The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

The American poet Kim Addonizio has stated in her terrific book of essays and poetry prompts Ordinary Genius, “We humans are an addictive species…. ….There’s a glamour and romance associated with addiction, especially with regard to artists. It makes for drama. To tell the truth of an addiction requires looking hard, at its appeal and also at its dark side.”

Glamour and romance? When I first started drinking at fifteen, I’m not sure I saw it as glamorous in the sense of drinking being a luxury as I was drinking Molson Export, but I did find drinking beer out of stubby bottles alluring, especially captivating, like I was doing something I should not be doing, and that I knew was not good for me.

I did it anyways. For decades.

The first time I realized I had a drinking problem I was probably thirty. I stopped drinking for three months and then went and did some intensive therapy. I thought I could talk and think my way out of being an alcoholic. In retrospect, it’s a little funny. Except I continued to drink for fourteen more years, and in that period hurt friends, and family, and certainly myself. So why do people, especially artists and poets, keep doing what they know is ultimately not good for them?

I think there is an unspoken mantra amongst poets to Write Hard, Drink Hard, meaning push yourself to extremes, create drama and tension in your life, translate that hard-scrabble wall or edge, the one that exists between yourself and the “normies” who have one glass of wine and go home, into art. This is, of course, all poppycock. Drinking never turned the metaphor dial on the poetry Aha! Machine all the way up. In fact, it turns it down. Way down.

But like an idiot, I believed I could keep it under control if I only I could self-regulate by buying only the 3 or 4 cans of beers I was going to imbibe that night, and no more than that. Sigh. The attempt to self-regulate really only slows down the progress of the addiction, so yes I was only having a bad night a few times a year, but this too slowly became once every few months, and then became a monthly occurrence. I even wrote this poem in my second book of poems The Cold Panes of Surfaces which really tells on myself:

Schooner

How little we knew about the world when the three of us,
Kyle, Jeff, and I, carefully loaded our small aluminum boat 
with food, sleeping bags, a tent, a pack of Players purchased 
from a pool-hall cigarette machine, and our prized possession
twenty-four bottles of Schooner. Schooner was a man’s beer, 
and though we were only fourteen, had never dibble-dabbled 
with drinking before, not really, we knew it was the Legion
special in town, and that men drank it, by the sheer number
of empties stacked behind that building. Once after getting
permission from our parents to go camping, we launched
our boat and gunned out across the whiskey-coloured lake.  
A small outboard motor passing our hull from wave to wave. 
But how were we to know what was waiting for us on that 
other shore? We did not know the dark places we were going,
how a boy’s first taste of beer takes the measure of all that 
he has known, dividing him into two persons, so he is both 
that boy, but also the shadow of a man who, in later years, 
would spend nights drinking alone in his house trying to fill 
the cups of his own emptiness.  We knew none such dangers
as we found our camp-site, pitched our tent, gathered firewood, 
waited for the dark to descend, and the day-blind stars to hang
their garlands of light across the night skies.  We sat hunched 
over a fire, watching images bloom in the slow sigh of flames
and told stories of the girls we had possessed.  We who had not 
lived long enough to possess anything yet, and took hard swigs
of beer until, one by one, bottles emptied, and words became
numinous.  Dimension shifted during our boasting, and night 
closed around the slow orbit of our talk. Everything took on 
a religious glow as we sat beneath the moon and stunted pines,
batting at insects and at smoke with our hands, feeling flesh
and spirit seperating, through the act of drinking six Schooners
until the thuggish weight of our bodies was too much to bear, 
until even the stars swirling, imperishably cold, above our heads 
fell into the lake, and we felt ourselves emptying out, vomiting 
in that church we had made of a wilderness.  And when we 
awoke the next morning, feeling skull-sore and stomach-sick, 
hang-overs mestastazing in sun-light, we felt somehow separated 
from the lives we had lived before, as if we were three scarecrows 
standing along the road to some private hell our previous selves 
had not come back from, for already it was too late. Aleady
we could feel, deep inside us, that division the previous night 
had made, that emptiness no amount of drinking ever fills, 
and those men we so desperately wanted to be, breathing.

I drank for eight more years after writing this poem, and mainly, because I was so embarrassed to be an alcoholic, and my Major Depressive brain, riddled with generalized anxiety disorder, was telling me I would not survive the particular stresses of my life and my work without self-medicating and self-soothing with alcohol. I am also an atheist so I was never going to embrace the idea of a higher power, any higher power, other than poetry. Poetry was my altar.  

People drink too much because of family trauma, financial insecurity, social anxieties, really for a whole host of reasons. And for poets and artists, it is no different. I know poets I really looked up to like John Newlove and Patrick Lane who also wrote about the profound effect alcoholism had on their lives, and there are many of my own friends who came to the same realization later in life as me that alcohol was not simply “dampening” their creative flow, but damaging their relationships with people and the world at large.

Then last weekend, I heard a personal essay of mine called “Black Hammers Falling” won in the category of personal journalism at the National Media Awards in Toronto. Originally published in The New Quarterly, “Black Hammers Falling”  is an essay about alcoholism and rehab and ultimately personal recovery. I did not go to the Gala event because I really believed I would not win given the stiff competition. To have won a National award for this essay, in particular, is gratifying because it was so hard to write about: the loss of my marriage, my suicidal ideation, my relapses. The essay is also going to appear in Best Canadian Essays 2026 selected by editor Brian Bethune.

I’ve always said alcoholism is a sing-a-long in Hell. To write about addiction well takes time and an imaginary gleaming microscope that looks not just at the addiction itself, the strange brain activity that says yes, I should keep doing this thing which hurts me time and time again, but also at yourself for addiction, really, speaks to you with your own inner voice, and the only thing I have found that quiets that voice is talking aloud or writing about what it is saying to you. That’s the big part of recovery. Talking about it aloud. Writing it down. Being honest about its hold over you. And of course, abstinence. 

Recovery
 
When hope is decommissioned, when optimism
is trapped in an underwater submersible, the air
running out—when every dream gets mugged
in the dark alleyways of fatalism, you have to
tame the wolves, and try to be yourself. Forget
you are a creature made of blood and chemicals
and trauma for a minute and ask, will a drink
make me take off this black raincoat? To put
it another way, do you want the oxygen mask
or the isolation room with its one silver mirror,
terrible wine, and occasional blackouts? You’re
worthless or wonderful and recovery is a lifetime
portage carrying a heavy canoe of regrets between
where you have been and where you are going.
There are no prizes or lobster dinners for not
drinking. Just a candy dish full of AA chips,
nights perfumed by self-respect. The secret
to not drinking is not drinking, enjoying
the occasional piece of pie, and remembering
a phantasmagoria of bad nights. I no longer
crave a pint of trouble, a glass carafe brimming
with crimson pain. Each new day is a striving,
falling down, then jumping back up, hurrying
towards tomorrow’s neon pink sign blinking,
not "Exit”, but “Hope’s Riches Await….”

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.