There is something chivalrous about Scott Griffin. It’s hard to pinpoint. But he’s definitely a throwback, with the quiet intensity and easy confidence of a fighter pilot or sheriff from a black and white film. The idea of Griffin as a lead actor fits with his rich and varied career, where he’s appeared in a series of starring roles: entrepreneur, adventurer, author, publisher and philanthropist. The latter role relates primarily to the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, a foundation that he established in 2000, and whose prize money he recently doubled from $100,000 to $200,000.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Griffin Poetry Prize, TORO caught up with Griffin at his home in downtown Toronto.

Q: Back on September 6, 2000, when you spoke at the launch of the Griffin Poetry Prize, you said that the very fact that people were even asking why there was a need for a trust for poetry revealed, in your words, “just how far poetry has slipped from the mainstream of our cultural lives.”

Well, 10 years later, has anything changed?
A: Yes, I think it has. First of all, all these artistic ventures are a little bit like fashion – hemlines up, hemlines down. So it is an evolving situation, or a changing situation, all the time. But I’ll give you an example. The first year we had readings with the shortlisted poets. We had 175 people attend, and that’s pretty good for poetry. This year we’re going to be in the Royal Conservatory Koerner Hall; it seats 1,100 and we’re almost sold out already. Secondly, in the first year we had just under 200 books submitted and this year it will probably be over 500. And from 33 different countries. I think that’s an indication. It’s a small indication, but there’s definitely more interest in poetry.

Q: Part of the reason for those submissions going up may have to do with the fact that you’ve just doubled the prize money from $100,000 to $200,000. What was the thinking behind this?

A: Well, two reasons really. One was to try and make more of a mark on the international market. Because I think that we’ve really been pleasantly surprised with the reaction in the Canadian market; the prize is well known and it has a certain sort of stature in the literary world here. But internationally I think that while it’s known around publishers and whatnot, it’s background noise. And we thought that by doubling it, it would send two messages: one, that this is an important prize, and two, that poetry is here to stay and it is important. So it makes a statement, I think.

Q: One of the three principles was that the prize money had to be sufficient that it declared that poets and poetry are just as important as novelists and their work. But isn’t the onus more on the poets themselves to engage the reading public with timely, provocative, entertaining poetry?

A: I think that’s a very good question and the answer is: yes, ultimately the product has to be good or it doesn’t matter how much marketing you do, if the product is not there it’s not going to be lasting. I think this is a case where the product was good but the marketing was bad. The idea of the prize, of course, is to raise the profile of the product but ultimately the poetry has to stand on its own. And I think that’s why the readings the night before are so important, and why they’re so popular too. When we started off, everybody was interested in the awards night – who’s going to get the prize, the fact that there was a dinner and all those sorts of things. But that has shifted and now the readings is the more important night – so I think that underlines that yes, the product is worthwhile.

Q: A complaint that I often hear is that poetry has become too dense and specialized.

A: Poetry is a little bit like painting and music, and the artists are breaking through boundaries. So you get modern painting which leaves some of the audience behind because it’s not representative – or even modern music because it seems discordant because you’re used to the classical stuff. And poetry is a little bit the same way if you haven’t been following it, if you haven’t kept abreast of what is being experimental. And of course a lot of it is not so good, just as a lot of modern art is not so good. And it is hard [to know] unless you are in the game, as it were, and I think the idea is to involve people and get people involved in the subject.

Q: How does someone like yourself, with a literary mind and a passion for poetry, end up building highly successful businesses in the field of high-technology engineering and manufacturing?

A: Well, that’s a difficult question to answer but I think it comes down to having an imagination, because a lot of business is creative. And if you have an imagination to see that there are possibilities.... For instance, I’m not an engineer but the engineering side is easy in one sense, because you can hire engineers. It’s putting together the business concept, financing it, and getting it organized, and seeing the opportunity – those are the more creative sides of business.

Q: At the launch of the Griffin Poetry Prize, your friend, the playwright David Young, said:

“Scott is defined by daring. He has flown the entire coastline of Africa in his little plane. He’s crash landed on an island in the middle of Lake Tanganyika. He’s dragged sledges on epic journeys across the Baffin Island icecap. He’s paddled the great rivers of the Northwest Territories. He’s sailed the world’s oceans. And he’s read poetry. Scott is the first to admit that it’s his lifelong interest in poetry that has provided meaning and context for his journey through this world.”

Can you expand upon just how poetry has provided meaning and context for your particular journey?

A: I think that there’s a certain intenseness in poetry, because it takes an emotion and makes it very intense in a very compressed space. And this is what’s exciting about adventure or doing things that are also intense. They’re related in a way. I’ve always felt that poetry is an amazing art form because with so few words you can convey an emotion that is very intense. And that appeals to me a lot.

Q: That makes perfect sense to me, because I can imagine how doing any of those you’re almost compressing reality in a way – making everything extremely vivid. And, really, on that same note, that whole range of activity reminds me of a Hemingwayesque style of life ... but without the killing.

A: That will come! [laughs]

Q: But has poetry even informed your life from that point of view, as when Frost talks about taking the path “less traveled by.”

A: I think it comes back to this intenseness again. It’s a little bit like the moth going to the flame. Some people are attracted to it and others are horrified by it, and I guess it’s just the gene pool that determines that.

Q: Part of the mandate of the Griffin Trust reads: “By funding the Griffin Poetry Prize, the world’s largest prize for a first edition single collection of poetry written in English, the Trust aims to spark the public’s imagination and raise awareness of the crucial role poetry plays in our cultural life.”

What crucial role does poetry play in our cultural life?

A: I don’t think we’re there yet. I think that poetry should play a central or at least legitimate role in our cultural lives. But it still remains out on the edges there. And it is something that we have thought a lot about, because the prize and the readings are really directed only to a very small group, when you think about it – even though it's expanded. And even though it has profile and people think about it and recognize it maybe, but that doesn’t mean that they are reading and participating. We are thinking, and we will come up with an initiative that will try to spread poetry over a much wider democratic following. I’m not in a position yet to announce that, but I believe that within the year we will come up with an initiative that tries to broaden the scale of what we’re trying to do. That’s a bit of a tease.... [laughs]

Q: How hard it is to sell poetry in today’s marketplace?

A: By and large, poetry is a tough sell. Every now and then, though, you have an exception like Christian Bök’s Eunoia has sold somewhere around 40,000 copies. It’s way up there. Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf in America alone sold over one million copies. Those are exceptions, of course. But yes, by and large, poetry is still an uphill battle. But it’s still not as bad as trying to sell plays [laughs]. And that’s really the challenge in front of us, to raise the profile of poetry so that people want to have the latest book that Anne Carson publishes, or whoever the poet is, in the same way that people will want to have the latest work by a top novelist. Really what it means is that we have a lot of work to do.

Q: Who are your favourite poets?

A: The difficulty with that question is that I have many of them. But I think that E.E. Cummings is underrated. I think George Mackay Brown somehow, on this side of the Atlantic, is underrated. But it’s a tough question. If you said your top 20 maybe.

Q: Did you ever write poetry?

A: My standard reply to that is if I did I wouldn’t admit it.

The international and Canadian winners of the 2010 Griffin Prize will be announced on June 3. The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology will be available from House of Anansi Press on June 1.