The Montreal Prize Broadside
Thursday, December 15, 2025
We have a rather important and exciting announcement. For a couple of months now we’ve had this quiet notice on our home page:
“Broadside: We are looking to produce a poetry broadside – essentially, a work of art that includes the text of a poem – meant to celebrate the dignity and value of the individual poem as a work of art.”
We’re very happy to announce that we’re no longer just looking to do this - it’s going to happen. Eric Fischl, the American painter and sculptor, has generously agreed to produce a broadside of one of our shortlisted poems. For information about Eric Fischl and to see examples of his work, please go here. And for information about the amazing nonprofit art project, America: Now and Here, please visit http://americanowandhere.org/.
This very limited edition production, signed by both the artist and poet, will be released in the new year. Our portion of the proceeds will go directly to funding our nonprofit, grassroots global poetry project. Requests for information may be sent to [email protected]Eric Fischl
The author of the poem selected for the broadside will of course receive a signed copy when all the work is completed (this won’t happen until sometime in the new year). In a way, this means we’ve managed to offer another significant prize. (We certainly wouldn’t call it a ‘second’ prize, since the broadside selection was made independently, and having a broadside made of a great poem by a great artist is in itself an incomparable and priceless thing).
If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of a poetry broadside, a beautiful combination of visual art and poetry, click here for a fine example.
The Broadside Poem
We gave our 2011 broadside artist the same thing we gave our 2011 prize judge, Andrew Motion: the shortlisted poems, without author names. Recently, the artist made his selection, which we’ll also be announcing a bit later today.
As it happens, the poem selected for the broadside is not the same poem that has been selected for the prize. This is a happy outcome, we think - it will help us bring attention to another new poem.
Eric Fischl’s selection, “The Grasshoppers’ Silence” by Canadian poet Linda Rogers, is inspired by the true story of Rumana Monzur, who was tragically blinded in an attack by her husband in Bangladesh in June 2011. “I’ve chosen this poem because the image of the one-legged grasshopper won’t let me sleep,” said Fischl of his selection.
When asked for a comment on the poem, Rogers replied: “Poetry should not always be easy to write or to read, but hopefully it is part of the process of redemption, when the silent learn to sing.”
The Grasshoppers’ Silence
By Linda Rogers
Right-click here to download the MP3.
Listen to the story the prisoner’s wife
hears in the Bengali darkness: the
one he’d told her about a grasshopper
he’d caught in his sweep net at dusk
and taken home in a glass jar with
breathing holes punched in the lid.
“Why do boys catch insects?” she’d asked,
and he’d answered: “Because they are lonely.”
He told her the alarmed grasshopper
fiddled, rubbing its leg against its
belly. In Bangladesh, as in China,
ancient violins have one string; and
they sing in minor keys. “Why is their
music so sad?” she asked him, even
though she already knew the answer.
“Their music is sad because grasshoppers are sad.”
In Bangladesh, unfaithful women are
called “grasshoppers,” because the
adulteresses jump from leaf to leaf
in monsoon swamps. “Don’t ever leave
me,” her husband had ordered his
captive insect, pulling off one of its
legs before he made it a suit of rags.
“Did it ever sing after that?” she’d asked.
His wife was a curious woman who’d
gazed past the Chittagong Hills to praise
the sunrise, its clamorous golds and
vermilions. “Don’t you ever leave me,”
he’d said to her every time she opened
a book or looked out the window, her
eyes astonished as water lilies opening
to the first light of dawn. And that one
last time, “You left me,” tearing out her
eyes and leaving them both alone in the
dark - her in a room without windows and
him in the prison he’d made for himself,
listening to the grasshoppers’ silence.