The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

Poetry used to be a specialized type of language quite easy to tell apart from prose, mainly because of its mnemonic effects–end rhyme, metrical patterns, alliteration, etc.–which poets used to keep a poem kindled and alive in a reader’s memories. This aided in the recitation of poetry which used to be very popular with the general populace, and with my own sadistic grade school teachers (who made me recite Robert Frost’s “The Mending Wall” in the 1970s in front of my class); and as poetry is the oldest, most permanent universal human art form we have, this is really no surprise. 

But as poetry became less of a popular medium of entertainment in the last fifty years–a medium once regularly heard on popular public radio broadcasts and an art form that used to be discussed seriously in the early years of CBC television–what makes “a poem” a poem, and not simply prose can be a difficult thing to nail down in an essay on craft. How is a prose poem any different than prose?, some like to argue, endlessly. 

The answer is usually to do with the intensity of thought and feeling; the concentration of sounds and images. Dana Gioia in his essay “Can Poetry Matter” paraphrases Pound and reminds us poetry, “is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning”, and I fervently believe this, but in recent decades, we have moved away from the aesthetic pleasures of a poem, reading it aloud, and placed our focus on poetic analysis, especially of lyric confessionalism–one person talking to another person–rather than dusty old fashioned poetic forms, and bombastic verse.

I’m sort of okay with this–as both a poet and an appreciative reader of poets like Jack Gilbert and Donald Hall and Anne Sexton who wrote brilliantly in this mode–but as society moved further away from the enjoyment of poetry on radio to the enjoyment of other media, movies and television sitcoms and paperback beach reads and now online “reels”, poetry has come to be a specialized language mainly taught and heard on university and college campuses. 

It is its own subculture; one with its own set of beliefs and norms and interests. An audience of the few rather than the many.

One of these core beliefs is that the connection between poet and reader is sacrosanct trumping aesthetic concerns, i.e. the best words in the best order. This is not to say there is not language “charged with meaning” in today’s poetry, but still, the epic poems and odes and villanelles and racy ballads have been mostly replaced by a kind of lyric directness, or as Dana Gioia has said in his essay “The Poet In An Age of Prose”: “a kind of minimalist verse that achieves clarity at the expense of comprehensiveness and intensity.” 

I think this is hard to argue for anyone who reads modern contemporary Canadian or American poetry. Poetry is a portal; a door between poet and reader. Stephen Dobyns said, “a poem is a window that hangs between two people who otherwise live in darkened rooms.” Donald Hall likened poetry to, “inside talking to inside.” It is not really an epic painting, or an apocalyptic story, or The Rime of Ancient Mariner anymore which I guess makes sense, at least to me, since time passes, and things change, so why not poetry too?

But with the proliferation of poets teaching poets, the plenitude of poetic forms have fallen away, giving rise to an exciting diversity of voices whose poems, although they are written in couplets or tercets or octaves, look and read very much the same on the page as everyone else’s poems which maybe is alright since the audience for modern poetry really is now limited to other poets and students of poetry. 

Yet I can’t help longing for a time when people other than poets read poetry, and when the big poets were not just teachers, but doctors or steel workers or machinists or lumberjacks or layabouts. I say this as a teacher of poetry, the irony of which is not lost on me.   

Why write this essay? I guess, on the one hand, I really love being part of a subculture, this secret club called Modern Poetry, and I suspect if you are reading this essay you are too. I love nothing more than introducing my students to Ada Limon or Kim Addonizio or Ocean Vuong or Danez Smith, and then watching them discover the pleasure of understanding a terrific poem charged with meaning, written by a living, breathing person.

As a teacher, those are the moments I hang on to and I cherish. 

But I do wish more people would come out to poetry readings or book launches to hear poetry, people not normally a part of the club. I also am starting to be a little more appreciative of those poets who are writing book-length poems, or who side-step the whole plain-spoken lyric “write-what-you-know” mode, and instead write off the wall surrealist non-sequiturs, or strict syllabic verse, or even books whose aims are not immediately clear to me, making me scratch my head, or whose own specialized language is building its own rules.

Does craft matter? Of course it does, and building an individual poetic voice based on high and low speech, or that mimics the mind in motion, or relies on no ideas but in things, all of this can be a difficult apprenticeship (as it was for me), and I am not suggesting teaching contemporary poetry to would-be poets is an easy gig for it most certainly is not. 

