Chicago Poet Suzanne Buffam, On Being Finalist for the Griffin Prize

Suzanne Buffam, whose The Irrationalist, out from House of Anansi Press in Canada and Canarium Books in the U.S., talked with the Canadian Press about being a finalist for the Griffin Prize, which is given to the best Canadian and international book of poetry published in English the preceding year and carries a $65,000 purse. Buffam had the following to say about the prize's impact on her work, especially its visibility:

"It seems to be a prize that people who I don't think normally read that much poetry pay attention to. I only know because my parents' friends have been calling them and congratulating them and all these people who I don't think about as people who follow poetry — maybe they do, I don't know — but it definitely seems to be in the public eye and well covered by the press. People in America have heard of it."

Buffam also discusses up her early poetry experiences:

Her physician father used to recite snippets of poetry around the house and she began writing her own poems in "the typical ways that adolescents start writing poetry, you know, heartbreak and stuff. And I had a really good high school English teacher called Mr. Heath, who I've often wanted to look up. I have no idea what his first name was. He was very stern and would catch me smoking in my school uniform. ... He was an old British guy who would walk the halls with a clipboard and give detentions but loved poetry, which I didn't discover until my graduating year."

She also touches on being in a poetry marriage, in addition to allowing humor in to her work/brainspace, which tends towards the melancholic:

In 2003, after finishing an M.A. in English literature at Concordia University, Buffam moved to Chicago with her poet husband, Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy, so he could start a residence position at U of C.
"We are very necessary readers for each other's work, so basically we married each other and now we can never part because poetry will keep us together," she said with a laugh.
Buffam published her first collection of poetry, "Past Imperfect," in 2005 and won the Gerald Lampert prize for it.
She wrote "The Irrationalist" in 2007 while she and Reddy were on academic leave and went to Oaxaca, Mexico.
"That was a fantastic year, probably the best year of my life because all I did was write and read and walk in the sun among Aztec ruins and Mayan ruins," she said.
The poems aren't about Mexico or her experiences there, though. Instead, they reflect what she was reading at the time and how her experience there influenced her state of mind.
If Buffam wins the Griffin, which she's not expecting to, she said she'd use the prize money to "buy time" as she works on a new manuscript.
When she started writing poetry, she thought she "had to be smart and serious in poems," she said. Now, she realizes she can be more herself.
"I want to try to write the kind of poems that I would like to read so you, on some level, I think have to be true to your sensibility or it's not fun and I think that took me a while to figure out," she said.
"That humour and levity can be just as powerful when tackling serious subject matter. I think I still write about very serious things and my disposition philosophically is melancholic probably, and that can be explored with levity, I think. It made writing much more fun to me."

The entire article can be found here.