My poem “Walking Underwater”, written in Portland, Oregon, on a reading tour, in March last year, has won the inaugural Montreal Poetry Prize.
The prize is worth $50,000, raised mostly from the donations of poets and modest entry fees. $50, 000 is more than has ever been offered for a single poem. The organisers wanted to send out a message to the world that poetry has inestimable worth, and is in wonderful health, even if most of the world doesn’t seem to know how much we need it.
The prize attracted over 3200 entries from poets all over the world. Each poem was read blind by a panel of esteemed poets, also from all over the world. The judges chose first a longlist of 140 poems and then a shortlist of fifty. The former poet laureate of the UK, Andrew Motion, chose the winning poem (again anonymously) from that shortlist.
Along with Canada’s poet laureate Linda Rogers, I had five poems longlisted, and then two shortlisted—"The Kingfisher” and “Walking Underwater”.
Motion chose “Walking Underwater” as the winning poem, saying about it, “This is a bold, big-thinking poem, in which ancient themes (especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape) are re-cast and re-kindled. It well deserves its eminence as a prize winner.” The award was announced on 15 December. The award ceremony is likely to take place in Montreal in March or April.
All 140 longlisted poems are available electronically free of charge, and an anthology of the shortlisted poems will be published in old-fashioned book form by Vehicule Press of Montreal in April.
Meanwhile, you can still read (and hear) the poem on the Montreal Prize website:
The website provides links to many stories that ran all over the world about the prize: http://montrealprize.com/news/blog/. To Linda Leith of the Toronto Globe and Mail, I commented that “To win this prestigious international prize feels, still, completely improbable. It’s a huge delight and a big break and an honour I’ll try to keep living up to in my writing. I get to take home the prize this year, and for that I am very grateful. Poets live in debt, and $50, 000 pays down a little more of it. It also buys time to get more poems written. And, specifically, a book of prose (Reading Slowly at the End of Time)”
Susan Wyndham wrote a nice piece about the prize in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/poet-walks-away-with-major-international-prize-20111218-1p0lr.html
Here are some words I had to say about the poem and the prize to Len Epp and Asa Boxer, heroic organisers of the MPP.
About the prize: This prize, funded by one’s peers and judged by the finest poets in the world, dreamed up and run with grace and deep humanity, celebrates poetry and cries its beauty and reminds us why we all need poetry so much these tone deaf days. It is an honour to win it in its first year. I hope my poem and those I can now go on to write live up to the beautiful ideals the Montreal Prize aspires to.
About the poem: Written far from home and soon after Fukushima, and conceived on a walk with a poet up Eagle Creek, a tributary of the Columbia River, this poem is a walking meditation on dispossession and the holiness of the affection the earth—in its power and humour and maddening self-possession—seems even yet to hold for us all, notwithstanding.
And on the morning the prize was announced, I dropped my five-year old daughter to the last day of her preschool for the year (forever, since she heads to school next year), and then I sat in the car outside the kindergarten and typed these words on my iPhone to send to Linda Leith for a piece she wrote for the Toronto Globe & Mail.
Poets live in debt, and this prize will go toward paying some of mine down. But it will also finance more of the silence upon which the making of poems depends: in other words, the money should feed and clothe and shelter me and mine for a year or so and spare me some of the worry and the work one would rather not do, but has to, while letting me sit in gainful unemployment and write. (I have a book of prose, Reading Slowly at the End of Time, to finish writing by June, and a new book of poems, Body Copy, to quilt even sooner, for publication midyear; now I have a chance of doing both—and staying sane.)
Perhaps I can now also make a return trip to the Columbia River, where the poem arose, buy myself a new fountain pen and a jacket I’ve been coveting. A new laptop for my eldest daughter. A visit to a temple in Japan to observe my fiftieth birthday, which is imminent. The rest of it I’ll try to waste in small donations and acts of probably useless kindness on some of the millions in way more need than I, with none of the freedom I am lucky enough to have in which to indulge in the creative agonies of making poetry.
I believe this prize tells the world that poetry counts, that it is being made beautifully all over the world, despite everything, all the time. The prize, in its size and reach and gravitas, gets that message out; it incites more and richer poetic direct action all over the place. Because of all this, it feeds poetry itself, that discourse of the soul, the discourse of the land, a language we need more than ever now, when the shrill and meager language of the market is colonizing our politics, out communities, our schools, our aspirations.
The prize was offered and administered and judged with more intelligence, generosity, and elegance than I have ever experienced. It changes the poetic world and therefore also the rest of the world. It cries the beauty, the everyday divinity, of poetry; it let’s poetry make it’s own case for poetry on a very large stage.
To win it feels, still, completely improbable. It’s a huge delight and a big break and an honour I’ll try to keep living up to in my writing.
Thanks to Kim Stafford for walking me up the Columbia River and Eagle Creek, and for inspiring me, as ever, by his life and work, including as his father’s son. The poem is dedicated to Kim, and it honours him as well as me. Thanks, especially to Asa Boxer and Len Epp, who ran this thing with such grace, and to the judges, Andrew Motion, in particular.
Though I take home the certificate and the cheque, this prize celebrates the making of poetry everywhere, in particular these fifty shortlisted poems whose company I proudly keep.
