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GG poetry winner, juror respond to controversy
In any other year, Jacob Scheier would have every reason to celebrate. On Tuesday, the 28-year-old poet won the 2008 Governor General’s Award for poetry for his debut collection More to Keep Us Warm (ECW Press). But Scheier’s celebrations have been marred by a controversy over perceived conflict of interest among the jurors.
Two members of the three-person poetry jury have clear ties to the winning title. Di Brandt, whom Scheier describes as a mentor and family friend, is thanked in the book’s acknowledgements for her “ongoing advice, support and feedback in the process of writing this book.” Brandt also co-translated one of the poems in the collection, “The Voices” by Rainer Maria Rilke. A second juror, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, is also thanked in the acknowledgments and blurbed the book as well.
Brandt says it is “absurd” to make an issue of her role in Scheier’s creative development, and maintains that the jury’s decision was a unanimous – and unbiased – one. “All big prizes have controversies attached to them in the sense that you have to make a choice, and that it is a choice that pleases some people and displeases others,” she says. “There will always be an element of envy among people who didn’t get their favourite people nominated or their particular poetics represented.”
Scheier, for his part, says he understands why some in the poetry community may feel “slighted” by his win, but he believes attacks on the jury’s objectivity are unfounded. “I think that if they knew Di, they would see she has more integrity than pretty much anyone I’ve known in my life,” Scheier told Q&Q Omni from Brooklyn, where he moved this fall. “She would not select this book if she did not believe in it, and she would not put her reputation on the line to get beaten up online for the sake of giving me a prize.”
The Canada Council, which administers the award, also defends the integrity of the jury’s decision. “You want to be very careful about situations where a juror has a particular relationship with a book,” says Melanie Rutledge, head of the council’s writing and publishing section. “You need to have a very serious conversation with the prospective juror and say, ‘Look, you need to be very sure that you can be 100% objective in evaluating [the submissions].”
Brandt says she was upfront about her ties to More to Keep Us Warm “right off the bat,” though Rutledge would not discuss the timeline. In any case, Rutledge maintains that due diligence was “adhered to to the letter.” But she also says that the council has no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to what constitutes conflict of interest.
“It’s critical to have guidelines in terms of our accountability and in terms of our transparency as a public institution,” Rutledge says. “Having said that … it’s the prerogative, and indeed the responsibility, of the Canada Council to interpret those guidelines using the best of our discretionary judgment.”
Whether that judgment was exercised appropriately or not, Scheier admits to being upset by the online attacks on his win. Some commentators have even suggested that he should have declined the award, which Scheier says would have been out of the question. “Of course I’m going to take the honour, because it would be an insult to the jurors not to,” he says.
Debate over literary prizes is hardly a new thing, and from a publisher’s point of view, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. As ECW publicity manager Simon Ware suggests, the controversy could actually encourage people to go out and read Scheier’s book.
If people want to debate anything, Brandt argues, they should at least be having a discussion on the level of poetics. “There is a debate going on in Canada about what is the important poetics of our time,” says Brandt, “and I think that Jacob Scheier’s book demonstrates a poetic clarity … and spiritual engagement which is in some ways unconventional in the current, neo-Dadaist fashion in some circles in Toronto.”
For his part, Scheier hasn’t decided how he’ll spend the $25,000 prize money, though he says he may use it to stay on in New York, where he works part-time in the office of the architect Daniel Liebeskind. In the meantime, he’s just trying to enjoy the accolades. “I’m going to do my best not to let it take away from what I think is something I deserve to enjoy and be proud of,” he says.
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