But I also worry that we have moved too far away from the aesthetic pleasures of really listening to poetry, to hear words ring out in our minds–poems like Gwendolyn MacEwen’s elusive “Dark Pines Under Water”, or the angry undertones of Philip Levine’s “What Work Is” – poems that live still in my memory, for I think many of us read poems for what we can glean, what tricks we can pick up. How did they do that?, we think. 

Often, I feel like I am a shake-down artist wanting a poetry book to give up all of its secrets when really, I should just listen more, and enjoy those special books that reaffirm why I started loving poetry in the first place, books like Diane Seuss’s Frank:Sonnets or Kim Addonizio’s Exit Opera or Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires.

I guess I don’t envy jurors who are evaluating a hundred poetry books for major prizes that are written using the same lens of personal identity and lyric minimalism. How do you choose? And how do you make your poetry stand out from other books in a publishing season if the sounds it makes is similar to the sounds made in those other books?  

If I was more cynical, I might agree with David Orr in his recent appraisal of contemporary poetry where he ended his review on John Koethe’s brilliant poetry collection Cemeteries and Galaxies with this stinging verdict: “Contemporary poetry is troubled. Its institutions are rickety, its audience is tiny and homogenous, and most of its products are crushingly orthodox. It increasingly resembles a community bake sale in which everyone’s cupcakes are agreed to be super-duper but nobody actually eats them… …But the art still has its outliers, talking into the advancing dusk.”

I don’t think it’s a homogeneity of “voice” so much as a homogeneity of approach, that Orr is criticizing here. Mainstream popular poetry draws its momentum and its source material from everyday speech and everyday topics. Diction is commonplace, and daily life occurrences are given a few moments of illumination that give a reader time to pause and to reflect. 

But as I get older, both as a poet and as a reader of poetry, I feel there should be more of what Dana Gioia was talking about–comprehensiveness and intensity–in the poems we celebrate.

I think after writing a few books, working out the nitty gritty details of one’s own individual poetic voice, a poet should be looking to make it different, make it new, whether that be stacking moments of illumination into every other line, instead of just offering one volta near the poem’s conclusion; or working with multiple memories, a lifetime of details, in a poem instead of simply one or two flashbacks; or throwing in multiple allusions, literary or otherwise, giving the reader lots, almost too much, to contend with in a poem.

Maybe this is why I don’t like short poems very much anymore because it’s hard to build up those accretions of vivid images and emotion and intensity in a poem under ten lines. There are, of course, masters of the short lyric like Gregory Orr and Emily Dickinson and others, but these practitioners are exceptions to the rule and stand apart from most other poets. 

And this is not to say every new Formalist poet is a misunderstood genius either as I have read my share of formalist verse that feels like a ‘Vale of Yawn Making’ rather than being particularly inspired or interesting. But we do need to push ourselves as contemporary poets who wish to be read, or studied, once we get overly comfortable with the plain-spoken lyric, or everyday occurrence confessional mode.

Contemporary poetry might bear some resemblances to prose, but it should be clearly, unmistakably be seen as different, certainly elevated, due to its use of experiential language, its vivid compression of emotions and imagery, its bending of time, its mirroring of the processes of the mind trying to make sense of an increasing nonsensical world, and this should be expressed with as much wisdom and wonder and intensity and approaches as we can muster. 

That intimate, confiding bond between poet and reader? It’s still an important one to me, as it lets us know we are not alone, that there are important truths about the human experience lurking underneath the traumas and travails of this world, beneath even the commonplace words we speak, but a poem is not just an unburdening of one person to another; it is also a vessel of sensory details and rhythms and hopefully striking diction and imagery. The totality of a poem is as much the way it sounds as it is the words and themes it imparts.

This is an essay that was supposed to be about poetics, the craft of writing poems, and how a kind of narrowness in terms of diction and subject matter has crept into our practices vaulting everyday confessionalism and personal anecdotes to the front of contemporary poetry, and I am just as guilty as everyone else of this, but we need to make sure we also make room for the stylistic weirdos and poet outliers, and those who are writing long book-length poems, or syllabic verse, or unrhymed sonnets, or any number of other conceptual approaches some young poet, even now, is dreaming up amidst the rising rent prices and diminishing academic employment and fewer reading series opportunities. I think the vitality of poetry depends on it.   

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.