Saunders on the Canadian National Magazine Awards

This sent in from Craig Saunders

At a gala ceremony on June 5, Sina Queyras won the National Magazine Award for poetry. The NMAs are Canada’s top prizes for magazine writing. The author of four books, including Teethmarks, Lemon Hound and the newly released Expressway, the Montreal poet won for “Her Dreams of the Expressway,” published in the Malahat Review.

The silver award went to Vancouver poet Jennica Harper for “Liner Notes,” published in Prism International. Honorable mentions went to Warren Heiti, Michael Lista, Peter Richardson, Barry Dempster, Sylvia Legris, Amy Dennis, Lorna Crozier and Jan Zwicky.

It was a banner night for the Malahat Review, which publishes out of the University of Victoria, British Columbia. The literary journal also won the gold and silver awards for fiction with stories by Andrew Tibbetts and D.W. Wilson, and a silver in the “personal journalism” category for “Bad Day” by Joel Yanofsky.

AlbertaViews was named magazine of the year. The Walrus won the most awards with five golds and a silver, followed closely by Toronto Life and explore, a small adventure travel magazine with an impressive history of good writing.

[editor's note: particular hip-hip-hoorays for Sina Queyras, a long-time blogger and friend of Eyewear's]

Craig Saunders is a Toronto-based writer and reviewer.

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

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THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

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E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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