Scott Griffin brings poetry into Canadian schools

Canadian literary benefactor Scott Griffin is taking his passion for poetry – in particular, the live recitation of poetry – into schools across Canada with a new bilingual recitation contest that will award $10,000 to students and school libraries.

Griffin announced the initiative, known as Poetry in Voice, at a press conference in Toronto on Tuesday. A pilot program is currently underway at a dozen Ontario high schools, and the plan is to expand to Quebec in 2011–12 and across the country in 2012–13.

Griffin, who recites a favourite poem from memory at each annual Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist announcement, spoke of the importance of recitation in discovering poetry. “The best way to know a poem short of writing it is to memorize it,” he said. “It’s amazing how different emotional settings or scenes will resurrect that particular poem because it strikes exactly what you’re experiencing at the time.”

Griffin wants to change the negative attitude many people have toward the rote memorization of poetry. “We hope this program … will excite students to want to memorize [poetry], and then they will discover the value of the poem,” he said.

Students participating in the pilot program can choose three poems from an online anthology that currently comprises more than 100 English-language and 25 French-language poems in the public domain, as selected by Poetry in Voice director Damian Rogers (author of the collection Paper Radio, published by ECW Press) and three-time Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet Pierre Nepveu.

According to Rogers, the contest will serve as a platform for bringing Canadian literature and contemporary poets into schools. “I want students to make the connection that poetry is part of the Canadian cultural landscape across the country,” said Rogers, who added that the group is currently in the process of securing rights to contemporary and Canadian poems.

Competing students will be judged according to a variety of criteria, including physical presence, voice and articulation, accuracy, and dramatization. Griffin says students who choose to recite at least one poem in their non-native tongue will have a slight advantage over other competitors.

The province-wide finalists will face off on April 12 at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, with the winning student receiving $5,000, plus an additional $2,500 for the student’s school library. The runner-up will receive $1,000 (plus $500 for the library), while the third-place student will receive $500 (plus $500 for the library).

In addition to the $10,000 earmarked for the Poetry in Voice program, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry will hand out $200,000 to the nominees of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Martel’s musical flight of fancy

Yann Martel is no doubt a busy man: not only is the Man Booker Prize–winning author of Life of Pi a new father, he’s also promoting his latest novel, Beatrice & Virgil, and fending off a slew of negative reviews. Yet the Montreal native has also found time to engage in a bit of classical music–inspired whimsy. On Tuesday, at a performance by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Martel supplied an original text to accompany some ballet music by Beethoven. The piece, called The Parole Hearing of Prometheus, took the form of a courtroom drama and was performed in French by Quebec actor Michel Dumont.

From The Gazette:

Trial-by-jury is not an original motif, but it got the piece up and running. Prometheus stood accused not simply of stealing fire and giving it to mankind but of enabling the despoliation of a planet the gods had been treating rather well. “Even Lord Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, says he does not need so much heat and fire,” thundered Dumont the prosecutor in one of Martel’s more inspired flights.

According to Gazette classical music critic Arthur Kaptainis, the evening was “mostly good fun” despite the “earnest Al Gore undercurrent” of Martel’s accompanying script. Still, following the lead of book critics in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, Kaptainis couldn’t help taking a dig at Martel:

Dumont’s delivery, comic and robust, was entirely in French. Undoubtedly the language of Molière is well suited to courtroom grandiloquence. The English as printed seemed less witty and less literary. This is a significant observation: Martel wrote the text in English and had his parents prepare a translation.

Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail described Martel’s text as a “mere bagatelle compared with the grandeur” of the music, complaining that the story, which touched on melting ice caps and oil spills, was “a tad preachy.”

Martel fans can make up their own minds: a recording of the performance will eventually be released on CD.

Jeff Rubin, Rod McQueen among National Business Book Award nominees

The five finalists for the 25th annual National Business Book Award have been announced. The award, worth $20,000, is presented to an author of an outstanding Canadian business-related book published in English or French. The finalists are:

• John DeMont, Coal Black Heart: The Story of Coal and the Lives It Ruled (Doubleday Canada)
• Wendy Dobson, Gravity Shift: How Asia’s New Economic Powerhouses Will Shape the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press)
• Buzz Hargrove, Laying It on the Line: Driving a Hard Bargain in Challenging Times (HarperCollins Canada)
• Rod McQueen, Manulife: How Dominic D’Alessandro Built a Global Giant and Fought to Save It (Penguin Canada)
• Jeff Rubin, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (Random House Canada)

The winner will be announced on June 9 at a luncheon in Toronto.

