by Chris Banks

When I was young, I desperately wanted someone to pluck me out of obscurity and show me how to write poems. I believed if I just met the right teacher, the right person of influence, they could teach me how to write well. As a nineteen year old, I wrote a hideously self-conscious letter to a Toronto publisher that never wrote me back, whinging about how no one understands me, and how I really wanted to be a writer.

The memory fills me with so much embarrassment I start blowing up like a Macy’s Day Balloon. Maybe not of Bart Simpson or Pikachu, but of late teen awkwardness.

Later, as a young high-school teacher with a first book, a student teacher assigned to a colleague of mine found out I had written an honest-to-gawd poetry collection that was not self-published, and this excited individual cornered me at 3 pm at the end of a school day, on a Friday before a long weekend no less, and kept me trapped in my classroom for an hour and a half while they pleaded how much they wanted to write a book of poetry, and would I consider mentoring them?

The answer was an unequivocal no, over and over. It didn’t matter how much he wanted to write a book. Wanting is not the same as writing. The young man in question did not know the first thing about Canadian poetry, nor collected books of Canadian poetry, nor really attempted to write poetry at all. He just liked the idea of writing a book, and saw me as a way of fulfilling that dream.

After over an hour, the student teacher finally dropped his shoulders, said ‘I understand’, and left my classroom looking like a mutt slapped with a rolled newspaper for having just piddled on the kitchen floor.

Some people want to be published more than they wish to write. Unfortunately, there is no escaping the heavy lifting of poetry composition. You have to write, and write—and maybe give up a few times—and then write some more, before you can lift your head from your black Moleskine, or computer screen, and start to see yourself getting somewhere.

No one can help you with this, but sometimes, you find an encouraging voice, usually someone older than yourself, usually a teacher. I wrote terrible poems in high-school. Terrible. But my English teacher Mary Tetzner told me they were wonderful, and I was ready to hear it!

I started writing poems all the time: in slim green journals I bought from stationary stores, on the walls of a friend’s bedroom with coloured markers, and sometimes for extra credit in English class. I wrote tiny imagistic poems, long five-page poems about the death of my Grandfather, poems about love and loss and redemption. Things I knew nothing about except for what I had read in books and saw on movie screens.

As a high-school teacher myself, I teach kids every semester who are far better poets than I was in high-school, and I’m quick to praise them. For example, I had one such student twenty years ago, an Olympian swimmer and Science wunderkind with a 4.0 GPA. They took my Grade 13 Creative Writing class. I casually mentioned P.K. Page’s book of glosas Hologram, which was still making the critical rounds at the time, to my students, and I boldly stated I would give extra marks to anyone who attempted to write a glosa.

In a week, she handed in a tight, three poem chapbook of glosas that were powerful, intelligent and revelatory. I was gobsmacked. I lavished my praise upon her. The student smiled, and went on to become a doctor.

 I guess the thing I had going for me in high-school back then that my talented, polymathic students, ones who are great at Math and Science and English, and make the All Canada Women’s Team in field hockey, do not possess is that I actually wanted to be a poet. I mean, I really wanted it. Bone-deep. I decided at sixteen. That’s it. It didn’t matter that I was not very good at it yet. I wanted to improve.

That ‘inner fire’, or pilot light, cannot be taught, but it helps if those around you do not try to snuff it out. My English teacher Mary Tetzner saw a creative spark in me and decided to help kindle it into something a little more.

What came next was an English degree at Guelph University where I met two important teachers: J.R. (Tim) Struthers and Donna Palmateer Penne. Tim was an expert on the Canadian short story, specifically the Montreal Storytellers, but we would talk about Canadian poetry too, often after class or in his office, and he took me at my word when I said I wanted to be a poet.

Donna taught a Canadian novels course, and I remember arguing the merits of Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey in that second-year University classroom. Her husband had seen me read my poems upstairs at the Albion Hotel in downtown Guelph at an Open Mic for Carousel magazine, and he told Donna he thought I would make it as a poet.

