Author: admin

Truths are
department stores:
you are going up,
you take the escalator,
you don’t come back

In the tentative
darkness of the
raisins there was
half of the
        sun
then the shadow
of the past

Sometimes I get ready for the
  voyage of no return,
but dawn raises the curtains,
  and my adolescence
  is standing at the corner
      of nowhere

Under the wonder of
cold skies

Notes on the Poem
What an intoxicating experience, when a poem introduces you to an image, in just a few words captures your attention and fascination ... and then takes you in unexpected directions from what you thought the image might mean. This crisp excerpt from 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection Time, by Sarah Riggs, translated from poetry originally written in French by Etel Adnan, is endlessly surprising.

"Truths are
department stores"

is a statement that instantly intrigues. A truth is considered an absolute, a single entity. How, then, does that equate to an entity that houses many sections and varieties of items? Or does that single truth house many dimensions?

Navigating that single place with many places within it ... well, an escalator is the perfect conveyance, isn't it? Not only is an escalator a piece of everyday magic - that we take for granted while it miraculously transports between building floors, airport terminals, from subway to street and more ...

"you are going up,
you take the escalator"

but it creates illusions that both charm and can cause harm.

"you don't come back"

With your usual comings and goings, you go and you do come back. What does it mean, then, when a mundane or innocent thought or activity necessitates being ready for a possible "voyage of no return"? Should we always be prepared for the epic and irreversible? This particular escalator - enchantingly but also rather deceptively - is taking you up but never returning you, to the departments through which you have passed, to your adolescence, to your past.

My dear, if it is not a city, it is a prison.
If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city.

When a courtyard talks on behalf of military issue,
all walks take place outside of the body.

Dear life to your left
A medieval painting to your right

None of this makes an impression

Crop people living in thin air
You got five minutes
to learn how to see
through this breeze

When a mask goes sideways,
Barbed wire becomes the floor
Barbed wire becomes the roof
Forty feet into the sky
becomes out of bounds

When a mask breaks in half,
mind which way the eyes go.

Notes on the Poem
Not only are the poems of Tongo Eisen-Martin's 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Heaven Is All Goodbyes gripping on the page, but they are astounding and compelling to hear presented by the poet. We were so fortunate to do just that during the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize readings ...



Once you have heard him speak, we contend that it's impossible to go back to the words on the page and not hear his voice. His demeanour has an offhand ease that makes the words seem extemporaneous, but they are faithful to the words written. The almost unearthly calm of his delivery actually demands your full attention - you are leaning forward to catch every phrase and line and absorb their intensity. Added to the marvel of Eisen-Martin's readings is that the lecterns before him are bare of pages or notes.

So go ahead: read this excerpt from the poem "Faceless" and register what is revealed through imagining his voice bringing it to life.

On Monday, January 18th, 2021, Tongo Eisen-Martin's indelible voice will be applied to a special keynote address he will present online for Martin Luther King Jr. Day in conjunction with Reed College of Portland, Oregon. The address is described as endeavouring "through poetry and exposition [to] investigate the trajectories of liberation for Black people in the United States and what it will require of our imagination and commitment." Even if he doesn't have notes before him for that address, we hope the blazing words will be available after - like the poems we've experienced here - for all of us to learn from and revere.

NIGHT-BLACK SILVER, JANUARY’S LUMINOUS
morning-darkness leaves behind its blacking,
rubbing off on everything I touch.
It could be worse, it could
always be worse, but could it
be better? No, never better than
this moment, it’s perfect, it’ll never
come back. The child sleeps,
the cat plays with its tail, traffic
sighs past on Falkoner Allé. I jot this down
in the margin of the newspaper, drink
a cup of tea, somewhere someone
opens a book, the year has just begun,
and life, the late dawn sneaks in,
polishes the dark spots clean.

Notes on the Poem
We have found the perfect poem with which to start a new year in which we're all investing with particular hope. The poem opening with the charmingly enigmatic line "Night-black silver, January's luminous" comes from Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments, composed in Danish by Ulrikka S. Gernes, translated into English by Canadian poet/translators Per Brask and Patrick Friesen. 

Gernes, Brask and Friesen introduce us to the dawning of a new day in subtle, sweet fashion. How the darkness turns to light has a literally smudged aspect to it:

"January's luminous
morning-darkness leaves behind its blacking,
rubbing off on everything I touch."

As the new day rouses, small acts and observations take on warmth and intimacy: children and cats doing the quiet things they do, the narrator scribbling in a newspaper margin, and imagining someone somewhere opening a book. 

That bit of scribbling suggests the new day might also herald new work. That snippet, what the narrator registers around her that might later evolve into ... well, this poem ... gives what we're reading a pleasingly circular element of Ars Poetica to it.

Also pleasingly, we circle back to those smudges of darkness with which the day began. By the end of the poem ...

"the year has just begun,
and life, the late dawn sneaks in,
polishes the dark spots clean."

Accepting and contented to start a new day, inspired to perhaps start a new work, we are now very ready to start a new year.

