Each year, Concordia’s Department of English hands out prizes for excellence in the studies of English literature and creative writing. The Irving Layton Awards for Creative Writing, worth $500 each, are given to undergraduate students for works of poetry and fiction. To qualify for the poetry award, students must submit a portfolio of one or several poems.
Jake Byrne plans to graduate in June 2017 and pursue an MFA in creative writing (poetry) next fall.
The 2016 poetry award recipient was Jake Byrne.
Byrne plans to graduate in June 2017 and pursue an MFA in creative writing (poetry) next fall.
The Ontario native is heavily influenced by queer poetry and believes this to be an excellent way to approach questions of identity.
He writes about things that scare him and believes, he says, that “poetry should be used to engage with the world, politically and in a way that balances politics with art that is not didactic.”
Keleti Station
by Jake Byrne
“I’m practically in a state of shock because of what I did and what has been done to me… I panic, now as I’m watching the footage it’s like it wasn’t even me.”
Petra László (translated by Mariann O˝ry)
“There is no fundamental right to a better life.”
Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary
First you came for the far-right camerawomen,
and I did not speak out, for I was not a fuckwit.
Now, watching the footage, it’s like a foreign film
I watched as a child in a dream, a soundtrack
of moonlight with occasional cicada.
You washed the streets clean, swept Romani
into dusty little corners of former industrial cities,
sold fresh cabbage and carrots in Kazinczy street.
A culture is absolutely worth defending:
I, for instance, just tossed out my ex’s
sourdough fermenting on the fridge,
six weeks after he left. The radical choice is
a population as pasty and refined as lángos.
It’s like it wasn’t even me, turista in jackboots
on the dancefloor, sucking back fény and complicity.
There is no fundamental right to a better life,
of course, but you reserve the right to scrape the grout off Oktogon.
Is that the Halászbástya you’d like to die on?
Well, perhaps not, but the better to
enjoy your meal at the Andrássy Burger King that way,
under a sky expressionless and cold as a denied visa.
Silent, now. I hear the coming of a train.
© Concordia University