News Releases

after Danez Smith

I have left Earth in search of sounder orbits,
a solar system where the space between
a star and a planet isn’t empty. I have left
a white beard of noise in my place and many
of you won’t know the difference. We are
indeed the same volume, all of us eventually fade.
I have left Earth in search of an audible God.
I do not trust the sound of yours.
You wouldn’t recognise my grandmother’s Hallelujah
if she had to sign it, you would have made her sit
on her hands and put a ruler in her mouth
as if measuring her distance from holy.
Take your God back, though his songs
are beautiful, they are not loud enough.

I want the fate of Lazarus for every deaf school
you’ve closed, every deaf child whose confidence
has gone to a silent grave, every BSL user
who has seen the annihilation of their language,
I want these ghosts to haunt your tongue-tied hands.
I have left Earth, I am equal parts sick of your
oh, I’m hard of hearing too, just because
you’ve been on an airplane or suffered head colds.
Your voice has always been the loudest sound in the room.

I call you out for refusing to acknowledge
sign language in classrooms, for assessing
deaf students on what they can’t say
instead of what they can, we did not ask to be a part
of the hearing world, I can’t hear my joints crack
but I can feel them. I am sick of sounding out your rules –
you tell me I breathe too loud and it’s rude to make noise
when I eat, sent me to speech therapists, said I was speaking
a language of holes, I was pronouncing what I heard
but your judgment made my syllables disappear,
your magic master trick hearing world – drowning out the quiet,
bursting all speech bubbles in my graphic childhood,
you are glad to benefit from audio supremacy,
I tried, hearing people, I tried to love you, but you laughed
at my deaf grammar, I used commas not full stops
because everything I said kept running away,
I mulled over long paragraphs because I didn’t know
what a natural break sounded like, you erased
what could have always been poetry

You erased what could have always been poetry.
You taught me I was inferior to standard English expression –
I was a broken speaker, you were never a broken interpreter –
taught me my speech was dry for someone who should sound
like they’re underwater. It took years to talk with a straight spine
and mute red marks on the coursework you assigned.

Deaf voices go missing like sound in space
and I have left earth to find them.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week is “Dear Hearing World” by Raymond Antrobus, from the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection, The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins).

“’The truth is I’m not a fist fighter,’ writes Raymond Antrobus, ‘I’m all heart, no technique.’ Readers who fall for this streetwise feint may miss out on the subtle technique – from the pantoum and sestina to dramatic monologue and erasure – of The Perseverance. But this literary debut is all heart, too. Heart plus technique. All delivered in a voice that resists over-simple categorization. As a poet of d/Deaf experience, his verse gestures toward a world beyond sound. As a Jamaican/British poet, he deconstructs the racialized empire of signs from within. Perhaps that slash between verses and signs is where the truth is.” (Judges’ citation)

Listen to Raymond Atrobus read from "Dear Hearing World" here.

It continues fashionable to mourn the death of ritual.
We miss the Neolithic ochre, smoking censers, silly hats
Cthulhu and Harryhausen prayers, all the mystic flap.

No one has ever owned death much better than that.
Still, ours are not that bad.
Hospitals have strict norms,

Specific times and tricky forms,
Rotting fruit and flowers.
We say conventional things at canonical hours.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week is from the 2019 Griffin-shortlisted collection, The Art of Dying (McGill-Queen's University Press) by poet Sarah Tolmie. 

Of the collection, the judges said: “A modern danse macabre in eighty-nine parts, Sarah Tolmie’s The Art of Dying conceals a multifaceted meditation on mortality beneath its deceptively simple lyric surface. An irreverent feminist in the tradition of Dorothy Parker and Stevie Smith, Tolmie leverages the subversive possibilities of doggerel to upend our assumptions about everything from abortion to the Anthropocene. Wickedly funny, this is work of great intimacy, too, introducing us to a mother, concerned citizen, social media addict, bookworm, and bon vivant who wants nothing more than to remain ‘Here on the quiet earth that I still love, / Where the last humans are.’”

Listen to Sarah Tolmie read for the Griffin Poetry Prize Award Ceremony here

No More Now. Even Fear Has Fear. Even Of Itself.
I refuse to be lonely. No longer. It’s enough now.
Language contradicts itself, constantly producing
additions, disclaimers and footnotes. And the body
never gets ready, nails grow out, and hair, in the strangest
places. Here is the mountainside is black with lemons.
At the very moment I rest within my contour a dam
breaks. Maybe there’s a connection. I am someone
who…bounded by skin, is alone. I say it again, as loud
as I can: not another word! Maybe everything is connected.
Several thousand kilometers away you move your hand.
And here everything is instantly flooded.

Notes on the Poem
We continue to celebrate works in translation with this week’s poem, an excerpt from the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian shortlisted collection, Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments, by Per Brask and Patrick Friesen translated from the Danish written by Ulrikka Gernes.

Of this collection, the judges said, “this collaboration between Danish poet, Ulrikka Gernes and Canadian writers, Brask and Friesen, is astonishingly successful, every line at home in its new language. The poems have not stopped being poems. In fact, now that they are speaking through three mouths (one female, two male) they seem to have gathered an extra layer of strangeness which suits their dream-like, mutable, almost anonymous voice.” 

Listen to Per Brask, Patrick Friesen, and Ulrikka Gernes read for the Griffin Poetry Prize Award Ceremony here

Hence breath
Then breath
Next breath
Subsequent breath
Because breath
Such breath
And breath
Same breath
Thereafter breath
Thus breath
Always breath
Eventually breath
Perpetually breath
Yet breath
However breath
Therefore breath
In spite of breath
Breath till the bitter end

Death breathes and you dream but
it’s time to remove the ventilator from death
it’s time to shatter the dream with a hammer

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week celebrates poet-translator Don Mee Choi, winner of the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize, and now recipient of the 2021 MacArthur Fellowship for her poetry and translation. Congratulations, Don Mee Choi! 

The poem of the week, “Asphyxiation (Day Forty-Six)” is excerpted from Autobiography of Death (New Directions), translated from the Korean written by Kim Hyesoon. In the Translator’s Note bookending the collection, Don Mee Choi writes: “[Autobiography of Death] gives voice to those unjustly killed during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but it also unveils what Kim refers to as “the structure of death, that we remain living in. An aspect of this structure is the neocolonial and neoliberal order that has shaped Korea’s history since the US intervention at the end of World War II. Autobiography is at once an autotestimony and an autoceremony that reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we remain living within the structure of death.”

Watch this video from the MacArthur Foundation announcing Don Mee Choi as a 2021 fellow.

Listen to Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon read jointly from Autobiography of Death.