By Matthew Tierney

Seamus Heaney did not win the Griffin Prize.

I was at that year’s readings, the year he was nominated for Human Chain, and the energy was different: in the auditorium where he read but also at the book table, in the lobby, the corridor. A pulse in the room tone. Not just a poet but a celebrity in our midst. Where is he? There he is. He’s right there.

The lineup for signings seemed instantly formed, and I delayed and chatted with others until it was winding down. I hadn’t brought a book (I had most at home), so I quickly purchased a Naturalist and, just as Heaney was being ushered away by handlers Scott Griffin and Robin Robertson, got his signature before his evening levelled up.

I wonder what Heaney thought of the prize, of us. When we Canadians thought of Heaney, did we think “poet” or “international poet”? Sounds goofy, reading that back. I couldn’t remember if he’d won and had to look it up.

When I think of the uniform condemnation of the Griffin’s 2022 shift in its prize structure—absorbing the money set aside for Canadians into one monster, open-to-all purse—I understand where it’s coming from. Canadian poets were keen from the prize’s inception, packing the Harbourfront Brigantine room to its capacity of low hundreds. Cheering on our own, wherever you were, was fun. I’ve heard the point made that the prize’s momentum was due in part to such early enthusiasm. There’s no real debate that the prize has an outsized influence on the poetry conversation.

But forty grand per winner flat-out buys you momentum. Poets swim in the waters of capital, even if poetry doesn’t. What if the new structure had been in place in 2001? With no former Griffin to compare it against, hard to imagine it’d have stalled for lack of support. Not for nothing, it’s also hard to imagine Anne Carson not winning.

Now, the prize crowns one poet to rule them all, taking home $130,000. If the reasoning has been that dollars confer importance, then that reasoning holds when there’s more of them. If the intent is to turn more heads around the world, the bet is not a bad one.

In the two lists since its restructuring, the scarcity of Canadian books has borne out the detractors’ worst fears, sample sizes be damned. Those detractors include every single one of my poet- or poetry-adjacent friends. I hold the Mariana Trench of unpopular opinions: a vigorous shoulder shrug. If pressed, I could name a preference, but I can’t muster any outrage.

Others are, though, and they have argued vigorously against the new structure. The challenges of such arguments are twofold, it seems to me.

The first is pesky premises: that the prize was designed solely to elevate Canadian poetry; that Canadian poetry is neither strong enough to compete with international poetry nor to shrug off years it doesn’t shortlist; that the Canadian poetry community deserves a voice in how the prize is awarded.

The second difficulty is that arguments about how ungood it is to further concentrate attention, from many to a few to one, become indistinguishable from a critique of prize culture itself. The old version of the prize gave an awful lot of money to one person too. This unassailable fact didn’t take long to incubate on social media for a version of democracy over a version of meritocracy, reshaping the prize into something resembling an arts grant. I saw some suggestions that Griffin funnel his money into poetry review journals. 

This real need for a robust critical culture is an ask that could be levelled at the League of Canadian Poets awards, or the GG awards, or any of the myriad others. At the idea of awards itself.

If it swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, you can’t ask it not to be a duck.

I’m lucky enough to live in Toronto and have the opportunity to attend the readings. Last year they were pretty much great, I thought. Roger Reeves’s acceptance speech was remarkably moving. Fanny Howe was a holy presence the entire evening. I’m older and less tuned in, but to my eyes there were fewer Toronto poets in attendance. I truly missed having them there. I missed running into acquaintances in the intermission and asking, “Who’d you like so far?” I missed that collective sense of engagement. I wonder if that same scenario will play out this year when Don McKay, shaper of a generation of Canadian poets, receives the Lifetime Achievement award.

When Margaret Avison accepted her cheque in 2003, she stood at the podium and said bemusedly (forgive my paraphrase) that it was all ridiculous. The Griffin Prize is as ridiculous as any sporting event. That is, if you’re a fan of poetry, not at all. Because it’s never about whether your team wins or loses, it’s how many signature moments you have along the way.