The biennial Montreal International Poetry Prize is always a great opportunity for students to discover contemporary poetry outside the classroom, and this year’s prize cycle is no exception.
Many students from the Faculty of Arts volunteer their time with the Montreal Prize by writing book reviews for the Prize’s website, managing the Prize’s social media channels and website and organizing speaker events such as Fluid Vessels, the Prize’s Online Reading Series, which was inaugurated during the 2022 Prize cycle.
“The Montreal International Poetry Prize gives students the chance to extend their learning beyond the classroom,” says Sarah Wolfson, 2024 Jury Member, award winning poet and course instructor at the McGill Writing Centre.
Wolfson was instrumental in fostering a new kind of student participation in the form of book reviews for the Prize’s website.
“By writing book reviews for the Prize, students use their close, critical reading skills to become active literary citizens,” she says. “I love witnessing the moment when students take poetry books into their hands. They hold them carefully, as items of significant value, knowing they’ve been entrusted with the serious task of framing contemporary literature for a public audience. To be taken seriously as a reader and to offer that seriousness to other readers — what a gift. It’s experiential learning at its besłŮ.”
We spoke to five McGill Arts students about their involvement with the Montreal Poetry Prize, the importance of poetry and some of their favourite poems.
Izzi Holmes, U2 Double Major in Honours English Literature and Psychology
Izzi reviewed Caroline Bird’s 2020 collection The Air Year, which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize.
Q: How did you get involved with reviewing jurors’ works for the Montreal International Poetry Prize?
Izzi: I took ENGL 311 with Professor MacLaren in the Fall 2022 semester, and upon hearing about the Montreal International Poetry Prize, I asked how I might be able to get involved. I then started attending monthly meetings in January 2023, and wrote my first review last May on Jenny Boychuk’s Antonyms For Daughter.
Q: In your own words, why is poetry important?
Izzi: I think that poetry is important because it verbalizes experiences that we cannot otherwise name, and cannot otherwise share. It brings its readers closer to their own experiences by first taking them away from their familiar reality. By requiring author and reader alike to relinquish control, it catches both parties at their most vulnerable, and therefore approximates the psyche better than any other form. Poetry’s position as an art form that is both beautiful and functional underscores this principle—it can provide the exact kind of joy, solace, or meaning a reader needs to navigate the world at a certain moment, but only if they engage in the unique kind of attention to and emotional connection with language that poetry demands.
Q: What did you enjoy the most about the works you read?
Izzi: Along with the balance she strikes between humor and philosophy, what I appreciate most about Caroline Bird’s poetry is its transformative power. Although her work is deeply personal, each poem imparts exactly what it describes on the reader—Bird suspends her reader while describing the act of suspension—and therefore resonates in a universal register. This pairing of form and function invites the reader to enter the poem—what could be more fun?
Q: Choose one poem to share with our readers.
Izzi: A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg:
Jackson Pinkowski, U2 Double Major in English Literature and Russian Studies
Jackson reviewed Madhur Anand’s Parasitic Oscillations, which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Anand is a Canadian poet and professor of ecology and environmental sciences at the University of Guelph.
Q: How did you get involved with reviewing jurors’ works for the Montreal International Poetry Prize?
Jackson: I first became involved with the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2023. I had taken a Poetics class with the Prize’s director, Professor Eli Maclaren, and wrote my final paper on the pastoral implications of the poem “Tereticornis” by Australian poet Mark Treddinick. Professor MacLaren approached me, asking if I would like my writing to published in the new “Essays and Reviews” section of the Prize’s website, to which I, of course, agreed. To my surprise, Mark Tredinnick had been the inaugural winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011. I suppose this is where my connection to the prize truly started. Since then, fellow students and I have had a hand in sending out copies of the anthology, speaking at the book’s launch, participating in Prize’s poetry reading series “Fluid Vessels”, and now reviewing the work of jury for the 2024 competition.
Q: In your own words, why is poetry important?
Jackson: It is a unique thing to give your attention wholly to something as small as a poem. Today, it feels as though attention is an increasingly rare virtue, one hard that is difficult to cultivate. Yet when you are able to achieve that level focus with a poem, a whole world opens before you. Becoming familiar with the intricacies of a poem, its idiom and inflections, is profoundly rewarding experience.
Q: What did you enjoy the most about the works you read?
Jackson: I think for me, the true reward has been the feeling of experimentation and curiosity in contemporary poetry, dually in content and form. As you read more and more of the poetry being written today, the work feels more daring than ever, while never losing touch of the lucidity that is so central to the poetic form. Naysayers will tell you the state of poetry is in decline, but the incredible range of contemporary poetry of both the Montreal Poetry Prize’s jurors and submitters from across the world tell a different, and much more hopeful story.
Q: Choose one poem (with link) to share with our readers.
Jackson: The poem which I have chosen to share is from the 2022 competition of the Montreal Poetry Prize. I find Alison Braid’s “Blue Dot” continually illuminating, as one of the few contemporary poems I have read that addresses humanity’s current relationship to technology in a way that feels simultaneously relatable and original. The poetic investigation of modernity is probing and brilliant, and yet lacking any sense of pretension or unnecessary abstraction. In Braid’s “Blue Dot,” one senses a poet with an acute understanding of our time, a unique quality deserving of recognition in an era of great confusion.
