The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

The iconic Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen once said, “Poets are magicians without quick wrists”, and after almost forty years of trying, failing, trying again, and sometimes successfully writing poems, I think I understand what she means. When a poet is in a creative state of “flow”, you feel like anything can happen in a poem. From nothingness, comes the rush of images, and words, and lines. But is it merely a trick?

Well, yes and no. Like magicians, poets need to practice daily. This requires studying poets who came before, untethering your expectations, and entering the arena of the Imagination with little protective armour and only a pen to hold in front of you. Poems fountain up from personal experiences, or lived life, but they also can be conjured from a well-turned image, or from just courageously leaping off into the dark with nothing to hold onto except your poetic influences, and a kind of mad hope that your hands will find something to hold onto when you reach the other side. If there is another side.

I always love that term ‘Imposter Syndrome’ which a poet feels when they are cornered at a cocktail party, and someone asks them what they do. Poets are booksellers, and editors, and scientists, and every other occupation imaginable. When asked what I do, I always say I teach high-school English, and I write books of poetry. In that order.

I always feel a “twinge” of imposter syndrome when I say that last part. The person asking the questions usually follows it up with another, more withering question: “Are you self published?” which only exacerbates the feeling.

I politely say I am not, and then, instead of feeling like an imposter, I suddenly feel more like a monkey in a cage. “Oh look honey! It’s a monkey in a cage. How cute. How strange. How perfectly forgettable.”

Luckily, however, poets do not write poems to make small talk at cocktail parties. And the best antidote to imposter syndrome is to not think about yourself in terms of being a poet. Or even as oneself. Think of the poems first.

When I am writing poems, I am the Emperor of the Unwritten Page. I might read a little of my favourite poets beforehand. I might look out the window at around six AM in the morning. I might try out a first line, or a potential title, or think of an image, or just lean really deeply into a subject, or an influence, and see where it takes me.

That is how poetry works. And when it works, it does feel like you have performed a magic trick. You then hope others will enjoy the illusion you have created, and not look too carefully for “the strings”, or the prestidigitation.

Poetry really is a kind of ‘hocus pocus gnosis’ (to steal a phrase from Dean Young) which is what I think of when Gwendolyn MacEwen’s phrase “Poets are magicians without quick wrists” enters my particular mindset. Poetry is magic, and it is mischief. It shines a light on the ordinary and the extraordinary equally. But it does not happen “accidentally” without a lot of technical practice.

Like magicians, poets have to learn their craft, and this unfortunately takes many years of failure, experimentation, and discovery. Poets need to figure out how words and sentences dovetail, how to trim the threads from their enjambments; how to even smash images together, like flint and steel, to see, if anything, sparks into flame, or new meaning.

But once you have become adept at the sleight of hand, the technical aspects of poetry, that is the exact time to let the poems take over. This too is a lesson one learns in one’s own time.

For me, I am most happy when I am discovering something new in language, or about the ‘self’, or about the unfinished world I am writing about. At those times, I feel I am participating in the grand community of poets that came before me, and will undoubtedly come after me. And if I cannot add a whole book, or even a chapter to the canon of Canadian poetry, it is enough that I add a page. One with funny revelations in the margins.

Writing poetry for me is not listening to ‘hidden music’. It’s more like performing a magic trick I did not know I could do. Until, of course, I somehow did it. So I make sure to take a bow, even if there is no applause, even if people ask me uncomfortable questions at cocktail parties. But unlike magicians, the magic act cannot be repeated.

The real trick for poets is not repeating the trick. It is baiting the nothingness until something new appears on stage, over and over, so that abracadabra, presto change-oh!, if not others, at least you yourself are changed.