About three weeks ago, I read a news snippet where scientists are starting to theorize that dark matter—what is essentially invisible and makes up approximately 85% of the universe—might just be gravity leaking out of other unseen dimensions. Basically, if gravity from a parallel universe is leaking into ours, it would push and pull on our known galaxies, and this extra, unseen “gravity” is what we observe and call dark matter.
I’m not sure why I am so taken with this idea, but it makes me feel like it is analogous to a writer’s work, especially in terms of writing influences. I’m thinking of the way the weight or gravity of another poet’s work can leak into your own poems, and maybe it is not seen or detected by a reader, but the poet knows it is there for the poet can “feel” the push and pull of that particular influence in the creation of a poem.
In high-school, I did not take physics, and I was a C+ in grade 11 advanced chemistry, only doing slightly better in grade 13 biology where I earned a hard won, not-too-shabby B+.
But I think this idea that there are invisible “effects” working upon the known universe, and that only about 5% of ordinary matter, what we can see and touch, what accounts for the stars and planets, your favourite café hangout or all the human cells in your body, is wildly interesting to me as a poet who instinctively understands that something resides in the nothing that exists on a white page or a blank computer screen.
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden wrote, and instead of despair, I hear both Auden’s curiosity and befuddlement in his statement. Where did that poem come from? It came from behind the veil of nothingness, but it’s the poet’s job to detect something meaningful behind it.
When I am starting to write a poem, I don’t care about the words, or the images, really, and I’m not taking “notes” towards an eventual poem like I might have done in my Twenties. Honestly, I just “make time” to sit down and try to write a poem. That’s it. It’s less about subject matter, and more about “feeling” something weighty is there, faintly outlined, its gravity felt, and the job really is just trying to find a couple of “handholds” or the push of a few words, or images, that will lead to a few more words and images that will wrest a living, breathing poem from the great nothingness all great poems come from.
It’s about practice, patience, but also for me I have to believe the stakes are low, that I might fail today, only to succeed tomorrow, because this sort of armchair Zen approach is the only way great poems happen. At least, for me.
This kind of thinking reminds me of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s fascination with a book called the Tao of Physics in her last book Afterworlds, and in particular, the idea of the uncertainty principle where maybe an atomic particle might be seen in a particular location using a certain set of limits, but it does not mean the particle will always be where you think it is. Sorry, if I am making a muck of someone’s beautiful science, but I have applied this idea to my poetry practice too. Essentially, the universe, the void, is full of potential energy, and so I think, why not the blank page as a source of potential energy too?
When I write, I sit down, patiently, usually early morning, and I do not wait for inspiration to materialize. I either work away as some energy source or idea or image appears, or it doesn’t and I stop for the day. Inspiration shows up or not. I succeed or fail. But I think more often than not, this approach leads to really inspired poems because you are making time for your art.
When I was thirty, I always thought at night, just five more GREAT poems, and then I’ll be happy. Then my book will be finished. Then I will not need to write anymore. This was folly as the metrics of writing good poems have very little to do with word count, or books written. It’s about showing up and staring down at the nothingness of a blank page or screen, feeling the full weight of your experiences and your writing influences, and your memories, and trying, just trying, to tap into something larger than oneself. That is the sweet spot for me in a poem.
I like it when a poem feels like 5% of it is on the surface, is visible, and this might be about a poet’s childhood, their identity, or some memory, but there is also this invisible energy or structure felt underneath it, the dark matter of a poem which might be the human collective unconscious, or your writing influences, or the great mysteries which still attract poets and scientists alike.
Poems like that are priceless, and elusive, but I still love finding them in a book written by an old Twentieth Century master or a contemporaty Canadian poet, and I love, love, love writing them when I can, when the spirit or the Poetic Genius, or the Voice that is Great Within Us, or the whatchamacallit descends.
I might name a writing folder on my laptop the “BIG BIG BOOK” but I never worry if I’m going to write a terrific poem until after it happens. If I worry too much about a poem, it will never work out. Instant inhibition.
Science might wish to give us the facts, and just the facts straight, but poetry and human curiosity is what gives us the courage to try to understand an inconceivably large universe that hides so much of itself from telescopes and words, quantum physics and talk of blank white pages.
Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of eight collections of poems, with Bureau of Useless Splendour forthcoming (Fall 2026, ECW press). 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.
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