Can you believe it’s been only months since PRISM last spoke to Billy-Ray Belcourt? A lot has happened since then (*cough* Griffin Poetry Prize Winner *cough* no big deal), and we couldn’t be more thrilled that the beauty of his poetry has been recognized in such a monumental way. It means SO MUCH to us that he’s agreed to judge this year’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. In order to help YOU, dear reader, choose which works to submit, we caught up with him and asked him to answer some further questions.
It’s been a few months since our last interview with you. You have since won the Griffin Prize and many other awards. Has this changed anything for you?
Like when I was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, winning the Griffin Poetry Prize was one of those cliché moments when my life, swiftly and clumsily, changed, irrevocably. I noticed quickly that the fog of newness that shrouds young writers like me had cleared, at least partially. A “poet” wasn’t a designation I had to vie for; I just was. I see now, of course, that one never quite finishes vying for a designation of that sort. The prize motored my will to hit the dirt road again.
Looking back at your writing career, what do you think were the moments that made a real difference in terms of how it progressed?
Two moments stick out from the mud of memories: 1. when Tracey Lindberg named me one of 6 Indigenous writers to watch in a CBC Books article; and 2. when I had a bunch of my poems published in Assaracus, a journal published by those at Sibling Rivalry Press. Both of these were kernels of possibility, signs that a writerly life could come.
What advice can you give to emerging writers and writers entering the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize?
Think about the poem as a unit of analysis. With which words, images, stylistic moves, etc. will you think the world anew?
What type of work do you seek out?
I’m a big fan of poetry that has a theoretics at its core, poetry that is keyed in the register of critique and/or radical imagination. I seek out poetry that forces one to hold their breath while reading. Poetry that agitates the form, that does not take language for granted. Some notable books of this sort in my mind include Han Kang’s The White Book, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent. And, I can’t wait to read Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk.
Are you working on anything at the moment?
I’m editing my sophomore book NDN Coping Mechanism: Notes from the Field, due out with House of Anansi Press in fall 2019. I’ve also been experimenting with the long poem. I’m working on one about performance art, the white gaze, hyperbole, and NDN grief.
Read our previous interview with Billy-Ray here. For more information on how to submit to our poetry contest please check the contest page.