Prize Culture: You’re Next!

By Shane Neilson

The next poetry contest in Canada is coming!  It’s a contest that competes… with other contests. It takes all the winners of the other contests conducted in a calendar year and decides upon one winner (there can only be one) that, because they are the one winner, are forwarded all the loot from those other, lesser contests. This meta-contest will have a game show name like Jackpot Enjambment! or Stanza of Fortune! Scott Griffin will try to be the game show host, just as he is for the current Canadian programming, but we’ll trade up for a poetry-loving billionaire who will soon buy all the poetry presses in Canada. To save them, of course! Then we’ll have a single press, the homogeneity that we all strive for, ultimately, with what I call Prize Culture.

What is Prize Culture?

Prize Culture is about the belief that a poet isn’t any good until they’ve won a prize. The poetry that got them to the cusp of the prize is only validated upon the receipt of that prize. In other words, the writing of poetry matters less than the winning of awards, which leads to careerism and reputation cultivation, friend-making and logrolling. All of which happened before the advent of Prize Culture, but when Prize Culture took over, poetry was doomed.

No poet is safe. Prize Culture Vultures swoop upon the very first book a poet publishes. In this country it starts with the Gerald Lampert Prize. A new poet is instantaneously taken seriously upon a shortlist spot. They bask in attention, and Prize Culture anoints them as a poet “to watch.” I’ve been careful how I’ve phrased that: not a poet “to read.”

The masses of other debut poets become acquainted with neglect. Prize Culture can only love a few poets. The rest of the poets languish in obscurity, and they feel this obscurity acutely, because Prize Culture is their culture. It’s how they were raised. I was born an Anglophone in rural New Brunswick. I worked on a farm. I watched cartoons on Saturdays. I was a Catholic, was baptized, and confirmed. My parents tried to raise me right. Prize Culture has the same kind of indoctrination.

First of all, there’s the benefit of the award. Winning means that the next book will be easier to place, and place with a more prestigious press. This sophomore book will also be much more likely to be reviewed. One of the dark sides of Prize Culture is that more poets want to be the winner’s friend in the hopes that Prize Culture will, if one shows fealty to Prize Culture, reward sycophancy and cross-promotion. But, more entertaining than poets privately falling over themselves to congratulate poetry they themselves don’t read and like are the poets who publicly feed the maw of Prize Culture. Prize Culture needs poets to talk about who “should” win, who “will” win, who “won’t” win. This entertains poets who care more about horseraces than poetry. I’ve lingered in a lot of bars after readings, and Prize Culture enforces its hegemony. Toronto poets are perhaps the worst offenders here, but only because Prize Culture has decided upon Toronto as its capital city, for Toronto is where the biggest prizes are awarded.

And what are those? The Griffin, of course. Prize Culture considers the Griffin its crown jewel. Careers have been made with this prize (Karen Solie, for example) and when poets see other poets get ahead in a big way, they stand in line just to get into the event, in the hopes, again, that Prize Culture will rub off on them. I know of one poet who started a popular blog just so that he’d be given tickets to the Griffin soiree! He was. And so he got on the Good Ship Prize Culture, with its loud and obnoxious brayings of All Aboard!

Because it’s the biggest prize, the Griffin puts the negative effect of Prize Culture into greater magnification. Poets begin to think of how they can score points for and against one another, and so, as in all competitive events, different camps emerge. Groups of like-minded poets back other like-minded poets, and are vocal about their picks in order to tip a scale like a butcher. If they are able to tip the scale, which is really all about just appearing to tip the scale, by correctly picking a nominee or winner, then they have succeeded at the next best thing to being a nominee or winner themselves. At this point the clairvoyant poet announces, publicly, that they have been correct in their choice, all in an effort to garner the maximum attention for themselves, to accrete personal capital. Again, by serving Prize Culture.

It should go without saying that prizes are, most of the time, very wrong. The best books are only discovered with the passage of time. Good books are often inimical to prizes. They are either too new, too odd, or too good to be palatable to Prize Culture. Because Prize Culture is by its very nature stupid, and only gets a book right by mistake.

Think about it: we have lived with the books we love since we have been able to read. The pressure cooker of a year’s assessment makes de-perspectived poets into ahistorical Vegas oddsmakers, desperately modifying their own opinions of what they actually value (good poetry) into what they think a jury would pick. (There’s even a critic out there who does “Griffin Math.”) Enter the Griffin and its known roster of jurors: poets try to decide whom, especially, the Canadian juror would like.