That encouragement kept me going until I arrived in Montreal to do a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Concordia University. The first poet I met there was a very young Carmine Starnino. The wife of Tim Struthers was a poet-professor Marianne Micros who had been my supervisor the year before when I undertook an independent reading course on all the novels and poetry collections of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Marianne’s daughter Eleni was also at Concordia, and we went out for drinks with her and her friend Carmine.

Even at twenty-one, Carmine Starnino already took himself very seriously as a poet. He had recently won the Irving Layton award for poetry, and I think Layton himself presented Carmine with the award at Concordia. A recent life-changing friendship between Carmine and the older Montreal poet Michael Harris earned Carmine a seat at a weekly poker game that included poets Harris, Eric Ormsby, and others.

I will say this for Carmine: as much as he has frustrated many, myself included, by the various things he has written in his essays about Canadian poetry over the last thirty years as a critic, he is a genuine person and a brilliant poet. He is the first person to tell you poetry is work. Writing essays is hard. He had strong tastes, even at twenty-one, and there is nothing he would not write in an essay that he would not say to your face upstairs at The Double-Deuce on St. Laurent where you could purchase 2-for-1 beers, or perhaps over strong coffee at breakfast somewhere on the Plateau.

Carmine and I were friendly, but not close friends. His literary star was already rising. He was the poetry editor of a magazine called Errata, and I think the possibility of his first book The New World was openly being discussed between himself and Michael Harris, the editor at Vehicule press. I had published some of my first poems in a chapbook called Hence with Carmine Starnino, Sina Queyras, Trish Salah, and Catherine Kidd, among others. But I was still floundering.

I had not yet discovered the poetry of Philip Levine or Larry Levis or Dave Smith or Kim Addonizio, poets that would shape my own writing for decades. The poets I was reading at the time were competent, but quaint, small-minded, local Montreal poets with slim books, and Carmine was quick to tell me so. Our friendship cooled.

I wrote a disastrous poetry collection for my Master’s thesis entitled In The Galleria of Missing Persons. You can Google it if you wish, but I would not waste your time. Unfortunately for me, as it does exist online, there is no possibility of paying someone to steal it from the Concordia library in the way Al Purdy was rumoured to pay people to steal his first book from various University archives. 

My teachers at Concordia, Mary di Michele and Gary Geddes, were kind, but honest. They quickly pointed out I was not yet ready to publish a first book. I left Montreal the day after defending my perfectly forgettable Master’s thesis and vowed to give up poetry. I packed up my car, my cat Gigi, and left Montreal for good.

I moved back to Stayner, Ontario, feeling imaginatively bankrupt, and did not write another poem for a whole year. I had no job. I had no poetic mentor which left me feeling adrift and rudderless. I ended up doing a one year teaching degree at Western University, this at the insistence of my mother, and then I promptly left for a year to teach English to kindergarten children in Seoul, South Korea.

“I have to feel like I’m learning from someone,” said the American poet C.K. Williams in the kitchen of his Princeton home in a documentary filmed a few years before his passing in 2015, “or else I feel bereft.” Williams mentions Emily Dickinson and Baudelaire in the film, and it was really there, watching that short documentary, that I started thinking seriously about the last fifteen years of my life and the poets that were important to me: Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Jack Gilbert, Dave Smith, and Rodney Jones.

There were more, certainly, but these poets were my greatest teachers.

I always thought you had to have a living person, or someone you knew personally, as a poetry mentor. But this is not true. Dead poets (and also those poets who are still alive, but who you will never meet) make excellent mentors if you learn how to actually read their work.

For instance, there are remarkable lessons to be learned about how to write poems in four octaves from Dave Smith. Larry Levis wrote in his poem “Those Graves In Rome”, “There are places where the eye can starve”, and I began to think differently of the Nail salons and Vape shops and closed store-fronts in strip malls in my own small city.

Jack Gilbert taught me how to compress images, and my own emotional life, into poems. Philip Levine taught me how to write long narrative poems with unflinching honesty about life’s drudgeries, but always buoyed by the restorative powers of art. Even the way Levine was able to shrug off damning negative criticism by some of America’s most celebrated poetry critics was a lesson. “Fuck Helen Vendler,” his poetry seemed to say. And so on.

