Interview with poet Don McKay from the Toronto Star, June 4, 2007
McKay Hopes Award Boosts Poetry's Rep
Poet, nominated for $50,000 Griffin Prize, says it isn't the money that matters to him
Vit Wagner, Publishing Reporter
If poet Don McKay is thinking about what it would be like to cash the $50,000 cheque that comes with winning the Griffin Poetry Prize, the two-time runner-up isn't letting on.
"I try not to focus on that aspect of it too much because the money is not the heart of it," he says on the line from Banff Centre, where he has spent the spring coaching young writers.
"It's nice for the poet who wins, but if the prize is going to work it has to work in other ways as well. It has to work as a way of making the public aware of poetry's importance and presence in the society."
That said, McKay understands the prospect of a $50,000 payout to a Canadian poet – coupled with an additional $50,000 award to an international writer – can't help but generate attention for an increasingly marginal literary form.
Strike/Slip, published last year by McClelland & Stewart, earned McKay a third nomination in the seven-year history of the Griffin Prize, launched by philanthropist and poetry lover Scott Griffin.
McKay's Another Gravity was among the nominees for the inaugural award in 2001, losing to Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours. He was also shortlisted in 2005, the year Roo Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida was the Canadian winner. This year, the Canadian field includes Ken Babstock's Airstream Land Yacht and Priscila Uppal's Ontological Necessities.
The four-member international short list comprises Paul Farley's Tramp in Flames, Rodney James's Salvation Blues, Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga and Charles Wright's Scar Tissue.
The two winners will be announced Wednesday.
All seven shortlisted poets will offer recitations from the nominated works during a public reading tomorrow at the UofT's MacMillan Theatre.
Strike/Slip is the 11th collection for the 65-year-old McKay, who made his debut in 1973 with Air Occupies Space and who has twice won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. An avid birder, McKay is regarded as Canada's foremost nature poet.
His poems, containing elements of botany, geology and other natural sciences, were praised by this year's jurists for exploring the "uncertain ground between the known and unknown, between the names we have given things and things as they are." Since retiring in 1996 from teaching creative writing to university students, McKay has been at even greater leisure to conduct "field work" that can range from walking through a field to hunkering down in the library with an ornithology encyclopedia.
"My view is that poetry is the point where language is humbled by the sense that it realizes that it isn't able to adequately describe the world," he says. "There's something that eludes it. And so it's language pointing beyond its own capacities."
Writing poetry, he also understands, is not a pursuit for anyone who craves the kind of celebrity and riches that go with reaching a mass audience. "There's a power that goes with not being mainstream," he says. "Poetry is the oldest linguistic art. We have cultures that have poetry that don't even have a written language. I wouldn't be writing it off. I wouldn't even be worrying about it."
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Strike/Slip was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2007.
Coming soon from Rattling Books:
Songs for the Songs of Birds, Don McKay's selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Narrated by the author, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species.
Interview with poet Don McKay from the Toronto Star, June 4, 2007