By now, my mother has been pulled to the top
of many small waves, carried in the curve that curls
over, onto itself, and unknots,
again, into the liquid plain,
as her ions had first been gathered from appearances
and concepts. And her dividend,
her irreducible, like violet
down, thrown to the seals, starfish,
wolf spiders on the edge-of-Pacific
floor, I like to follow her
from matter into matter, my little quester,
as if she went to sea in a pea-green
boat. Every separate bit,
every crystal shard, seems to
be here — her nature unknowable, dense,
dispersed, her atomization a miracle,
the earth without her a miracle
as if I had arrived on my own
with nothing to owe, nothing to grieve,
nothing to fear, it would happen with me
as it would, not one molecule
lost or sent to the School Principal
or held in a dried-orange-pomander strongbox
stuck with the iron-matron maces
of the cloves. My mother is a native of this place,
she is made of the rosy plates of the shell
of one who in the silt of a trench plays
music on its own arm, draws
chords, and then the single note —
rosin, jade, blood, catgut,
siren-gut, hair, hair,
hair — I miss her, I lack my mother, such
peace there is on earth now every
tooth of her head is safe, ground down
to filaments of rock-crab fractals
and claw facets, the whole color wheel
burst and released. Oh Mom. Come sit
with me at this stone table at the bottom
of the Bay, here is a barnacle of
egg custard, here is your tiny
spoon with your initials, sup with me
at dawn on your first day — we are all
the dead, I am not apart from you,
for long, except for breath, except for
everything.

Notes on the Poem
The title "Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater" makes pretty clear what this selection from Sharon Olds' 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Arias is about. What will reassure you that you should venture into the poem, even knowing it is about an observation in conjunction with someone's death, is that Olds will find a way to affirm life even as she looks unflinchingly at the ritual.

Look no further than a purveyor of cremation urns for insights into the symbolism and significance of scattering ashes. Different faiths and traditions view cremation and the spreading of the deceased's ashes in a variety of ways, from "a way of freeing the soul or spirit", to 
environmental considerations to "a submission to God's will and created order, as well as a proclamation of hope in his power to raise the dead to life in an act of re-creation." All of these perspectives seem to combine in Olds' heartfelt description:

"I like to follow her
from matter into matter, my little quester,
as if she went to sea in a pea-green
boat."

In her details of what is happening to her mother's ashes ...

"her dividend,
her irreducible, like violet
down, thrown to the seals, starfish,
wolf spiders on the edge-of-Pacific
floor"

"now every
tooth of her head is safe, ground down
to filaments of rock-crab fractals
and claw facets"

Olds manages to still be poignant amidst her clinical, verging on enthusiastic fascination with the processes under way. That poignance draws each of us in as she concludes:

"we are all
the dead, I am not apart from you,
for long, except for breath, except for 
everything."

Somehow, this poem is achingly appropriate as we consider the ashes of a past year we're relieved to release, knowing with both cautionary trepidation and optimism that what has been disposed of flows into the continuum of what comes next.

for Bel Mooney

Imagine a shallow glass box
About nine inches by seven,
She writes, a bundle of papers
Inside, tied with brown ribbon,
Photos of our battlefield trip
Interleaved with war poems
She has copied out in longhand.
A shrapnel ball (in cellophane
For protection) nestles there
And rusty shrapnel casing
And the chestnuts and acorns
We examine in one photo.
In another, under a cross,
What can we be looking at?
Embroidered postcards evoke
Men who fought and loved and died,
She says. I who wrote the poems
Imagine a shallow glass box.

Notes on the Poem
Let's visit again the poem "Glass Box" from The Stairwell by Michael Longley, winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. This poem both hearkens back and looks from a present day perspective at historical events that have informed a significant part of Longley's work - the First World War.

The poem "Glass Box" is dedicated to Bel Mooney, a British journalist and broadcaster who has most recently written columns and articles for the tabloid newspaper Daily Mail. It was for that publication that she wrote a touching account of retracing her grandfather's wartime path. The tour she took to visit the scenes of her grandfather's World War I experiences was orchestrated by The War Poets Association, an organization that "promotes interest in the work, life and historical context of poets whose subject is the experience of war." Michael Longley is the only living poet among those whose biographies are showcased on the War Poets web site.

Both Longley's poem and Mooney's reflections in her article circle back repeatedly to the simultaneously heartbreaking and spirit bolstering importance of things - letters and pictures are both fragile and vital. Postcards combine letters and pictures, and interestingly, both pieces gaze longingly at them. Mooney remembers: "As a child, I played with the silken postcards he’d sent her from France ..." Longley carefully points out:

"Embroidered postcards evoke
Men who fought and loved and died,
She says."

... perhaps depicting the very same postcards to which Mooney refers.

