The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

So many Canadian poetry books are published every season, and most, after a reading, or maybe two, sit lonely on bookshelves waiting to be reread, if ever, by the person who bought it. But then there are some books that given their abundance of poetic tools and intense preoccupations–language, pop culture, decentering the self, the avant garde swerve, exquisite imagery and associations–feel still evergreen and rich every time they are read. And for me, one of those books is Kevin Connolly’s book Xiphoid Process.

When I was still writing mainly narrative, lyrical, self-centred poetry, and honestly, getting a little bored of it, Kevin Connolly’s book came out with Anansi Press in 2017. I was immediately taken with the poems; and the title Xiphoid Process (which is a strange title to be sure, referring to the pointy bottom end of your sternum) was also a little riddling. Kevin Connolly took nine years to write Xiphoid Process after his last book Revolver which was nominated for both the Trillium Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. I read Xiphoid Process, and reread it, and loved it, and read it some more, learning a lot about poetry along the way.

I think one of the things I really love about Connolly’s writing is how it flirts with surrealism–”the stars are little plastic cheese swords” or “Hungry as a dress caught on low branches”– and at the time I read the book, I was really struggling with my own identity, personal and poetic, as I was newly sober and single, so it was revivifying for me to read a collection that plundered language and pop culture allusions unabashedly, and really asked tough questions about what poetry is, and the self; and what is essentially unlearnable but learned through the lines and images one conjures forth. These poems resist closure but embrace surprise, the irrational, as Connolly writes “Thinking / can kill you dead. Though it may never, and surely hasn’t yet.” 

Andre Breton wrote, “put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur” in his The Manifesto of Surrealism and I hear the echo of this in Connolly ‘s poem “Were He Here” where the poet writes, “The murmur in the basement, tap /at the pane–is it always invention?”. For me, yes it is. Forgetting oneself is how to see the world anew. The rest of the stanza suggests this reading:

Absence of the forest, then its roaring
presence. Fish under the river, birds over.
Insects rowing it; the day’s blue face.
We are lost as they are found.

Some poetry books just find you when you most need them, and Xiphoid Process is one of those books for me. I learned that you could tell the truth of your life in a poem by adding a quick biographical detail, but then moving to a non sequitur historical fact or pop culture allusion, and then a deadly serious rhetorical question, and gift-wrap it all into meaning, or at least meaning in the sense of seeking to understand a world that does not give up its wisdom very easily. 

“Form is the shape of the selecting intelligence because time is running out” writes Dean Young in his book The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction. I am reminded of this in the opening of the title poem “Xiphoid Process” where Connolly lets his consciousness and imagination rip and tear at the fabric of meaning:

To hell with equanimity, I fucking hated turning fifty.
Longevity, morphology, incept dates. Not much I’ve done could be called
questionable and only acrobats and stuntmen switch horses mid-race.
Elizabethan jockeys had it rough. Not just the outfits,but all those 
awkward sidesaddle races. I’m not even sure I’m making that up.
Do you think they ever call single women “fillies” in Philadelphia?   
Female horses, even? It’s something else; I’d stake my cheese on it.
But thoroughbreds are for royal birthdays,the coffee is for closers,
and hard drugs are for the bartenders and the bartenders’ friends.
There’s no Coast of Nebraska, but I’ve seen a small tide of snow geese
wash up over an I-80 overpass near Ogallala with my own eyes.
Joseph Conrad made more eye contact than anyone in human  history.
Said people’s personalities leapt out at him “like tigers.”
How then to explain that last confused third of Heart of Darkness?    

Reading this poem again years after first reading it, I see all kinds of things–the play of high and low culture, the puns, the asides, the universal short aphoristic statements–all of which have found their way into my own poetry, and liberated my own imagination.

I’m not really one for erasure poetry, or redactive poetry investigations, which probably says more about my poetry education, these forms not really being a thing when I was in my Twenties as the kids say, but there is always an exception to the rule and Connolly’s redaction of Whitman’s Song of Myself in his poem “Song” has real energy and sparks like in lines, “I am of old stuff, I course with lakes, bays. Learner, prisoner / fancy-man: moth and darks suns. Palpably impalpable.”    

However, the one poem I probably reread the most from “Xiphoid Process” and the one I learned the most from would be “Love Removal Machine”. I love the allusion to the 80’s Cult Classic hit in the title, the wonderfully aphoristic lines, the references to the golden age of cinema, the deadpan rhetorical question, it’s all here to be found:

The day’s a crown we’d all want to wear, yet
few silent stars survived the transition to talkies.
Johnny Weissmuller, as per his dying wish, was
counted out with three signature Tarzan yells.
The lord of bad choices made seventy-nine whereas second wife, Lupe Vélez,
(Mexican Spitfire) rode out a cloud of Seconal at thirty-eight.
Many felt that was Gary Cooper’s fault. Maybe it was.
In Keanu Reeves’ return to the stage in Winnipeg, as Hamlet
no less, the audience broke into spontaneous laughter
on the line: “My excellent good friends!”
Life’s a bad writer. Ask the lead singers of
passable hair bands now working shifts as greeters
while Rush reigns as mid-America’s mid-market monsters.
Great art demands a great audience. Frye boots and mullets,
see-through net vests and poets’ blouses—you can guess
where things went awry with this particular cult.
Much like this crowned day; its worry it won’t pass for normal.
Normal meaning the mean, mean meaning what it usually does.
The world drags you down. Still, there are doves, gold sounds,
bees, having trouble with their direction. Wild flower, I love
you every hour. Isn’t everything alive a kind of come-on?
Shadows of geese, gulls, the biggest asteroids rolling
over your shoulders as you ride the August light.
Doorbell’s been disabled, screen door latched, still you’d
swear each morning you were roused by knocking.
The Witnesses never ask for shit, but look at them—
the script, the outfits—they’re selling something.
So many different ways of doing, maybe the only sure
thing is the best bad guitar solo in arena rock history.
Check the bootlegs: that dude never does it any better.

Common sense holds you can’t doubt you’re doubting.
But find me anything interesting that’s not done at least that.

I love this poem every hour I read it. And I mean that. It was a revelation to me, and opened the door to reading Dean Young, and other poets whose work, until then, I had always found intentionally obfuscating, and for a lack of a better word, “busy”. 

Meaning, or stroking your synapses, your poems,  in conventional ways does and will wear you down eventually. The poet Connolly seems to be having a lot of fun in this poem, and at the time, that was not a word I would have associated with the writing of poems. Sure, there is a world weariness, too, in the lines but also hope, like “The world drags you down. Still, there are doves, gold sounds, / bees, having trouble with their direction. Wild flower, I love / you every hour. Isn’t everything alive a kind of come-on?””

The answer is yes. Life is a flirtation with the earth, lest we forget. There is a real electrical charge in Kevin Connolly’s flood of details, and a real sincerity to represent thinking in all its messy glory and mash-notes, not only in this poem but in this book. I love the poetry collection Xiphoid Process, for not only what it says, but what it tries to say, and I think Connolly’s collection deserves a home on every serious Canadian poet’s bookshelf.

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.