Song for the Earth and the Water by Harold Rhenisch
CBC Books | Posted: November 7, 2024 2:47 PM | Last Updated: November 7
The B.C. writer is on the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist
Harold Rhenisch has made the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Song for the Earth and the Water.
The winner of the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books. The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 14 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 21.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize opens in January and the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.
About Harold Rhenisch
Harold Rhenisch has just published The Salmon Shanties: a Cascadian Song Cycle (University of Regina Press, 2024) a series of reconciliation songs about the bioregion, Cascadia, and the salmon that weave it. He prunes both poems and fruit trees, a combined art he wrote about in The Tree Whisperer (Gaspereau, 2022). He lives in Vernon, in Syilx territory, where he writes the blog Okanagan Okanagon and is kept by a flock of gold finches.
Rhenisch won the CBC Poetry Prize second place in 2007 for Catching a Snare Drum at the Fraser's Mouth and shortlisted in 2017 for Saying the Names Shanty. He also longlisted for the 2014 CBC Poetry Prize for The Art of Weaving.
Entry in five-ish words
"Listening to land and water."
The poem's source of inspiration
"In syilx territory, where I live, land and water are one interwoven substance. I learned these lessons from ten years of going out daily to look closely at the land, the water, the sky and their creatures for my blog Okanagan Okanagon. During this long immersion, my friend Jill, an artist from Vancouver Island, went swimming in Okanagan Lake. There she was, just a face staring into the sky, like the sun. When she came back to shore, she spoke of the lake as a living being fallen from the stars and now lying in the land, with her arms spread. I was inspired by how quickly Jill sensed the energy of this woven environment.
After all the poems that have written me, this poem is a completely new beginning, a saying of things previously unsaid - Harold Rhenisch
"When I was at the George Ryga Festival in Summerland last year, the gap between Ryga's writing and his commitment to working people and Indigenous women, on the one hand, and the valley's current wine culture, on the other, inspired a series of poems about Ryga and the working and Indigenous people who have shaped regional society. This is one of the last ones, in a closing series honouring women and imagining an integrated future. The series includes Margot Kane's words of affection for Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, coupled with her call for something new.
"I, too, want something new. After all the poems that have written me, this poem is a completely new beginning, a saying of things previously unsaid and an answer to the question, 'If this is your land, where are your stories?' I wouldn't say it is my land. I would say, though, that I am the child of the land and the water."
First lines
I used to ask What's going to happen today?
Now I ask what the land wants and expect the sun rising with cliff swallows.
Now I ask what the land wants and expect the sun rising with cliff swallows.
There is a silence that the philosophers in their grave clothes
are going to have a hard time erecting a festival tent over.
are going to have a hard time erecting a festival tent over.
There are buntings in it and kingbirds chirring
as they swoop out from the power pole and return.
as they swoop out from the power pole and return.
Check out the rest of the longlist
The longlist was selected from more than 2,700 submissions. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list.
The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is composed of Shani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin.
The complete longlist is:
- Borderland by Howard Anglin (Calgary)
- on the last day of ramzan, the moon makes the sun in its image by Manahil Bandukwala (Ottawa)
- Lament by Jessica Bebenek (Montreal)
- Citrus Dreams by Elena Bentley (Clavet, Sask.)
- When it's 9:48pm and the kids are asleep and you realize you've spent the entire night on your phone by Nicole Boyce (Calgary)
- ABC Gum by Devlin (Halifax)
- scar/city I by Daniela Elza (Vancouver)
- I Thought I Might by Tamsyn Farr (Wakefield, Que.)
- Score Before Cutting by Claire Gordon (Ucluelet, B.C.)
- There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen by Cicely Grace (Vancouver)
- After Icebergs by Matthew Hollett (St. John's)
- a house in O's name by Eimear Laffan (Nelson, B.C.)
- Gas Station Coffee by Paula Lemke (Langley, B.C.)
- magdalene sonnets by Louie Leyson (Vancouver)
- 吃苦 (Eat the Bitterness) by Emily Yiling Ma (Burnaby, B.C.)
- Kananaskis by Kathleen McCracken (Belfast, Northern Ireland)
- A Tenuous Life Act, I Lay Dreaming by Sasha Pickering (Halifax)
- Regeneration and other poems by Katherine Poyner (Nanaimo, B.C.)
- Girls of the Now by Dora Prieto (Vancouver)
- No Apples and Oranges by Marion Quednau (Sechelt, B.C.)
- i'll expect big things from the moon later tonight by c. a. r. rafuse (Ottawa)
- Song for the Earth and the Water by Harold Rhenisch (Vernon, B.C.)
- Palimpsest County by Rachel Robb (Toronto)
- Doom Scroll by Jenny Sampirisi (Toronto)
- Northern Childhood by Eleonore Schönmaier (Ketch Harbour, N.S.)
- Some Notes on Intoxication and Simile: Like Butterscotch by Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)
- The Killer and the Harpist by Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)
- The Rupture by Ayşe Lara Yildirim (Toronto)