Spring Update, or, "Oh, yeah... this thing..."
In which I note that I forgot to hit send on December's update and use some of that text to flesh out this spindly thing...
So, I apparently wrote a post in December, but … well, I forgot to hit send on it. Here is the beginning of that:
In many ways, 2022 was a crappy year for us: the deaths of two close friends (the dear Stan Dragland and the glorious Steven Heighton), several bouts of Covid in the house, including one that landed me in hospital thinking I was having a heart attack, the roof went on our home in the same week as our car died and our sewer system needed replaced, my latest book Problematica has maintained its record-setting streak of 0 (zero… ZERO) reviews, novels have been written and abandoned, my relationship with my own poetry needs couples counselling, etc, etc..
But in other ways, it has been quite good and full of renewal. I started a new part time job marketing books, I’ve been asked to review poetry on a national radio program, the Walk the Line classes and the Front of the Line community are humming along, I’ve been asked to write my first non-fiction book on teaching poetry, we travelled outside Canada for the first time in 3 years so I could be the best man at my best bud’s wedding in Brooklyn, I got a new kilt, I started psychotherapy with a kind man who is so serenely calm that it feels like talking to an empathetic alien who has mostly learned to communicate through smiles and nods, etc.
I suppose it’s the fate of any given year to be a mixed bag for, at least some people, but I can say without a doubt that my 40s (now behind me by a couple years) were uniformly great, while the first couple years of my 50s have been a chequered mess.
(FTR, Covid was the single worst sickness of my life. It was OPPRESSIVE. I’ve never been laid so low. And here I am now, six weeks out and I’m still showing symptoms and having to take naps like someone’s grampa at a family gathering. I was triple-vaxxed, wore masks, washed hands, and did all the things the doctors told me to do, and then my kid came home and coughed in my face after dinner one night. Thanks, son….)
Ahem. Back to the Present…
It was National Poetry Month only last week, which is to say, the month each year when poetry gets to be front towards-the-back and centre off-to-the-side in the news. I hope you bought yourself a book of poems by someone you’ve never heard of.
Back in February I was pleased to debut a poetry column on CBC’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers (the cool fairy godmother of Canadian literature). I got to talk about three books and I spent that time on Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations, Phoebe Wang’s Waking Occupations, and David O’Meara’s Masses on Radar. All three books deal with dualities and life changes, and all three are fantastic. Besides getting to chat about these books in specific, it was a lovely chance to stretch out and dig into some generalities around how to read books of varying difficulty levels. Often when I speak publicly, I sort of shut off my conscious brain and ramble, then peek later to see if I made any sense. In this case, I think I did.
My books
My edition of new and selected poems, Problematica, is chugging along, sales-wise, but still has yet to receive a single review. I did get some coverage through CBC and other places, but no traditional reviews. I was talking with a friend who also has a neglected selected (poetry!) and he pointed out that most of the poems in it had already been reviewed as part of other books, but given the healthy chunk of newer work at the end, I’m not sure that holds up. Anyway, if you’d like to review it (with no expectations from me), let me know and I’ll try to get you a copy.
Submitting to journals
I stopped sending unsolicited submissions to journals many years ago, mostly because I was exhausted by it, but also because I finally achieved a certain level of notoriety that meant editors were reaching out to me specifically, which meant I could skip the slush pile. Usually now anything you see from me in print (most recently Ampersand Review and upcoming in the UK journal Bad Lilies) is the result of someone at the magazine reaching out. (Don’t get me wrong, here and there I’ve submitted facelessly, like many other poetry wildebeests, to Poetry and the New Yorker, but largely I’ve been absent from the practice.) For a long while, it was a nice privileged position to be in, but I’ve recently begun to wonder whether I might just cold call a few places. Anyway, it looking around, I was surprised to see which journals are still with us and which have fallen aside.
