The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

Contemporary Canadian poetry is a merry-go-round of eclecticism in terms of form and style, and no one well-worn principle, or guiding theory, OG school of poetry or radical “new” approach, can pin-the-tail on that particular donkey or grizzly bear. 

What is the voice of Canadian poetry? Well, it is voices. What about form? Does writing a villanelle make you a great poet? Well, no, of course not. Is free-verse lyric poetry a circling drain of mediocrity? Well, no, that is not true neither. 

The truth is some poets who write formally are bombastic, exciting voices (I’m thinking of Carmine Starnino and Alexandra Oliver); while other yawning formal poets simply lump words and subjects into over-tightened, boring rhymes. Other poets can pack an emotional wallop and winnow so much life experience into a short lyric poem of less than twelve lines (ahem, Ricardo Sternberg or Michael Prior), and then there are other poets who stylistically ground their poems in the mantra “small is beautiful”, but there is nothing intellectually, or sensefully, surprising about their poems other than a wistful nod to nostalgia. 

As you can imagine, poetry criticism in Canada is therefore difficult to talk about when: 1) literally anything goes in Canadian poetry (cinquains, erasure, surrealism, the short lyric, idiomatic versus elevated speech, etc.) and 2) those brave enough to be poetry critics speak from their own particular biases, and experience, which involves where they come from, where they were educated, what poems/poets are important to them, their own insecurities, etc. 

I guess what I’m saying is that what makes one book of poems better than another book of poems is a fraught topic, and really hard to talk about, and this is perhaps why there are so few poetry reviewers in Canada where all approaches, all styles, are celebrated equally. Fawning praise is the norm. We have little appetite for critical evaluative reviews. Rarely are the best books of the year up for major poetry awards–and yes, it is nice to give awards to young people finding their way, but this sort of relativism leaves cultural critics and veteran poets feeling left out in the cold. 

Why even attempt to write evaluative poetry criticism in such a tightly-knit writing community where everyone, like it or not, is thrown into the same “bathwater” together?

For me, I’m not so stupid to get caught up in a war of who is better, Don McKay or Dionne Brand or Mary Dalton? Such silly online flame wars reduce the multiplexity of Canadian poetry, which is why I don’t pick Patrick Lane over Peter Van Toorn (although I might write an essay about why Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea is a masterpiece, I am just as apt to cozy up with Patrick Lane’s Winter for a “brain workout” reread).

To me, style trumps form anyways. You wrote a book of sonnets? Bully for you. Oh, you wrote an entire book of narrative poems tricked out in tercets in the “voice” of the sea captain Robert Fitzroy who led Charles Darwin around the Galapagos islands? Well, good for you, too, but let’s hope there is also a sprinkling of magic–or a manifestation of your personal style–which makes your writing your own and unique and special, amidst all the historical details. This is to say form alone does not make poetry.

In his 1975 essay “The Question of Poetic Form”, Hayden Carruth observes, “Form has meant the poem’s outer, observable, imitable, and more or less static materiality; style has meant its inner quality, essentially hidden and unanalyzable, the properties that bind and move and individuate.” In the same essay, Carruth says, “form is the poem… …style is the property of a poem that expresses the poet’s personality… …we know a style when we see it, we recognize it and are attracted or repelled by it” (54).  Carruth likes poems that marry form and style– the wholeness of a poem.

In my own writing about poetry, and in my poetry reviews, I often conflate a poet’s style with“voice” which maybe is imprecise, but I am enough of an imprecise Romantic critic to agree with Carruth that form is outwardly imitable, while the “voice” or style or essence which animates a poem is not a rhyme scheme – it is an individual personality that after experience and contemplation hopefully has something vast and “special” to share with others. I like and am attracted to such poets. Poets like Mark Strand, Dean Young, Kayla Czaga, Tim Bowling, Kim Addonizio, Ellen Bass, Diane Seuss, Russell Thornton, Bob Hicok. Poets whose style is immediately recognizable and a gift. 

You can talk about diction, syntax, imagery, sound, but ultimately what makes one person’s style better than another person’s is the force of their personality– an intense inner need to communicate something of utmost importance– and that is hard to analyze.

When I was first starting out twenty five years ago, there were the lyric narrative poets versus the more cosmopolitan formalists in Canada: ideological camps that seem quaint in hindsight. Now we celebrate diverse, under-represented voices in Canadian poetry with Indigenous and Queer and Bipoc poets leading the charge, but I worry that what we hold good and special about Canadian poetry solely depends now on our culture, and our own poetic identity, or what MFA program we graduated from.

I’m probably not articulating this well, and let me just say I think the most interesting poetry being written in North America are from Queer and Bipoc poets. I would nominate Terence Hayes as the “best of the best’ in terms of style and innovation, and I both love and envy the poetry of Ocean Vuong and Alex Dmitrov. But I do think we can hold open writing spaces and opportunities for under-represented voices in this country, while also not sinking so far into relativistic thinking that we no longer write critical essays or reviews saying this poet’s style is more interesting than others. I believe in equity in poetry, but I also believe in evaluative criticism. Can the two co-exist? I hope so.

So going back to the marriage of form and style, the wholeness of a poem, how do we point out what is terrific about contemporary Canadian poetry, raising up some terrific voices, while excluding others? Well, you just can’t. Any attempt to “fence-in” what is happening in Canadian poetry will always be an approximation (as any poem is an approximation of what is wondrous and special about life’s mysteries). Most Canadian poetry anthologies are doomed by outrage hunters asking why X was not included? I often think of the current discourse about Canadian poetry as a picnic where everyone brought knives, and no one thought of any food.    