Having a living poetry mentor you know personally, however, must be a great source of nourishment for a young poet. For instance, my friend Paul Vermeersch has always been close to Dennis Lee ever since Paul moved to Toronto twenty-five years ago. Other friends were nurtured early on by Constance and Leon Rooke in Guelph, or by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane out in Victoria, British Columbia. I never seemed cool enough, or talented enough, to warrant such preferential treatment.

Sure, I was at the top of my class during my undergraduate days at Guelph, but I was a middleweight when it came to attending Graduate school.

I learned after leaving Montreal, if I was to become a poet, I would have to do it on my own with very little help. I would have to read, and write, and fail, and hope to become a better poet just like everyone else. I had to rely on myself as no older distinguished poet was going to rescue me from a lifetime of hard work, or put me in a poetry anthology.

I had to prove myself. Over and over. I met other young poets in the ensuing years who were looking for short-cuts to the top of the remaindered heap of poetry books. They became axe-wielding poetry critics for the notoriety it carried, or they became “toadies” cozying up to these same critics, in the hopes their work might be briefly mentioned in glowing terms in an essay.

Who’s your daddy? I don’t have one.

I remember reading about the brilliant American poet and creative writing professor Theodore Roethke. He would mercilessly tease a particular student during class if he felt they were secretly hoping to be “patted” on the head, and told they were a good boy or girl. I think about my younger self, and that is exactly what I had wanted too.

I’m glad to have read the poetry and critical essays of Theodore Roethke, but I am equally relieved he was not one of my poetry professors. Philip Levine seems much more approachable. I mean, he was still teasing and unshakably honest, but there was supposedly a wealth of humour in his classes. “You write like the Duke of Windsor on Acid!” Larry Levis has written of Levine speaking about one particular student’s poem.

As a teacher at California State University in Fresno, Levine had many great American poets come out of his classroom. People like Larry Levis and David St. John and Dorianne Laux. Unlike Ivy League students who might cry during a poetry critique, Levine explained these kids were used to failure. They knew you had to work hard as nothing is ever handed to you.

I guess I learned this lesson on my own. Am I a little jealous I did not have a lasting friendship with an older poet to help me through all those difficult early years? Someone whose kitchen table I could sit down at, someone I could tell all my problems to, someone whose work would later be influenced by my own? Certainly, but I did also have teachers who told me the unshellacked truth when I needed it.

Writing poetry is hard. A sustained writing life? Almost impossible. Read widely, and your writing may get better with time. Those were the lessons thrust upon me.

My most important poetry mentors were poets I had never met, and most of whom are now all gone. Philip Levine, Larry Levis, W.S. Merwin, Lucia Perillo, C.D. Wright, Hayden Carruth, Jack Gilbert, Marvin Bell, Dean Young….the list goes on and on. Maybe this is the way it should be. Maybe there is something to be said for working hard at your own writing desk in complete obscurity, sending out poems once a month, learning to face rejection with a steely eye.

And who knows? It might have been worse for me had I met with some older, wiser poet at the bar every week who was just looking for acolytes, looking to turn me into a little them. I too have heard the stories from the whisper gallery of older poets who take sexual advantage of younger ones when all they were looking for was some friendly advice on how to put together a first book.

No, I guess I am happy with the literary friendships I have gained over the last thirty years, and I am grateful to my poetry teachers who put their time and trust in a green kid from the sticks, told me the truth about my strengths and weaknesses as a poet, and sent me on my way to either figure out how to write poetry on my own, or to quietly give up and become a chartered accountant.

I became both a poet and a teacher.

Forging friendships with poets who are also teachers, or deceased poets who live on now only in their books, can be a sacred thing for those of us who seek to write poetry. Either way, no one writes the poems for you.

Works Cited

Page, P.K.. Hologram. Brick Books, 1994.

Queyras, Sina. Barking & Biting: The Poetry of Sina Queyras. Edited by Erin Wunker, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016.

Smith, Dave. The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000. Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Starnino, Carmine. Dirty Words: Selected Poems, 1997-2016. Edited by Andrew Steeves and Allison LaSorda, Gaspereau Press Limited, Printers & Publishers, 2020.

Williams, C. K. Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.