Jayda Smith, U1 English Literature
Jayda is reviewing Sadiqa de Meijer’s poetry collection The Outer Wards. De Meijer’s work has been awarded the CBC Poetry Prize, Arc’s Poem of the Year award and a Governor General’s Literary Award.
Q: How did you get involved with reviewing jurors’ works for the Montreal International Poetry Prize?
Jayda: I took an English course with Professor Eli McLaren, and he let the class know that we were free to participate in the Poetry Prize meetings. Once I started attending, they asked if anyone was interested in reviewing, and I volunteered.
Q: In your own words, why is poetry important?
Jayda: I think poetry is such an effective way to help us get back in touch with our emotions. We’re so conditioned to be afraid of vulnerability and emotional expression to the point where we become desensitized to and ashamed of our own feelings. I find that reading and writing poetry uncovers emotions that would have otherwise remained buried beneath the surface. To feel someone else’s words resonate inside yourself is an incredible gift, and to produce that resonance inside someone else is an even greater one.
Q: What did you enjoy the most about the works you read?
Jayda: Sadiqa de Meijer’s poetry collection, “The Outer Wards,” adopts a maternal perspective on love in the context of battling illness. What I loved about these poems is how much they pushed me to think about my own mother’s experience of the world and how that has informed our relationship. I also found myself wondering how that relationship might have been altered, for better or for worse, in the face of illness. Each poem richly blends the individual experience with cultural and communal experiences to produce a voice that is both personal and out-reaching.
Q: Choose one poem to share with our readers.
Jayda: Because I am unable to find any of Sadiqa’s poems from the collection available online, I have chosen a poem that she quotes in the preface of her collection: Elizabeth Bishop’s, “Sestina.”
Mathilda Stock, U2, English Literature, Art History, European Literature and Culture
“During the 2022 cycle, I reviewed Danielle Legros Georges’ translation of 20th century, Haitian-French poet Ida Faubert’s collection Island Heart. Legros Georges is now a juror for our 2024 cycle. We try to not only review the collections of our jurors but also to uplift excellent poets in the international community, so this cycle I am reviewing Stephen Kuusisto’s Only Bread, Only LighłŮ.”
Q: How did you get involved with reviewing jurors’ works for the Montreal International Poetry Prize?
Mathilda: In the winter of 2022, Professor MacLaren sent around an email asking students interested in poetry to attend the volunteer meetings for the Montreal Prize. After attending meetings for some time, I was offered the opportunity to review a poetry collection. I selected Legros Georges’ translation of Ida Faubert’s work as I was intrigued by the largely unknown and forgotten poet she was translating. I found the experience extremely rewarding, which lead me to volunteer once more this year.
Q: In your own words, why is poetry important?
Mathilda: Poetry is a beautiful art form with a long tradition and history over many cultures, there is so much to be learned from reading poetry. Good poetry offers a genuine glimpse into an experience or feeling; words are enlivened rather than just stated. A good poem can be transcendent and enlightening.
Q: What did you enjoy the most about the works you read?
Mathilda: I love to be surprised, to be moved and to observe how different poets approach different subject matters. There is such a breadth of subject and form to be discovered. The collection I am currently working with, Only Bread, Only Light, is written by a blind poet. As a seeing person, I am afforded the experience of learning about how the poet, Stephen Kuusisto, approaches and navigates the world around him and poetry itself. Poetry affords this type of learning. The reader may immerse themselves in the perspective of the speaker.
Q: Choose one poem to share with our readers.
Mathilda: Jessica Wilkinson recently read “On the Writing of a Feminist Poem” from the 2022 Montreal Prize Anthology at the Montreal Prize’s online reading series, Fluid Vessels. I was really struck by this poem and her reading.
Natalie Co, U3, Psychology, English Literature Minor
Natalie reviewed Randy Lundy’s Field Notes for the Self. Lundy is Cree, Irish and Norwegian and a member of the Barren Lands First Nation, Brochet MB and the author of four books of poetry.
Q: How did you get involved with reviewing jurors’ works for the Montreal International Poetry Prize?
Natalie: I started reviewing books at the beginning of last year. At the time, I had been to a few of the prize’s volunteer meetings and wanted to get more involved. Writing a book review not only seemed like a great way to contribute something of my own to the prize, but also a valuable learning experience!
Q: In your own words, why is poetry important?
Natalie: Poetry transcends the bounds of time and space. It takes the deeply personal and immortalizes it in words. It makes us feel; it is the ultimate reminder of our humanity.
Q: What did you enjoy the most about the works you read?
Natalie: Getting to hear each author’s unique voice. Reading another person’s words is such an intimate experience. It offers a kind of glimpse into their minds that even the most genuine conversations cannot offer.
Q: Choose one poem to share with our readers.
Natalie: I really enjoy “Stories of Snow” by P.K. Page—I first came across it in a poetics class that I took with Eli (which was how I ended up getting involved with the prize)!
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