Griffin Poetry Prize short-list nominees, clockwise from top left, Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, Ishion Hutchinson, Homero Aridjis and Amelia M. Glaser.Supplied
On June 5, at Toronto’s Koerner Hall, the nominated authors for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize will read from their shortlisted books. After which, the winner of the $130,000 award for a book of poetry written in (or translated into) English will be announced.
One of the poets, the celebrated Jorie Graham, recently had the shortlisted To 2024 and other recent collections of hers set to music by Matt Aucoin and Peter Sellars. The resulting Music for New Bodies had its world concert premiere this spring at Rice University in Houston.
“It is heart-stopping in its access to deep time and the layers of time we call afterlives,” Graham said about the piece for five vocal soloists and an 18-instrument ensemble. “We might be in an afterlife now. If so, they have found its sounds.”
With that in mind, The Globe and Mail asked the Griffin nominees about their dream choice of a songwriter/musician, dead or alive, to set their shortlisted poetry to music.
Homero Aridjis (Mexico), Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence
I would choose Bach to write a secular cantata using Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence as the libretto. The poem’s narrative progression and complexity would be expressed by a baroque orchestra, a choir and soloists. Mexico’s Zone of Silence, in the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, is a mysterious landscape that encompasses the terrestrial and the celestial; one could say the same of Bach’s music.
Bach was a master of counterpoint and someone who reflected on and sought out the spiritual on Earth, as do I. My poem revolves around notions of duality, life and death, a dialogue with the cosmos and the self.
The opening of a cantata is often choral or polyphonic. I want different instruments to represent the desert fauna, and would feature the hare with translucent ears in a short musical phrase as a leitmotif. A deep voice, a basso profundo, would provide the voice of the desert.
Jorie Graham (U.S.), To 2040
There are so many, but among living musician-song writers, Laurie Anderson would be ideal – both for her intrepid, deeply original exploration of the sounds in words as well as between words – and for her extraordinary ability to draw on the entire history of music from classical to electronic in ways that combine both pathos, irony and exploration of the limits of a human voice.
Given that my work explores and confronts the limits of our humanity, and our ability to sustain life on this Earth, her ability to reach deep into earth sounds as well as sounds which transcend all earthly musics, fuels a deep feeling of kinship.
Ann Lauterbach (U.S.), Door
Lots of people come to mind, but I think I would choose Stephen Sondheim to set my Elegy in January to music. I grew up listening to songs from musicals, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific to West Side Story. These songs, along with folk music and blues, were central to a desire to make a poetry that moved between interior and external worlds.
Elegy in January was written to my sister Jennifer, who lived and died in Washington, D.C.; it ends with a “storm in January,” a reference to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. I think Sondheim would have been able to make a song simultaneously mournful, fearful and angry, as he did, for example, in Sweeney Todd.
Ishion Hutchinson (Jamaica), School of Instructions
Lee (Scratch) Perry, the maverick Jamaican musician, comes first to my mind. But if I am limited to only one choice, then that would be Bach to adapt School of Instructions into an oratorio. I return often to Bach’s passions, his setting of Gospel texts, in particular St. Matthew Passion, for many reasons but mainly to get lost in the harmonic beauty of the choral voices. He commands these voices into an almost unreal balance of voluptuous grandeur and charged plainness. That is what I aspire towards in my poem, a kind of liturgical play in which there is a slight elevation of the human voice, or voices, breaking up as it communicates the large-scale tragic experience of the First World War, spliced through at every turn with the simple minutiae of a boy’s life.
Amelia M. Glaser (U.S.), co-translator of A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, by Halyna Kruk (Ukraine)
Halyna Kruk’s poems are heady combinations of science, the classics and raw emotion. A musical adaptation could take these poems in a lot of directions from hip hop to new-wave ballad. I’d give a lot to hear a Nina Simone or Kate Bush adaptation of one of Halyna’s poems.
Among contemporary artists, Halyna’s poems make me think about Björk and American songwriter/musician Mirah. Both these artists are very formal about their music, and have managed to pull off a crossover between art, politics and science. Mirah collaborated with the Spectratone International ensemble on Share This Place: Stories and Observations, an album entirely devoted to bugs, which was actually about a whole lot more – love, emotion and coming to terms with the self.
Björk’s Biophilia mixes science with questions about the future of humankind. What could an artist like Mirah or Björk do with Kruk’s poem citing anthracite, which places geological and political time side by side? Or with the story of a ficus, which describes a building being torn apart by a missile, as told from the perspective of a houseplant? I’d love to hear this.