rob wins the 2011 John Newlove Poetry Award

On Saturday night [here's Charles Earl's photo of same], Amanda Earl announced that I won the 2011 John Newlove Poetry Award for the piece "Poem after a line or two by Sylvia Legris." Thanks much to the whole Bywords team, judge a rawlings and the ottawa international writers festival. Part of the award is a chapbook out with Bywords the following year, to launch as part of the fall 2012 writers festival (previous winners include Roland Prevost, Sean Moreland, Marcus McCann, etc).

Thrilled, and honoured. It's a strange thing to win an award named for a late friend. And I'm the first they couldn't give the selected poems to as part of the prize, since I'm the publisher of it. Ah, well.

from the Bywords.ca site:

This year's judge was a.rawlings.

"From the department of curious Canadiana arrives a poem in conversation with the ecopoetic and disjunctive narrative fixations of writers countrywide. The poet nods to Legris nods to MacEwen. Left-aligned stanzas are interwoven with indented asides – or perhaps a poem within a poem. Both. Drenched and stretched, aurality translates what is not quite read. The text itself finishes mid-thought, or does not finish, or does not. Any. Either. All."

The annual John Newlove Poetry award, launched in the fall of 2004, commemorates the honest, poignant and well-written poetry of John Newlove, an Ottawa resident for almost twenty years and poet who died in 2003.

The 2 poems receiving honourable mention in 2011 are

rolling over forwards - Brigette de Pape
my mother’s piano - Benjamin Lancaster

Each year the winner will receive a certificate, A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, Edited by Robert McTavish (Chaudiere Books, 2007) and the opportunity to publish a chapbook through Bywords.

Poems published on bywords.ca from September 2011 to August 2012 will be eligible for consideration for next year's Newlove award. The judge for the 2012 award will be Gary Barwin.