The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

I teach writing to high school students which means showing kids not only how to construct an informal essay or poem or short story, but also showing them literary models–read this Raymond Carver story, kids or, oh man, check out this poem about “Scary Movies” by Kim Addonizio–exemplars that make an imaginative leap, or have a special individual way of looking at the world. However, the one thing I cannot do for students, though, is to make them, ask themselves seriously: who am I or why am I here? Why are any of us here? You know, the tough questions that begin to create a special ‘lens’ for an incipient poet to begin to see, to really see, everything joyful and awful about this world.

Let’s call this specialized lens ‘poetic attention’, and this may be the one thing that an MFA in Creative Writing really does give students. Not an an understanding of poetic forms, or how images work, but an invisible set of improved binoculars for each student that they can use to connect to their own need to create. Some poets find it on their own; others hone it over a few years completing an MFA.

When I was taking Writer’s Craft in grade thirteen in the 1980s, I was not the strongest writer in the class, but what separated me from my classmates who might write an essay just as strong as me, was a seeking to understand, a need to connect with writers, and more importantly, an intense inner compulsion to create. 

My first poems were painfully hauled up, were difficult to compose, and honestly, were not very good for years. And I think a big part of that was because I was a bit of a distracted kid: I played electric guitar; I worried about my social circle; and I think I was always looking for a “short-cut” to making worthwhile art and poems.   

That there is no short-cut is what I learned by doing a Masters in Creative Writing at Concordia in Montreal. I eventually dropped the electric guitar (I played it badly); and I stopped feeling sorry for myself that most of my writing practice was just staring at a white page, or the MS-Word screen, and not very much else was getting accomplished. I even began to embrace the staring and thinking and waiting. Especially the waiting. 

In an introduction to her book Forms of Poetic Attention, Lucy Alford writes, “It is true that poetic language is densely formed. But what is formed by and in poetic language is an event of attention generated in the acts of both reading and writing. I suggest that a poem might be better understood not simply as a gathering of composed formal features, but as an instrument for tuning and composing attention” (3). 

Maybe this is why some argue you can’t teach someone to be a great writer. Can you teach creative writing students to stretch attention? I think for students, the distractions are manifold: SnapChat, Messenger notifications, the climate crisis, self-sabotaging thoughts, roommates; whatever fresh hell the news dredges up on any particular day.

All I can say for me is I eventually began to gravitate towards those poets, and poems, that helped me to enter this contemplative mode, or liminal space where a poem might happen. I began to trawl or to scout my own small poetry book collection for a line, or an image, or even a fresh word that might trigger a poem. To quote Alford’s introduction again, “Stated simply, poetic attention is the attention produced, required, or activated by a poem. But, of course, it is not that simple…”(6). When I read this quote, I immediately think of a simple, yet complex poem I dearly love by Jack Gilbert called “Waiting and Finding”.

Waiting and Finding

While he was in kindergarten, everybody wanted to play
the tomtoms when it came time for that. You had to
run in order to get there first, and he would not.
So he always had a triangle. He does not remember
how they played the tom-toms, but he sees clearly
their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back
and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.
If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.
You mostly waited while the tambourines and tomtoms
went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all
triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.
Then it was tomtoms and waiting some more. But what
he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,
shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.
Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost
and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning
without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,
sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives
silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting
for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence
as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.

This poem by Jack Gilbert is about a bunch of things–loss and love, for instance–but I do think it illustrates what Alford is talking about in the introduction to her book which is poets make space, a little time within themselves, to attend to language and to feeling, knowing failure may well happen, but waiting, surrounded by silence, they may well write something meaningful too. At least, this is how I read the poem now years later. 

Even though I’m no longer a moody sullen teenager, I still feel the value of daydreaming at fifty-four, but I turn that dreamy state inward, so I am no longer daydreaming about being in an Indie band, or being an overnight poetic sensation, the self’s significance, but instead, I’m more daydreaming about attuning significance; i.e. finding the right words: mine, yours, ours, the world’s. 

It’s not so much the forms our poems inhabit, but the thinking and the waiting and the reading as part of our poetry practices, which create poetic attention, and I think poetic attention is the greatest indicator some young upstart poet will one day write a special book of poems, one someone else, maybe another young person, will attend to, and be changed by, one poet’s words teaching another poet’s eyes, and ears, and heart how to see.

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.