Winners and All that Jazz *jazz hands!*

Okay, y'all. Be prepared. These blogs are gonna be filled with my stream of consciousness and I'm determined to just say things and not worry about things like editing and making it perfect. I do that way too much in my writing life and part of what I'm trying to show with this prize is the actual expenditure of time, labour, financial costs on all ends. So cutting the bureaucracy and the "gloss" of making things perfect, I'm going to dedicate my time to what matters, which is the community and the poets themselves. Meanwhile you can sit back and get a sense of the relatively unfiltered stuff that comes out of Isabella's head as I type.

Picking a winner, I've thought a lot about how to do this for the top prize winner and also the winner of the Graffin--an outstanding book of poetry published in French. By now I've sat on quite a few juries for poetry book prizes and literary organizations, so okay on one end this is Isabella starting this random prize because 1) I'm bored though I don't have time; 2) I can and I love this thing called free-will; 3) I am curious of the directions a prize like this can go. What does it mean to break existing frameworks and set new precedents? Hit obstacles and figure it out along the way? To experiment? That said--I do know a bit of what I'm doing okay, from the experience of being on past juries. Having reflected on these experiences, I'm going to share some of the obstacles I see myself facing with this prize, and well, propose some ways to do this and you can tell me what you think.​

---

1. Even when judges are paid, the amount of $$ allotted to judges often does not meet minimum wage for the amount of hours that we actually put into reading, say, all the books of poetry published this year within provinces A, B, and C. Ya, there's some ways around that. Ie I've been told I don't have to finish the whole book if it doesn't resonate. But even with books that do, I cannot realistically spend as much time as I want to with them to meet prize deadlines. Then there is of course the fact that everyone, including judges, read at different paces. When it comes to poetry, I'm not a fast reader. Alas - wait a sec can I change the font on this cuz I don't like this font.... nope oh well. Wait what was I saying? Alas, this year at least I'm running on a really low budget. I'm not charging publishers submission fees to ensure that ALL poets who have published a book gets recognized by a "Canadian Poetry Prize" like the Girffin is. I don't have a fund for judges. That said, I refuse to let anyone's labour go unacknowledged or reciprocated.

2. Judging is super subjective and arbitrary. When such high amounts of $$$ are often at stake, I think that judges often feel they need to reflect the positions of the prizes to be objective. I think there's things put in place to ensure levels of objectivity: often prizes are judged by more than one person. There's discussions. There's different rating systems. Oftentimes, it is nice when I meet my fellow jurors for the first time and we share our top contenders, and there is more or less a level of agreement in terms of who we all think the top one or two contenders are. It makes me sigh in relief if my top contenders are picked by others too, because that means thank god Isabella you are not a total idiot. I see a lot of variation when judges are asked to pick their top five though, and that's where the subjectivity comes in: the books I want to longlist if I had my choice don't always reflect another juror's. 

So basically, I'm working with a limited budget of $0 and an awareness of the very non-objective and arbitrary processes of judging that I'm not gonna sugar coat. This allows me to thus propose a judging method that's super unorthodox, but one that effectively lessens the expected work placed on judges and ups the fun and chaos. That also acknowledges transparently the fact that prizes are subjective all along. This is the process:

We start with five judges I will reach out to. The judges will be compensated with a small gift donated by sponsors I'm currently harassing for collabs. I'm aiming for the jury pool to reflect a range of diversity in terms of backgrounds, provinces of residence, years of experience with poetry, age, etc.  I'm going to ask each of them to come up with one outstanding book of poetry they've read that year that meets the prize's eligibility criteria. A book that they would like to see recognized. While they do that, I will send them a recommendation each, of a different book of poetry on my favourites list. They will be asked to reflect on their chosen book alongside the recommended book they are reading, and between the two, choose the one that still resonates the most. These five titles, chosen by the five judges, will make the finalists. I will take my time with the five longlisted titles, and like the way I've judged in the past, choose a winner. 

Every year won't be like this. We are experimenting. But I'm proposing this for this year. And I'm offering $250 in prize money, not a down payment, so like doing it like this shouldn't get me cancelled right?

Isabella

ps. send me notes in the comments. ​