In terms of my own brief survey of Canadian poets, there will be no experimental or erasure poets which is a personal bias, I know, and I am good friends with some very smartish people in Canada which can talk about erasure poetry at length, but alas, poetry criticism, like poetry, is amalgam of one’s own thinking, which is also an amalgam of one’s own taste and education and experiences, so therefore no erasure poetry is on my list (note: I find erasure formally interesting, but as a style flattening). 

Still, I will try to give a credible cross-section of working Canadian poets that marry form and style brilliantly in case I am ever abducted by aliens, and forced to write a dissertation on the state of contemporary Canadian poetry.

For instance, if I was going to talk about the most formally interesting poets in Canada, I might mention Carmine Starnino’s revivifying “Worst Case Scenario” sonnets that bustle with energy and idioms and surprising thoughts like “How To Escape From A Car Hanging Over The Edge Of A Cliff”, or his later poem “Pugnax Gives Notice” which is a master class in not just the dramatic monologue, or idiosyncratic diction “Pugnax is a real fierceosaurus”, but in syllabics. 

However, I might also just as easily talk about Rhea Tregebov’s latest collection, Talking To Strangers, which inhabits so many forms like quatrains and tercets and the villanelle, but the voice or inhabiting consciousness of the poet always feels like she is confiding in the reader, while the poems are scaffolding myriad thoughts, connecting the ”seen” to larger societal problems like war, or questions of consent. 

And then, of course, there are the poems of Ricardo Sternberg who compacts meaning and allusions and evocative lyricism into tightly controlled short-lined poems, or D.A. Lockhart’s long winding, loosely syllabic lines in his book Commonwealth, or how about Matthew Tierney’s pared down philosophical sonnets in Lossless?

As for the most interesting stylists in Canada, I would look no further than Tolu  Oloruntuba’s Unravel with its wealth of wordplay and subject matter, its blending of personal identity with folklore and allusions. Or Kayla Czaga’s Midway with its confident, confiding voice that, at once, conjures up many pop culture references while also simultaneously dropping perfect, surprising metaphors that make a hair brush “a mostly eaten cone of cotton candy” or a “microphone generating its own static.” 

 I also like Russell Thornton’s The White Light of Tomorrow with its authorial voice that reads like a home-grown Cesare Pavese, or Philip Levine, and then of course, there are the stripped-down intellectual subtleties of Jim Johnstone and Matt Rader, the surreal fabulism of Alice Burdick and Stuart Ross. Who else? Who else?

Honestly, there is a whole plethora of people who deserve acknowledgement, people like Karen Solie and David O’Meara and Erin Moure and Sina Queyras, poets who marry form and style brilliantly in the poems and books they write, but still, I would be leaving people out. There is no one way to look at Canadian poetry, even if you are appraising it from a place of knowledge.

I guess I am with Hayden Carruth in the belief that, “what anyone says about poetry, provided it be grounded in knowledge, is as true as what anyone else might say, though the two sayings utterly conflict”(52). There are mediocre formalists just as their mediocre lyric poets. You are not going to sway me to like Peter Van Toorn anymore than Patrick Lane as I like them for different reasons.  

What I do not like, however, is effusive, “gushy” reviewers simply praising a book or a poet without moving beyond the veneer of the shiny and “the new”, without talking about its form or style in-depth; how it fits into a particular poetic tradition; how it reminds you of something you read in an essay twenty years ago. 

Honestly, if you cannot write a 600+ word review on a poetry collection, looking at its observable forms and giving a reader a sense of the poet’s unique style – “the properties that bind and move and individate” as Carruth says–I’m probably not going to enjoy it very much. 

If a poetry book is just giving you “vibes,” I’m not interested. Am I poking the relativist Grizzly bear by saying so? Probably.

I believe in the wholeness of a poem. Form married to style married to knowledge. To do that well takes years, and sometimes a few books first, which is why I rarely review debut poetry books unless I see a young poet’s promise, or if a book’s style does, in fact, really speak to me, or teaches me something new.  But the book and the poems have to do it on their own. I don’t want to necessarily hear what a poet says about their book. I want to hear what the book says for itself.  

Have I solved the problem of Canadian poetry criticism by writing about it? Have I lassoed the Zeitgeist? Absolutely not, but hopefully I have made a case for writing intelligent poetry reviews, imbued by knowledge and life experience, reviews which are a contrast to babbling praise or back-copy bumf, reviews that make distinctions–this particular poetry collection stands perhaps taller than other poetry collections – for clear reasons.

I think it is fine to acknowledge the relativism of our age, but simultaneously, I think there is a gold standard amid the multiplicity of poetic forms, conventions, and styles that compose Canadian poetry. Some poets are inimitable.

What is Canadian poetry? For me, it is  form and style and linguistic sprezzatura and, hopefully, a door when opened which helps us to understand the great mystery of why we are here. Everything else is just a Kodak moment or mere imitation. 

“Poetry is where you find it”(51), says Carruth. To that, I say go find it, but also be brave enough to write about why it is special, too.

_______________________________________________________________

Carruth, Hayden. “The Question of Poetic Form” in Claims for Poetry. Edited by Donald Hall, University of Michigan Press, 1982.

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.