The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

I recently bought the book Poems Talking To Poems: Setting Your Manuscript Apart edited by Jeffrey Levine and Kristina Marie Darling, and it is a book, I dare say, which contains multitudes of good ideas and nuanced probing questions for putting manuscripts together. 

There is the usual good advice like “Spell-check. Spell-check again” (5), but then the book really starts looking at the practical “magic” of manuscript-making: the book as one final poem (thank you, Robert Frost), finding the courage to revise poems we believed are complete (usually because they were published in a little magazine somewhere), and then there is Cassandra Cleghorn’s advice in her essay ”The Art of Stumbling Upon”: “our task in making a book is to open ourselves to the possibility that the book we set out to write is somewhere to the side of the book we will end up making” (21). 

Of all the advice in this prose collection, the idea that we sort of stumble upon the right “mix”, the right marriage of tone and formal elements and variations on a theme and design elements really spoke to me. As poets, we play with language, so why should we be so scared to play with our manuscripts? Every book I have written has surprised me in some way, and perhaps no one more than my first book Bonfires.

My first book went through at least three different iterations: there was my Master’s Thesis which was a perfectly forgettable collection I called In The Galleria of Missing Persons which was a weird mix of influences from Gwendolyn MacEwen to Bronwen Wallace to Patrick Lane to Lorna Crozier. When I reflect on the poems from that time period of my life, I sort of think of Michelangelo’s slaves statues, poems still trying to escape the marble block; in essence, the poems felt half alive, trapped and incomplete. I was still learning.

A couple of years later, I threw out half of those poems, and rewrote the other half of my Master’s Thesis while living in Seoul, South Korea, and these poems became a book of living, breathing, but very much middling, small poems I called Going Out Like A Candle. There were startling lines and images, but few startling poems. I sent it out to three small presses when I got back to Canada, and all three rejected it.

After meeting Silas White, the editor of Nightwood Editions, and Paul Vermeersch and Carleton Wilson, I sort of asked myself after some gentle nudging from them, Why am I writing so small? Why am I holding onto these three poems my Thesis advisor praised five years ago? Why all the epigraphs which begin every other poem? What am I trying to hide behind other people’s words? Isn’t this supposed to be my book?

In retrospect, looking at my apprenticeship years, I think I really exercised my “editing” muscle during all those creative writing workshops I took, but not so much the“creative” muscle. I still had not learned the poetic power of mischief or play. 

In the early 2000s,  I took a leap of faith and started writing poems that were a WHOLE page in length.  Whoa! I also decided to excise any “lines” that I had BIG feelings about, but ultimately didn’t work with the rest of a poem. 

I think when you are first starting out, you play a little “defence” with a finished book, with that third of the book which contains weaker poems so you sort of stuff them in the middle, when really you should be thinking of the manuscript not so much as a finished tome, but this living, malleable thing you are trying to conjure into its best self. 

Do you want to publish a tight, collection with a thematic, narrative or formal arc, or do you want to publish a bloated sinkhole of throwaway lines? 

The last iteration of my manuscript became Bonfires published by Nightwood Editions, and it went on to win a National poetry award, earning a second printing in Canada. Since writing my first book, I now sort of listen to my head and my heart and my gut when I am putting together a book. That trifecta.

I might omit the first three opening lines of a poem if they feel a little meh, or I might remove the poem that is okay, but sounds a little too familiar, a little too like myself, without the emotional oomph or duende I’m looking for. 

I want my poems and my books to surprise readers, so I need to try to surprise myself when putting a book together. Doesn’t this make sense? I’m always on the hunt for the right mix and mesh and marriage of form and ideas and content in my books. 

As I became middle-aged, my poems became less introspective, more outward looking, less about me and more about the restless, fast-fashion, accelerated spirit of the age we live in.

And yet, even though I find I have a book of lightly surreal poems called Bureau of Useless Splendour coming out in a year, the manuscript I am writing right now is once again full of plain, introspective poems with a lot of brevity and tightly compacted images and allusions, but hopefully, this time I have the craft to manage it. At least, I hope so. 

Looking at my personal bookshelf, I’ve written books full of zany lines and fantastical images, and books with serious poems about small Ontario towns and recovery from alcohol, and now books where aging is becoming more and more a predominant theme. I go where the poems lead me, and to reference Cassandra Cleghorn’s “The Art of Stumbling Upon” essay once again, I sort of stumble upon the shapes and various colours of a poetry book. 

So yes, when putting together a first manuscript, omit the phrase “inward” you have used twenty times already, forget your workshop instructor’s voice whispering in your ear, and lean in hard on your own voice and preoccupations, but just don’t be dull or middling, don’t try to hide bad poems behind good ones. Be confident that one good poem will lead to another good poem. I don’t believe in the imagination “drying up”; I believe in leaving the creative “tap” open. 

This requires a poet to be receptive to writing a book that is perhaps different than the one you first started writing. Maybe that is the best advice of all.

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.