If there’s anyone who understands the power of poetry, it’s Claudine Bertrand. The Quebec poet has just won the prestigious Ganzo prize for poetry, awarded in France, for all of her work.
This prize is endowed with a considerable purse of 10,000 euros, and she is the first Quebecer and the fourth woman to receive it. But Claudine Bertrand is not at her first prize. She was also the first Quebecer to win the Tristan-Tzara award in 2001, for her collection The body in mind.
Poetry, Claudine Bertrand read it, wrote it, defended it, stimulated it, circulated it all her life. As the author of dozens of books, but also as a former professor of literature at the Cégep de Rosemont, as the founder of the all-female poetry magazine Arcade in 1981, or as co-instigator of the project Poetry takes the metro, in Montreal, in the early 2000s.
In Benin, where she gives conferences and workshops, and where she works to establish a writer’s residence, a literature prize bears her name. In Quebec too.
However, the management of cultural events during the pandemic demonstrates that Quebec is struggling to give the arts in general, and literature in particular, its essential place, she said in an interview.
“When you put culture aside, you put aside a part of humanity. For several years, Claudine Bertrand has divided her time between Quebec and France, where she has published several of her latest books.
“Over there, the spring of poetry lasts a month,” she says. And it is celebrated across the country. Schools participate. [..] In Quebec, we do not value literature, when you are a poet, you have to whisper it, we say that very timidly. Whereas in France, the poet is highly valued. I take the taxi, and I say that I am a poet, before saying that I am a teacher, and he [le chauffeur] begins to quote Baudelaire or Rimbaud to me. »
Ephemeral projects
However, it is not the writers who are lacking in Quebec, she notes. But a project like Poetry takes the metro lasted here, in all, only two years, whereas in Paris the program continues from year to year.
It was as a child, when she was an unattached orphan, that she discovered the power of texts, and their power to connect people together.
When you put culture aside, you put aside a part of humanity
Very quickly, it was towards women’s literature that she turned, in particular through the founding of the journal Arcade, at a time when it was still a world to conquer.
“I’m doing an anthology of women’s literature,” she says. I’m 94.”
On this subject, Quebec has a head start on France, which however tries to raise awareness on the issue, she concedes. Hence the joy of Claudine Bertrand to receive the Robert Ganzo prize as a woman.
A French-speaking Venezuelan poet, Robert Ganzo had made one of his last wishes the creation of a prize which rewards a poetic work “in tune with the movement of the world, far from the closed field of formalist laboratories and postmodern affectations”.
This prize will be awarded to Claudine Bertrand during the Étonnants Voyageurs festival in Saint-Malo, in June 2022.