Awards News
My friends Stuart Ross and Carl Phillips both have good news. Stuart was shortlisted for the Trillium Prize and Carl just won the Pulitzer. Both of these poets are ones I grew up admiring and I’m lucky enough to have become friendly with each over the years. You should buy their books: The Book of Grief and Hamburgers and Then the War.
The Griffin Prize released its first shortlist since dropping the Canadian half of its prize and it looks like the jury was at least conscious of the optics of this terrible decision and they’ve included both a longlist and a shortlist with two (sort of) Canadians on it, though one is senior poet Susan Musgrave, who is a likely choice for most awards. And even worse, none of the books are with what one might think of as “small-presses”. In fact, I think the “smallest” press represented is the venerable Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. So not only are Canadian poets being shuffled aside, Canadian independent publishers are also benched. We’ll see how future years do.
It’s a real shame to have lost this prize, and I frankly can’t figure out why it was dumped except that, along with the news out of Anansi, it looks like Scott Griffin and co want out of the Canadian literature game. What other reason could their be? The idea that Canadians should be able to compete against the rest of the sounds good on paper, but we’re sort of like the 110 pound competitor bumped into the under-250 wrestling bracket. And besides, is the Pulitzer open to Canadians? Is the TS Eliot Prize? What makes these awards vital is they provide a snapshot of some books from that area of the world. The Griffin did this very well for Canadian poetry for many years.
But this change smacks of a couple things: 1) a sort of delusion of grandeur as it tries to position itself as a mini-Nobel Prize, and 2) a thumb in the eye to young, marginalized, experimental, and independent Canadians who are very unlikely to make a list among all the many established international writers who they are now competing against.
I get that Griffin is a “business man” and that to business people publicity growth and profitability are paramount, but neither of those concerns have ever applied to poetry. It seems telling that after several years of increasingly young, marginalized, experimental, and debut books taking the prize (and perhaps with subjects and language that might add a few extra perm curls to the blue-rinse set of Griffin’s rich friends who come to the party), they suddenly drop it. Poetry is already difficult to market and sell, but if the books being chosen for the one award that gets any public attention are also difficult and political and inaccessible to the non-poet folks who fancy themselves aficionados…
Anyway, a bad idea all around. And I say this as some who is fairly confident he would never have gotten nominated anyway.
What I’m reading
I’ve been doing my once per decade re-read of Tolkien’s work. It’s very comforting and even with 95% of the Silmarillion stored in my meat clock upstairs, I still find something new each time. I will point out though that the advent of the movies has really changed my visual anchors for each character in the main series. Sad, because I can barely remember what I thought Legolas looked like before that gorgeous youngster got into the costume for Peter Jackson.
Last year I got to edit a book of poems (her debut) by local musician and politician Maggie Burton. Chores is a feminist look at the ebb and flow of power and understanding in traditional, multigenerational, domestic relationships between women. Love and friction make a great combo for poetry. Really lovely little volume, but I may be biased.
Do you subscribe to one of the many poem-a-day newsletters from various orgs? I subscribe to the one from the Academy of American Poets, and it’s always something interesting, with an emphasis the last few years on previously underrepresented voices. You can sign up here.
What I’m working on
I haven’t been writing much the last year or so, but I have been painting and playing music. When I look back over what I HAVE written since my last book came out, I’m dissatisfied with most of it. So I’m not sure what yo tell you here.
That said, as not-mentioned-in-December, I am working on a non-fiction title, and I went so far as to print out the languishing text of my literary novel in hopes I would one day redraft it into something I can show to others. Lots of bits and bobs of other work, including teaching and going back into a “day job”, in marketing.
What an eye-opener it’s been to work in book marketing. I had no idea how complex and time-consuming it is. I don’t think most authors can really appreciate how much is going on at any given publisher. If they did, you sure wouldn’t hear them whining as much as they do. It’s an enormous amount of work for very little return, in terms of publicity. Be kind to your publicist.
Good to hear from you. Glad you're getting over Covid. Hope the after effects are done with soon.