The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

I’ve been a fan of Chris Hutchinson’s poetry for twenty five years so I was excited when my Can-Po antennae pinged that a new book of his poems was coming out this Spring with Palimpsest Press called Lost Signal.  In Lost Signal, Hutchinson seems to be communicating that so much agitprop noise and blather is given bandwidth nowadays, that it is hard to ‘zero in’ on the information humans need to meet the historical moment given that every summer parts of North America are on fire, or our social media feeds are tailored to make us feel grotty about others who don’t think like us, but Hutchinson is not just twisting knobs on the various humanitarian and environmental crises we face in this collection, but on language itself, as the title poem foregrounding the book says:

Tonight, I’m on a train
of thought that follows a famous river
into this feeling of mirrors and unread books

into twilight and old usages.
You’re just radio waves.
I’m the touch of a touchscreen

away.

I like the idea of a poet only being “a touchscreen away”, but how to amplify the good, the unique, the home-brewed critical perspective when so much AI slop and bot farms and automated systems of thought over-run our lives? I guess you move the dial, and keep amplifying nature, our connection to it; you turn up the gain on an individual’s perceptions, on the surprises and delights of language which can be found in a “sunflower’s star power / and reckless ambition.” 

But the poet Hutchinson also emphasizes how difficult it is to attune oneself to this type of thinking in a sea of Starlink contracts and internet chatter, when the imagination itself is a multi-frequency thing, so how does art, poetry, impose order on a world, on Nature itself, when so much digital noise gums up the feed? 

Hutchinson riffs on Wallace Steven’s iconic poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” in a poem entitled “Waving At The Shores of Key West”: 

But let’s think back before
this poem — how the urtext
of the calm, uninjured page resisted
every bullet, every point, every food-for-thought chestnut

then marrying off its offspring
then leasing out its depths
to your interplay of light, silence
and glitchy eellike shadows.

Then what? And who am I to say?
And aren’t we all just shipwrecked here
in the same squelchy, pedestrian
dream?

Yes, we are all trying to make sense of the ‘squelch’ of reality, a tall order for any poet, a human endeavour that has never been more fraught given the almost limitless bandwidth of misinformation at our fingertips, but at least we are together the poem seems to be saying.

Part of Hutchinson’s strategy with language and imagery in this book is to go beyond the merely ornamental, the purely mimetic, as he writes about, “dropping the planet-sized / skulls we are trying / to juggle in our sleep”  or says “time to light the black candle / of this panopticon tower, make it blaze/ like lady liberty’s torch” suggesting night is a prison, but who exactly is surveilling us? Ourselves? This is to say the poems in Lost Signal are demanding, and don’t lend themselves to light reading, but who says poetry should be easy? The poet Hutchinson keeps shifting channels and perspectives, showcasing both the outlandish and the familiar, to illustrate poetry is, itself, a multi-bandwidth antenna. The human mind an imagination filter.

There are parts of Lost Signal that are quite good silly fun, too, like the poem “The Dyslexic Skwriter”which is a delicious idea worthy of James Tate, and these lines in particular made me smile:

 Yes, the skywriter thinks, maybe
he is a fly-by-night hero of sorts — albeit
inverted and looking backwards. Maybe in a previous life
he was unmarried, free of Earth’s surly grammars
and accountable to no one — a child
born of no parents, a godlike

daredevil poet of the skies!

Still, this is a collection about meaning and perception, the idea of order and the nature of reality, the lost signals of language and the things words represent, as Hutchinson writes in “Carrying On, Carrying Over”:

 Listen, when I say river
the meaning of a river
is what I mean

Hutchinson takes up this theme again in another poem “Fire, Honey, Ice”, perhaps my very favourite poem from the whole collection, which is about beekeeping, but also about meaning-making and a kind of Worldmind, or collective human unconscious, that allows us to understand each other:

 Some say the world will end in fire,
   Some say in ice.
    — Robert Frost

Climbing through
frozen mists, the sun, at its zenith
is the colour of a brimstone moth, itself
the colour of honey made from bees sated
on clover. Because nothing goes on
unaffected, all my mentors are dead
or gone to beekeeping. In their apiaries
they soothe their hives with the white incense
of burning cedar chips. They puff their bellows
and genuflect beneath all the ways the sun
with its zillion tongues of honey
with its zillion fiery wings
hates hyperbole. No word ever says
exactly what it means, which is why
my mentors prefer the poetry
of honeybees. They know hive
can also mean rash, which has nothing to do
with the collective mind, unless we’re talking
irrational urges — not inside
the tangible world (which includes
the sweetly aromatic smoke of the dead)
but within these hot flickers of icy hate
that can sting, or give life
like the word love that lives
in clover.

I love the word-play in these lines, the idea of the colour of the sun being the same colour of a brim-stone moth, or honey, and that words are mere representations that will never adequately represent the poetry of millions of honeybees birthed daily. 

Chris Hutchinson’s Lost Signal out this Spring with Palimpsest Press is a kind of radio scanner that instead of picking up pre-selected frequencies of thought, goes in search of what lies beneath words, the actual things, to root out “Each image transfixed / inside the idea of an image.” I really enjoyed this poetry collection with its rich tapestry of thought and its attempt to impose, if not order, per se, to amplify a pirate radio signal inside all of us uplifting the human heart and the active mind and the endless imagination.

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.