Andre Alexis weighed in on the whole conflict-of-interest thing that happened with the awarding of this year’s Governor General’s Award in poetry (read the back-story here, here, and here.) It’s an even-handed, well-reasoned assessment, the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from Alexis, that’s pretty damning towards both the Canada Council and the juror involved. Andre, as I mentioned previously, had recused himself from a jury during the year someone he was emotionally involved with was up for consideration. Seems like the smartest thing to do. Like almost everyone else, Alexis expresses sympathy for Scheier, whose win is tainted and will always be questioned.

When you are on a jury, you have little time to assess works that have taken their authors years to produce. G-G fiction jurors are expected to read about 200 works of fiction in five or six months. Poetry juries probably read fewer books, but poetry is dense and intense and needs time to work its strongest effects. In principle, the juror starts at zero (or somewhere reasonably near zero) with a book, reads it and evaluates according to strong first or second impressions.

A juror who has worked on a book of poems, who has seen the progress of a number of poems, who has participated in their development can in no way be said to have started from “zero” or anywhere near it. The juror who has worked on a book of poems has an intimacy with the work in question that he or she does not have with the others under consideration. Brandt was intimate with Scheier’s work. She knew its warp and weave as she did not know that of other works. To assert that she can have been “objective” and to call those who doubt it “absurd” is self-serving and rude.

Scheier’s work had an unfair advantage over the others this year. (We don’t even need to get into the fact that another juror, Pier Giorgio di Cicco, had given Scheier’s book a blurb, or question just how dispassionate Brandt can have been when her own work was part of the book under consideration and a poem in More To Keep Us Warm is actually entitled Di and is addressed, one assumes, to her.) The Canada Council did not do anything to rectify this advantage, it seems.

Also, the person in charge of the books section of the GGs is stepping down, apparently for unrelated reasons. So someone will be inheriting a bloody mess there. On the more prurient side of things, there’s an edit battle raging over Scheier’s Wikipedia page, with updates about the controversy being constantly scrubbed from and re-added to the record.