited.”
“The cat that dies is simply the cat that lost count.”
These words of wisdom are all pulled from Glimpse, the poet George Murray’s new collection of aphorisms.
We introduced you to author and book over the weekend and now we want you to come up with your own aphorisms.
E-mail your best aphorisms — a maximum of three, please — to theafterword@nationalpost.com. We’ll select the finalists, while George Murray will pick the winners, three of whom will receive a signed copy of Glimpse.
The deadline is Friday, October 1 at 6 PM EST, and remember: “Those who do not enter cannot win.”
The Rush to Here was shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Prize!
The finalists for the EJ Pratt Poetry Award are:
Randall Maggs for “Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems” (Brick Books, 2008), a collection of conversational poems that follow the tragic trajectory of the life and work of one of hockey’s best goalies.
George Murray for “The Rush to Here” (Nightwood Editions, 2007), poems that combine what the poet calls “thought rhymes” with a structured sonnet form.
Agnes Walsh for “Going Around with Bachelors” (Brick Books, 2007), poems that employ the tang of Newfoundland language to meld the plain with the sophisticated.
I received a lovely letter and citation from DC Reid of British Columbia, who wrote to tell me he’d been one of two judges for the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, a prize that doesn’t publish a shortlist (excellent poet Asa Boxer won, so congratulations to him), and that my 2007 book, The Rush to Here, had made it to the top five.
It’s extremely kind and classy of Mr. Reid to write, so I send my thanks and regards. I also note that he’s bang-on about the importance of shortlists, especially in the poetry world in Canada, where chances for recognition are few and far between.
His letter is excerpted below.
…I read your spectacular book, the rush to here, as a juror on the CAA Award for a book of poetry from 2007.
The judging was blind, as in neither I nor the other person knew who the other was, nor had any contact. After battling through 103 books, both of us put your book on our individual top 10 list. Subsequently your book made it to the top five short list. So both of us thought a great deal of your work.
While your book was not the ultimate winner, I wanted to let you know that you made it to the top five. I asked the CAA to publish a shortlist, as that is pretty much just as good, and is important to writers. They declined for 2007.
But I wanted to reach out and let you know because we poets tend to exist in our corners not knowing whether we have connected with anyone out there. It’s a confidence thing for following books; hence my reason for sending this letter….
Well put, I think. And here is his citation, copied in full from his website dcreid.ca
the rush to here – George Murray, Nightwood Editions
At once recognizable as a great book, the rush to here, effortlessly explores the sonnet in all of its permutations and is so neat in its execution, so Shakespearian in its lush authority that it sneaks up on a reader and takes him/her by the throat. There are quotable completely-full-of-themselves epigrams in each and every poem. From Silence is a Dead Language: What you’re looking for is ingenuity / enough to let ambition go: to find / yourself building the simple, the clever, / suddenly satisfied with what’s appearing // at the ends of your much-surprised hands. This is supple, sure, intelligent swelling of incandescence abundance. What impresses is the magic of great poetry captured in one of the western hemisphere’s millennia-long traditional forms, overleaping in one easy – for Murray – step one current retrograde neo-conservative stream in Canadian poetry that holds up structure as the only important consideration in poetry. The rush to here blows that movement completely apart even though it’s not intending to. This guy is so smart so sparklingly clear in his poetic invocations that every line rings as clear as a glass tinged by a fingernail. You want the music to continue and continue in its arpeggio octaves.
So very kind and generous of him to advocate for a shortlist. Maybe CAA will change their minds in the future?
I’ll be making several appearances in support of the Atlantic Book Awards, in which I’ve been shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize, starting May 9th and leading up to the award ceremony on the 12th, and then in St. John’s shortly after. If you’re handy to any of these venues, I’d love to see you there. Details below.
May 9th, 7pm
Reading with: Don Domanski, Anne Simpson, and Herménégilde Chiasson
Saint John, NB – University of New Brunswick, Ward Chipman Building, Study Lounge
May 10th, 3:30pm
Reading with Don Domanski
Charlottetown, PE – Confederation Centre Library
May 12th, 4pm
Atlantic Book Awards Ceremony
Dartmouth, NS – Alderney Theatre
May 15th, 7pm
Reading with Marq de Villiers and Bernice Morgan
St. John’s, NL – The Studio, 272 Water Street
My thanks to the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia for organizing and footing the bill for all this travel, and to the Writers Alliance of Newfoundland Labrador for hosting the St. John’s reading.
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