A poet's winning season
A poet's winning season
Sylvia Legris's break-out book won the Griffin, and her life may never be the same
PATRICIA ROBERTSON
Special to The Globe and Mail
SASKATOON -- At the beginning of this month, Sylvia Legris's quiet poet's life was dramatically altered when she won the coveted 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize. Three times is apparently a charm, since it was her third book of poetry, Nerve Squall (Coach House Books, 2005), that garnered top honours.
Recently Legris and I shared a discreet upstairs booth at Grandma Lee's Bakery in downtown Saskatoon. It's her favourite haunt, she says, because it's low-key and serves great Rice Krispy squares, but she's a bit on edge. Since the Griffin gala on June 1, Legris has hit the poetry jackpot, been inundated with attention and been run over by a scathing critic.
A close reading of Nerve Squall reveals a vital and very personal meditation on neurology and weather. It's a poetic tour de force that rivals Anne Carson's, Emily Dickinson's and bp nichol's transcendent use of the form. The writing is taut, playful, jam-packed, complex and demanding; I had to consult my dog-eared copy of the Oxford English Dictionary more than a few times. With unusual word pairings "neurogenic-calendric" and "nictitating sun" peppering the text, you just know that Legris loves playing with language.
"I read the dictionary for fun," she confesses. "I love etymological dictionaries. I hesitate to look something up because I can get lost for hours. I also enjoy field guides. I appreciate the lovely images offset by language and the description. Scientific language often has its roots in Latin, so as a writer I'm really intrigued by it."
Unused to public attention, Legris is uncomfortable talking about herself and keeps to the subject of her work. Her poetry, she says, comes from paying attention to language and listening -- "I have really keen hearing. I'm crazily attentive to everything. Poetry allows and demands that kind of slowing down. We live in a fast-paced world. It's important to take the time and slow down."
When the discussion turns to form, she brightens. "I like to work with long lines," Legris says. "I think of a line of poetry being a tightrope. I like to let it out and rein it in. The really long lines in some of the poems mimic the prairie horizon."
Legris began writing poetry seriously in 1991 because "I felt like this was a genre I should be working in. This is what I'm supposed to be doing." Nerve Squall was five years in the making and it was only published because her mentor, poet Betsy Warland, pushed her along. "It takes a long time to become a good poet," she says, adding: "If it weren't for Betsy, I wouldn't have submitted it."
Legris has penned two previous poetry books, circuitry of veins (Turnstone Press, 1996) and iridium seeds (Turnstone Press, 1998). No stranger to critical acclaim, she has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (a U.S. award for work printed by small publishers), and in 2001, she won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize for Fishblood Sky. In addition to the $50,000 Griffin purse, Legris has just received $1,000 for winning the League of Canadian Poets's Pat Lowther Memorial Award, given annually for work written by women poets.
Has the win and the attention affected her writing? "I'm overwhelmed -- I haven't been reading or writing since the short list was announced," she says. "I'm still stuck on page 825 of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy."
Even without the awards, Nerve Squall is clearly Legris's break-out book. It's the kind of collection that cements a writer's reputation. Still, in the Griffin contest with 441 entries vying for top honours, Legris was a dark horse from the West. Speculation in poetry and media circles had fellow nominee Erin Mouré and her book Little Theatres favoured for the big prize. (The second Griffin honour, for international poetry, was given to Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite for his book, Born to Slow Horses).
Legris's victory wasn't unanimously lauded. The Griffin's choice of an experimental Canadian poet has been controversial. In fact, the entire Canadian short list, including Mouré and Phil Hall, was risky by conventional poetry standards. Globe and Mail reviewer and poet Fraser Sutherland lambasted the Griffin judges' short list and dismissed Nerve Squall as "narcissistic inconsequence."
Others, however, say Legris's work heightens the aesthetic differences between traditional lyric poets and their upstart, experimental cousins. It has also drawn attention to a neglected niche category favoured by Legris's publisher, Coach House Press. Damian Rogers, the Arts and Lifestyle editor at Toronto's Eye Weekly, gave the book a rave, but admitted she'd only seriously considered reviewing Nerve Squall after the Griffin short list was announced.
"Legris's language is loose and free, yet it's precise," Rogers said recently. "There's a compulsion behind each sentence. The first word in the collection is a botanical word for peppergrass. Legris likes to make her reader work. It's a challenge to read, but then, I like an active form of reading."
Not every reader is as keen to hone their vocabulary; some want their poetry to be more accessible. "There is a huge resistance to difference," explains another Saskatoon poet, Steven Ross Smith. "Sutherland's review is a lyric poet railing against something that is different, or edgy. But we must remember that poetry is, after all, an art form. The role of any art form is to challenge itself; otherwise, it stagnates."
As for the "experimental" tag that critics have attached to the poet, Sylvia Legris has this cagey reply: "Isn't all writing supposed to be experimental? Doesn't everyone strive to do something new?"