The Governor General’s award is awful too. Any award that can be perverted as easily as this one has to be awful. I think the security of this award is akin to a bank that posts a sign above its doors which says, ROB US! The doors to the bank are left open at all hours, and the vault has its security code scratched into it as if it were a bathroom stall. Prize Culture is conflicted about this award, though: it’s happy that an award can go to a poet on the basis of who they are, and not what they write. (Prize Culture has in fact dictated who they are.) Yet it’s unhappy that the process has been so transparent. For a moment, the bank camera was unwittingly switched on and the robbers were caught on film. I had hoped that Prize Culture would suffer a blow. Instead, it has gotten stronger.

How? Well, by the advent of more prizes, of course! Now there’s a newly-announced whopper of an award out of Montreal, overseen by two non-poets and Asa Boxer. Clearly an instance of Prize Envy (this could only have come out of Montreal, in competition with the Griffin) the newest big fucker of an award shows that Prize Culture isn’t worried anymore about being caught. It now runs the bank and is printing the money. (Yes, I am going to submit to this award. I am doing so in the hopes of finding out if the money is funny money or real.)

We have national prizes. We have prizes for each province. We have prizes for groups of provinces. We have prizes for cities. We have prizes by author’s guilds and groups. We have prizes awarded by our publicly funded broadcaster. Prizes for small press. And a host of smaller-fry prizes by magazines and associations. There are so many prizes, I’ve taken to referring to them all, collectively, and individually, as This Prize and That Prize. Friends ask me what prize I’m talking about in response to the prize they’ve started talking about. I respond, This Prize and That Prize. And I admit I think of V.S. Naipaul, who, when judging a literary competition, took great glee in referring, before he had even read any of the entries, to the award as Third Prize.

Prize Culture has so dismayed me that I’ve done the unthinkable: I’ve gone off the grid. My beautiful little book of poems with the Porcupine’s Quill wasn’t submitted to the Governor General’s Award, nor was it sent to the Griffin. I’m not deluded; I didn’t have a chance. Not only did I admire the work of others more, I also wasn’t tipped off by what’s known as “the buzz.” Prize Culture needs people speculating in order to grow stronger. I wasn’t part of that buzz. But neither was the work I admired of others, either.

What, exactly, is the objective of Prize Culture? Arguably it’s the suppression and discouragement of the writing of poetry. Poets get upset that they’re not darlings. They get discouraged. Some will stop writing poems. Others will suffer arrested development. Why? There’s a reason there’s an ever-shrinking number of reviews published in this country. It’s because Prize Culture doesn’t want them to exist. Reviews, when written properly, make people actually think about poetry. They make people think about what poetry means and how it can be better. Prize Culture doesn’t care if poetry gets better; it cares about slimming the pool to its own choices. Only so much love to be dispensed to so many poets, and Prize Culture wants a line of succession, so that the smaller beneficiaries become bigger beneficiaries as their “career” matures. Reviews are about honest assessment of books, and honest assessment gets in the way of divine right.

Prize Culture has become so powerful that even our strongest, most trenchant– I’d even say brilliant– critics have become canny and diplomatic about whose careers they wish to reassess. Whereas once they were willing to say that the emperor had no clothes, they now covet the awards they used to invalidate. And I am sure they listen to the same conversations I do in bars after readings. They too have a drink in hand. And they are aware of who is in the room, who has been blessed by Prize Culture and who has been ignored and even shunned.

Of all the affronts Prize Culture takes pleasure from the most, perhaps the conversations happening between poets who haven’t even read a debated poet’s work are the most shameful. These nattering poets might pretend to have read the work, or they might be as brazen as Prize Culture itself and admit they haven’t. But the one thing they can say in truth is that though they haven’t read a particular poet, they have watched that poet’s career.

At least the new big fucker out of Montreal is about a single poem, and is judged blind. That’s promising, and might mean that Prize Culture has met its match: poetry.  Which is what Prize Culture should be all about. But based on how the media has covered the advent of the prize, I fear for this new award. Because the coverage so far is about the dollar bills– most stories bleat the 50,000 benjamins right up front, as the Globe and Mail did with its story– as if money were the legal tender of poets, and for some, I suppose, it always will be.