The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

Loneliness is a funny thing to talk about in terms of poetry given that so much of Canadian poetry seems to be about community-building, and celebrating a diversity of voices and approaches to poetry, but unless you live in the literary hubs of Toronto or Vancouver, Montreal or Hamilton, or any other urban centre with a large number of poets living in it (hello Ottawa! hello Fredericton!), a poet outside these areas can feel a little bit like a pioneer on the frontier beyond what is happening in the larger cities. So kay, maybe I’m  not Susanna Moodie, per se, but certainly I’m not one of the cool urban kids going to ‘swanky’ literary events either.

Now, I have been told by my many good friends that most ‘swanky’ literary events and reading series attended by large audiences are mostly nostalgic things of the past. But sitting in Kitchener, now a man in my Fifties, I do admit I feel a little FOMO, or fear I’m missing out on something. My city friends assure me I am not. That the literary “scene” is now confined to small crowds in small bars and bookstores. But I still can’t help but feel a little lonely for that human connection of just sitting down with a few good friends to talk books, or poems, or how we are all managing with a “post-David-Bowie-world” where the middle class is on fire, politicians openly “lie” with zero consequences, billionaires flirt with fascism and gut public regulations, and everyone feels our quality of living is slipping through open fingers. 

I think social media only exacerbates this feeling, more often isolating people rather than bringing individuals together, and I’ll be honest, it’s hard to wade through all the AI slop memes and constant barrage of “groups” being pushed at you online before you get to see how your good friend who lives in another city is managing day to day with the essential devolution of politics into dumb show ‘populism’, rent hikes or renovictions, angry ‘bro’ drivers, self checkout everything, or the many other ‘fresh hells’ this past decade has delivered.

As a high-school teacher, I am mostly immune to the financial precarity many who work in the private sector or academic “gig” economy suffer, but as I get older, I feel my social connection to others outside my immediate family is waning, and there is a pervading sense of isolation creeping around the edges of my mental health.

My last several books were written in a poetic “voice” that combined social commentary, low-key surrealism, and a sort of distant emotional ironic humour that never took itself too seriously, but for the last year or so, I have been trying to write clear-eyed, earnest, deeply meaningful poems that meditate on real authentic things, and I think the change has come because so much of our lives has become inundated with the fake or the inauthentic. 

There is a growing concern, for instance, that young men are becoming addicted to man-o-sphere podcasts, online porn or sports gambling rather than nurturing human relationships. I am also hearing a rising chorus of social commentators sayings there is an epidemic of male loneliness among older men, and my heart and my head tell me this is so. But what are the reasons for this shift and is it just men feeling this?

The American poet Todd Boss blames social isolation on PMM, or pervasive modern meaningless where naked greed is everywhere, influencers are either “looks-maxxing” or shilling big brands online, and workers’ lives are being ever more winnowed down into just profit numbers on a corporate earnings sheet. “Optics” trump authenticity; and some sort of climate reckoning or class conflict in the near future feels almost inevitable.

We are already seeing groups of individuals banding together to keep Artificial Intelligence Data Centres out of their communities, and many people are becoming politically active, some for the first time in their lives, to stem the tide of corporate deregulation and the erosion of a crumbling future for their children.

Maybe I feel lonely, not because I am a poet who lives in a small city, Kitchener, on the edges of the GTA where a large number of poets live, and who go for lunch with each other in my imagination, but because I am a human poet, and to feel loneliness is to disrupt the plastic church of late stage capitalism that wants us all to be separate and apart, coccooned in houses and apartments, and buying all the things the oligarchs are selling. 

It’s maybe to think this is not right how I am feel, and to then ask: what can I do to change my environment to remedy this feeling?

I try to meet up with friends. I try to keep dangerous politicians from accessing power or stirring up hatred of others. I try to be a good father and a good teacher to my students. I am always looking for deeper social connection with others which is somewhat ironic as I am also deeply introverted, almost to a fault. So yeah, I’m feeling a little lonely at this stage of my life, but maybe it’s the right kind of loneliness that makes real change possible. That says the world keeps trying to run me down but you have to keep standing up. Of course, canapes and camaraderie at ‘swanky’ literary parties also help with loneliness and social isolation, but honestly, I’m grateful that after twenty years on from my first book’s publication,  I’m still able to write and publish small books of poetry. I’m trying not to forget that. Gratitude requires no splashy literary parties and, like human loneliness, it wells up from within.

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.