The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

Is April the cruelest month as T.S. Eliot once lamented? Not if you have had to shovel heavy snow in the “Long Dark” of a Canadian Winter, it isn’t.

I’m not a fan of January, or seasonal affective disorder, but with April just around the corner, I thought I would rouse myself to write something about the need for a National Poetry Month which seems more important than ever, given that our neighbours are now eyeing Canada’s precious resources, and their President is now openly defying the courts and the rule of law which can only lead to a constitutional crisis.

Do we need a National Poetry Month in Canada? Well, no, but it sure is fun if we stop eye-rolling at the ‘Poem A Day”, or weekly poetry prompts, or the ‘hot takes’ on whether Poetry is Dead (full disclosure: it isn’t), and just take a couple of weeks to think about why we started writing anyways. 

For me, it started with Al Purdy. Yes, that Al Purdy. The one with yellow flowers in his beer. I grew up in Bancroft, ON, which is almost a straight line north of Belleville so when my English teacher put on a NFB film about Purdy where he read his poem “The Country North of Belleville”, I was transported away from the fuggy-smelling, grade 11 English portable I was sitting in back to the land of my childhood. Somewhere I had not been for years. 

I could picture the stone fences and skeletal trees marking the divisions of land. I could see the huge boulders sitting in the middle of farm fields. I reimagined the swamps and the lakes and the shoulders of the Canadian Shield jutting out on either side of highways as I took a school bus to school.

Childhood is a land of exile. It is the Edenic place. You can never go back. Except you can in a poem which is what I discovered listening to Al Purdy read “The Country North of Belleville”. That was it for me. I was hooked on the imagery, and the time-traveling, and the Great Voice that stirs from somewhere deep within us.

So when April wakes up, and Poetry Month slowly lumbers towards us, this is what I think about. Al Purdy, and then later, Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood who I found in my small country high-school library; and then Alden Nowlan and Eli Mandel and Gwendolyn MacEwen: and then Patrick Lane: and then the Americans Philip Levine and Larry Levis, Mark Strand and Jack Gilbert. And so on.

When I read poems, I don’t just ‘break into blossom’ as James Wright wrote. I jail-break into memory, into Time itself, into the creative impulse which from all poems flow. 

No one gives you a golden pen to write, but if you listen, and you read poetry–lots and lots of poetry–you are given the tools to make a creative life writing poems. You can build your own practice. Your own imaginative poetic voice. That is,  if you can steel yourself against the steady stream of rejections sure to follow, and the sometimes years of failure, and the constant measuring yourself against the Greats. Write anyways, the voice whispers. 

And maybe that is the lesson of Poetry Month. To understand why we write. Where do the poems come from? They come from where we have been and where we are going. They come from me, and you, and those whose creative ambition was not snuffed out by poverty, or the careless word of another, or encroaching family and financial responsibilities, or the endless other reasons that prevent talented poets from continuing to write.

This is what I’m thinking about as April rolls around soon, and everyone is going to raise their little Poetry flags together, and wave them for a few weeks in the air. 

I know poets who literally want to shut themselves in doors, or go off the grid, for the whole month of April because of the sheer amount of bad poetry, or humble-bragging self-promotion, or social conformity they associate with April, and that they find so culturally embarrassing. To this, I say beauty is embarrassing. Poetry unzippers all of our carefully curated online personas, and finds us hiding inside: just these little guys who so desperately want to believe in something more than rent, stock markets, job promotions and Costco. We want to believe the Great Voice within us will find us, and like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, that this voice will finally make us real to ourselves. 

Here at the Wood-Lot, we are celebrating April Poetry Month with a host of new poetry reviews of Spring 2025 Canadian poetry collections, a few feature essays, a fun interview with rob mclennan, and if anyone else would like to submit a review of a new poetry collection (we don’t review chapbooks!) or a personal essay, just reach out.

Poetry Month is a time to celebrate what has been written, but also why we write. Those reasons are different as each individual is different. Let’s share those differences.

Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.