spellbinding evening

The announcement of the shortlisted writers for this year's Trillium Book Awards was promoted as "a spellbinding evening" but the spell was woven more by my two glasses of house red as I waited with friends to applaud a good friend who was announced this evening as one of the nominees for the Poetry Book Award. Assorted small barely recognizable appetizers were wafted past on  trays held aloft in the crowded darkness, and we perched on stools talking about films (mostly Downfall, which I haven't seen and from the discussion, am not now keen on seeing despite the always watchable Bruno Ganz, an actor much admired by Thomas Bernhard). Perhaps it was the aura of the setting --- the "Underground" of Queen Street West's Drake Hotel -- that was meant to enthrall, although the designation referred not to any exoticism or subversiveness except perhaps to the occupants of Queen's Park who were in attendance. "Underground" was merely downstairs. Short-listed writers in all three categories had been closeted (a binding spell?) and after a small bilingual ceremony notable for the brevity of speechifying, the writers were announced. They paraded out, were named along with their books, drowned in the glare of the lights, then had to forage for seats in the darkness, with suitable hurrahs. I had hoped for a mite of reading -- that might have qualified as spellbinding and more bardic than the silence the writers were allowed. Actual readings of poems may have to wait until the awards ceremony on April 27, and those may only be snippets.
Three poets are on the shortlist: Maureen Scott Harris for her second collection, Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press); Rachel Zolf for her second collection, Masque (The Mercury Press); and Ray Hsu for his first book, Anthropy (Nightwood Press). I have only one of these books in hand, must go hunting for the others, and will respond to all of them in future posts.
In truth, it was a civilized and pleasant evening, despite my expectations of being spellbound. It's not because I've imagined being Ingrid Bergman's sophisticated shrink to Gregory Peck's well-mannered pseudo-psychopath in Spellbound. Or because I ever have any expectation of government representatives to be more than . . . government representatives. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the recent encounter with storytellers and their ways of enchanting with words, or perhaps I was imprinted at an early age by a passage in Frans G. Bengtsson's marvellous book, The Long Ships: A Saga of the Viking Age, translated into English and printed who-knows-when in Stockholm. In the court of King Harald Bluetooth during the six days of Yuletide feasting, stories are told, well larded with verse, and each of the Viking leaders must take his turn. One of them "was Bjorn Asbrandsson, and he was a famous warrior, besides being a great poet to boot, like all wanderers from Iceland. Although he was somewhat drunk, he managed to improvise some highly skilful verses in King Harald's honour in a metre known as toglag. This was the latest and most difficult verse-form that the Icelandic poets had invented, and indeed his poem was so artfully contrived that little could be understood of its content. Everybody, however, listened with an appearance of understanding, for any man who could not understand poetry would be regarded as a poor specimen of a warrior; and King Harald praised the poem, and gave the poet a gold ring."
If only poetry were as highly regarded now, for we still have a great capacity for both drink and war, but poets are scarcely lauded or praised, nor are their works necessarily reviewed, in what gets generally called "the media" and the gold rings are few, and far between.