Literary Montreal is the source of an audacious new literary prize announced late last week: the which will award $50,000 for a single poem of up to 40 lines written in English.

Billing itself the “World’s Largest Poetry Competition,” the prize is “designed to bring more attention to poetry and to encourage people from all over the world to enter their poems,” according to a press release.

What is innovative about the prize is its encouragement of poems using “any English dialect” and its openness to poets from all over the world, whether previously published or not. [. . .]

An editorial board of distinguished poets includes Montreal’s Stephanie Bolster and Michael Harris, former Montrealer Eric Ormsby, Australian John Kinsella, Jamaican-born Valerie Bloom, Malawian Frank M. Chipasula, as well as the Nigerian Odia Ofeimun, Mumbai poet Anand Thakore, Sinéad Morrissey from Belfast and London-born Fred D’Aguiar, who grew up in Guyana of Guyanese parents.

The early entry deadline for the competition is April 22, with a final deadline of July 8, 2011. The editorial board will choose the top 50 out of the poems submitted, and these will be published in print and in e-formats by Montreal’s Véhicule Press in fall 2011. The winner of the inaugural prize, chosen by 2011 judge Andrew Motion, will be announced in December.

Good luck to all our poetry friends . . . I’m assuming you’ll all apply, since it probably (unfortunately) takes three decades of poetmaking to earn $50K in royalties . . .

Her main point is to emphasize the differences between the Quebec literary scene and that found in “English Canada,” differences both in terms of literary style and personality:

The great Jacques Poulin’s new novel is L’anglais n’est pas une langue magique (Leméac). Poulin is loved and admired in spite of — or is it in part because of? — his refusal to take the public stage to promote his work. Nor is he the only major Quebec writer of whom this is true, for Réjean Ducharme (author, most famously, of L’avalée des avalés in 1966, remarkable winner of the Prix Goncourt) is a legendary recluse. Is there a major Canadian writer alive from outside Quebec who never speaks into a microphone? I can’t think of one. Can you?

(Ironically, in a story about there’s a quote from Margaret Atwood: “The term ‘relentless self-promoter’ used to be an insult in publishing circles. Now it will be a necessity.”)

Getting back to the literary, this book is at least compared to a lot of the right names:

Patrice Martin is a hopeful newcomer with a first novel entitled Le Chapeau de Kafka (XYZ), which includes nods not only to Kafka but also to Paul Auster, Calvino, and Borges — a combination that intrigues Le Devoir‘s dependably literary columnist Danielle Laurin in her recent round-up of the season’s highlights.

Kafka, Calvino, and Borges all have their English-Canadian admirers, as indeed does Paul Auster. The adulation for Auster in French Quebec, though, where he walks on water — as indeed he does in France and elsewhere in Europe — is another measure of the distance between Quebec’s literary milieu and that of English Canada.

I really need to look into some of these authors to find out what they’re really like, but at least the Quebec literary scene sounds promising . . .