Daily book biz round-up: U.K. flight ban ends, Amazon sues North Carolina, and more

Book news bits & bites:

• U.K. flight ban ends just as London Book Fair comes to close
• LBF no-shows likely to make up for lost ground at Frankfurt Book Fair
• London panel examines the digital future of comic books
• Amazon sues entire state of North Carolina
• Dennis Lehane jumps to Little, Brown
• Quebec school board pulls book for characterizing French Canadians as poutine-eating square dancers
• George W. Bush Library vs. feral cat colony

Daily book biz round-up: evil mobsters, filthy librarians, and more

Your assortment of book news tidbits:

• Victoria booksellers told to be on lookout for ex-mobster
• Moore, Mantel make Orange Prize shortlist
• Hearty French and Dutch manage to make it to the LBF; Americans, Italians, and Spaniards wuss out
• Proof: librarians even more filthy-minded than once thought
• Kelley bio ain’t no thang to Oprah
• New Stephen King novella goes to Kindle first
• Nielsen to divest itself of The Bookseller

Daily book biz round-up, March 30

More book news for you all:

• iBooks pricing model leaked
• Kobo to go to agency model
• Let the media slobbering begin: new Stephenie Meyer title announced
• BookCamp 2010 is open for registration
• French publisher Gallimard to sue Google
• The Economist attempts to soothe its aging readers’ nerves
• Mike Shatzkin wonders why anyone wonders about Random House not teaming with Apple
• The Guardian wants your help in identifying these kids’ books

Daily book biz round-up, March 23

All the news that’s fit to blog:

• U.S. indie distributor Perseus signs deal with Apple
• Hachette Livre says “non” to new French Publishers Association head
• Borders has date with destiny on Apr. 1 (I had a date with destiny once… but she stood me up…)
• Why OR Books decided not to sell on Amazon
• Sheila Heti does podcast for The Guardian
• LeVar Burton teases us with promises of Reading Rainbow 2.0
  
• Profits up at Random House U.K., not due to sales, but to “cost reductions”
• Amazon demos the iPad Kindle app

Edgar Allan Poe’s grave tradition ends after 60 years

Since 1949, an unidentified visitor known as the “Poe toaster” has visited Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore, Maryland, on the anniversary of the writer’s birthday, leaving behind three red roses and a bottle of French cognac as a tribute to the master of the macabre. But this morning, Poe enthusiasts were surprised to find that the tradition seemed to have unceremoniously ended.

Today marks the 201^st anniversary of Poe’s birth, and some are speculating that the Poe toaster decided that after the bicentennial, the tradition should come to an end. From the CBC:

“I’m confused, befuddled,” said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum.

Since 1977, Jerome and a small group of Poe enthusiasts have made their own tradition of keeping an overnight vigil at the church cemetery where Poe is buried to catch sight of the visitor …

[Jerome] had waited in the church and on the outer edges of the cemetery along with about two dozen die-hard fans. They spent the time singing Happy Birthday and reciting lines from The Raven.

Many commenters on this story speculate that the toaster might have died after a 60-year tradition. However, it has been reported by several sources that a note was left on the grave in 1993, reading “The torch will be passed,” which was taken to mean the tradition had been passed on to the toaster’s son. Ever since then, onlookers have reported spotting a much younger-looking man at the grave.

Jerome said he would continue visiting the grave in case the tradition begins again. And although this whole story is appropriately mysterious, the real question is, what happened to all that cognac?

Kindle self-publishing – now available in Canada

Amazon announced today that the Kindle Digital Text Platform is now available to writers all over the world who are writing in English, French, or German. The DTP is a Web platform that allows people to self-publish e-books and sell them via the Kindle store. The service was previously available only in the U.S.

Via Mediabistro:

And now that authors living all over can upload books, we have the potential to get heretofore unimagined texts, though most of them will likely be very bad, and all of them will be hard to find.

The publishing industry – this week in quotes

“We are not going to be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is. We are not going to be deprived of what generations and generations have produced in the French language just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project.” – Nikolas Sarkozy, on France vs. Google, in The London Telegraph

“Poets always react to one another’s work. One generator of great poetry is the response of one poet to a provocative poem by another. That’s how the conversation with the past and tradition occurs, but it’s also how the conversation with the present occurs.” – poet A.F. Moritz, on editing The Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books) in the National Post

“Numerous books, which aren’t available electronically, end up pirated. Attempting to prevent piracy by not making a book electronically available won’t stop the book from showing up as a pirated material, but it will show a lack of willingness to meet the demands of a hungry audience.” – P. Bradley Robb, responding to Sherman Alexie’s appearance on the Colbert Report, on Fiction Matters

“Doug may not recall this, but I remember him strolling into our art department at St. Martin’s Press in New York, looking (aside from the preppy sweater) like any of the other young, jeans-clad designers there. He was quiet spoken and it was the most casual of exchanges, but seeing him added a slight electrical charge to the project: he was our age. One of us. Books quite like this – about, conceived and designed by twentysomethings – hadn’t come around very often. Let’s face it, ever. There was a moment of glee as I realized the possibilities. I could go to town with the design or deliberately underplay, knowing that the team would’”get’ whatever cultural references I toyed with.” – Book designer Judith Stagnitto Abbate on designing Generation X, from the CBC Canada Reads blog