Mooney mentions repeatedly how significant poetry was to her in pulling together her respectful and sorrowful response to revisiting her grandfather's experiences. In turn, Longley acknowledges the poet's essential role in delicately preserving wartime memories - the physical mementoes, but also the feelings - in this final line:

"I who wrote the poems
Imagine a shallow glass box."

some fearful heap
some crooked swell

bent towards him
and produced a pair

of nickel-plated pullers
a bull winder of

dirty tenderness ⁴
that stiffened into

that low-brow ice
that dead injun game

Notes on the Poem
Considering another selection from Jordan Abel's 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize winning work Injun, we marvel again at what the poet has mined and turned into something unique, powerful and redemptive.

As we've discussed in conjunction with other selections from this collection, Abel's source was dozens of public domain western novels, published from 1840 to 1950. At the end of Injun, he reveals the process by which he excavated the raw material and built the work:


Injun was constructed entirely from a source text comprised of 91 public domain western novels with a total length of just over ten thousands pages. Using CTRL+F, I searched the source text for the word "injun," a query that returned 509 results. After separating out each of the sentences that contained the word, I ended up with 26 print pages. I then cut up each page into a section of a long poem. Sometimes I would cut up a page into three- to five-word clusters. Sometimes I would cut up a page without looking. Sometimes I would rearrange the pieces until something sounded right. Sometimes I would just write down how the pieces fell together. Injun and the accompanying materials are the result of these methods.


This poem's footnote #4 points to line after line from Abel's source that he mined specifically for the word "tenderness". 



Just looking at those lines drains the word of its usual associations. Stripped bare as part of how Abel has mechanically excavated the term, then determinedly filtered and processed it with acute human consciousness and craft, the word takes on stark and menacing new meanings.

The praise Injun has garnered from Abel's fellow writers captures the value of the poet's steadfast work shaping these unearthed materials.


"In parsing sentences of the colonial habitus that drives Old Westerns, Jordan Abel's Injun turns tables of (dis)contents to redress the page, the book, and the naturality of reading ... With his caress of phrases cruel with rcisms, Abel deftly shows ... where the social psychosis of West was founded ..."

Erin Moure



"I imagine Abel poring over source texts, deconstructing code, forging meaning from scraps, and breaking through colonial constructions with fever ..."

Leanne Simpson



"Built from a core sample of our culture's colonialist project in language, Jordan Abel has opened a space of disruption, lament, resistance and inquiry ..."

Ken Babstock

before i start i want to say you shouldn’t blame yourself
there’s no point in beating around the bush
there’s something we need to talk about
this is the most difficult thing i’ve ever had to tell anyone
the longer i wait the harder it’s going to be
it’s best if we face this right now
what i’m about to tell you won’t be easy to hear
i know this will hurt but it has to be said
i don’t like being the bearer of bad news
please sit down, this could come as a shock
you knew this was coming, right?
i hope this won’t be a complete surprise
hate to break it to you
please don’t kill the messenger
i have some really bad news
how do i even say this
this is really really hard for me
there are no words for what i have to tell you
i can’t go on lying anymore
you aren’t going to like what i have to say

Notes on the Poem
Deceptively simple on the page, Donato Mancini's poem "you aren’t going to like what i have to say" from his 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Same Diff takes on new meanings as you spend more time with it. If you read it aloud ... even more so. (Go ahead, try it!) And if you have the opportunity to have the poem read to you - perhaps by the poet himself - even more new contexts, qualities and meanings might surface. 

In his contemplation of poetics and performance in Jacket2 in 2013, David Buuck pauses to consider:


"... the interplay between page and performance can inform each other ... where the performance of the poem moves well beyond the treatment of the poem as a static object awaiting vocalization to a thinking-writing-performing through/with the poem (and, importantly, the social contexts of its performance) as a way to activate manifold potentialities in the work, such that each reading is both an interpretation as well as a further investigation into how the poem ‘means’[1]."

1 cf for example, Close Listening, ed Charles Bernstein & Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance, & Site-Specificity, eds David Kennedy & Keith Tuma, as well as Steve Evans' commentaries here on Jacket2.


However deeply (or not) you want to go into what performing a poem does for that poem's meaning and resonances, there is no denying that poetry readings enrich, entertain and add new dimensions. How fortunate we were in 2018 to have Mancini read the poem to a rapt and appreciative audience listening in Toronto's Koerner Hall and on our livestream, and how wonderful that we can still enjoy that performance today:



Whether you took in his reading then or are experiencing it now for the first time, how do you find this presentation works with and enhances the words you see on the page / screen?

Annually, the shortlist readings have been an important part of the celebration of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The live events have been special and memorable occasions, and we've archived the livestreams and selected individual readings so poetry lovers can revisit and replay them, extending the unique glow of those presentations.

While the singular challenges of 2020 meant curtailing the shortlist readings, we still captured some special audio presentations with the gracious and resourceful efforts of the 2020 shortlisted poets, embellished with video detailing that sets off the words beautifully, if we do say so ourselves. Here is Kaie Kellough's reading from Magnetic Equator:



and the rest of the 2020 readings are here for your enjoyment. 

As always, we want poetry lovers to relish the poetry on the page and derive additional and new perspectives from it in performance.