Poerty

Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry

To mark the 10th anniversary of the prize that bears his name, Scott Griffin wanted to make a statement. To that end, the chairman and the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry decided to double the amount of the Griffin Poetry Prize, from $100,000 to $200,000.

"We weren't trying to necessarily make it bigger than anything else, but to make a statement: that this is important, that poetry is important," Griffin said Tuesday, after the nominees for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize were announced at a news conference in downtown Toronto.

Each of this year's seven finalists receives $10,000, while the two winners will receive an additional $65,000, bringing their total to $75,000.

In a reverse from last year, where eventual international category winner C.D. Wright was the lone female poet to be nominated, women dominated this year's shortlist, six to one.
P.K. Page, who died earlier this year at age 93, is on this year's shortlist of Canadian works for Coal and Roses, alongside Kate Hall for The Certainty Dream and Karen Solie for Pigeon.
The international shortlisted works are: Grain by John Glenday, A Village Life by Louise Gluck, The Sun-fish by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Cold Spring in Winter by Valerie Rouzeau.
Last year's winners were A.F. Moritz of Toronto and Wright, who hails from Providence, R.I.
The judges for the Griffin, poets Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie and Carl Phillips, read some 400 books of poetry to come up with the shortlist.
The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist readings will take place June 2 in Toronto. The winners will be announced June 3.

CANUCKS UP FOR HUGO PRIZE

Two Canadians have been named finalists for the Hugo Award, the world's top prize for science-fiction writing.Robert J. Sawyer, based in Mississauga, was nominated for best novel for his book Wake, a story about a 15-year-old girl who discovers an emerging artificial intelligence lurking on the Internet.
The novel is the first book of what will become the WWW trilogy.
California-born Robert Charles Wilson, who recently became a Canadian citizen, was nominated in the same category for Julian Comstock, A Novel of 22nd Century America, premised on a future United States ruled by a Christian fundamentalist oligarchy.

Imagine You are Driving

Imagine you are driving

nowhere, with no one beside you;

with the empty road unraveling and raveling

in sympathy as the wheel turns in your hands.

On either side the wheatfields go shimmering

past in an absence of birdsong, and the sky

decants the shadows of the weather from itself.

So you drive on, hopeful of a time

when the ocean will rise up before you like dusk

and you will make landfall at last –

some ancient, long-forgotten mooring,

which both of you, of course, will recognize;

though as I said before, there is no one beside you

and neither of you has anywhere to go.

From Grain, by John Glenday
Copyright © John Glenday 2009