The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Don McKay, Griffin Poetry Prize 2001 Canadian Shortlist
Don McKay won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Night Field (1991), and prior to that was a finalist for Birding, or desire (1983), which won him the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. McKay’s Vis à Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in the Nonfiction category; another collection of poems, Apparatus (1997), was also a Governor General’s Award finalist. Don McKay is on the faculty of ‘In the Field,’ a low-residency program in contemplative philosophy, environmental thought and writing at St. Peter’s College, Muenster, Saskatchewan. McKay is still the Associate Director for Poetry at the Banff Centre and spends vast amounts of time working on new poems and essays. A selected poems collection, Camber, was published by McClelland and Stewart in 2004. Among other distinctions, Camber was chosen for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian shortlist. McKay’s 2006 collection, Strike/Slip, won the 2007 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.
Judges’ Citation
“Don McKay’s journey through closely observed places and creatures not only brings them alive with great panache, it explores a more humane way of living on earth, ‘bereft and happy, my whole mind/applauding.’ These wonderfully bittersweet poems establish a rich vocabulary of dwelling – have ‘lift and drag,’ of homing and leaving home. The result is a playful yet resonant microcosm, charted with virtuosity and love.”
Don McKay reads Sometimes a Voice
Sometimes a Voice, by Don McKay
Sometimes a Voice
Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? - wants not to be voice any longer, wants something whispering between the words, some rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will hearken back to breath, or even farther, to the wind, and recognize itself as troubled air, a flight path still looking for its bird. I’m thinking of us up there shingling the boathouse roof. That job is all off balance – squat, hammer, body skewed against the incline, heft the bunder, daub the tar, squat. Talking, as we always talked, not about living past the age of thirty with its labyrinthine perils: getting hooked, steady job, kids, business suit. Fuck that. The roof sloped upward like a take-off ramp waiting for Evel Knievel, pointing into open sky. Beyond it twenty feet or so of concrete wharf before the blue-black water of the lake. Danny said that he could make it, easy. We said never. He said case of beer, put up or shut up. We said asshole. Frank said first he should go get our beer because he wasn’t going to get it paralysed or dead. Everybody got up, taking this excuse to stretch and smoke and pace the roof from eaves to peak, discussing gravity and Steve McQueen, who never used a stunt man, Danny’s life expectancy, and whether that should be a case of Export or O’Keefe’s. We knew what this was - ongoing argument to fray the tedium of work akin to filter vs. plain, stick shift vs. automatic, condom vs. pulling out in time. We flicked our butts toward the lake and got back to the job. And then, amid the squat, hammer, heft, no one saw him go. Suddenly he wasn’t there, just his boots with his hammer stuck inside one like a heavy-headed flower. Back then it was bizarre that, after all that banter, he should be so silent, so inward with it just to run off into sky. Later I thought, cool. Still later I think it makes sense his voice should sink back into breath and breath devote itself to taking in whatever air might have to say on that short flight between the roof and the rest of his natural life.
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