by Chris Banks
I’ve written poetry for forty years now, and I would say maybe for the first ten years, it felt like a hobby, or a recreational pastime, something I did between attending courses at the University of Guelph, or reading, reading, reading; or attending rock concerts, or going on dates, or navigating the many pitfalls of early adulthood.
But at time some point, that hobby became something altogether larger, deeper, like a voice from a bottomless well inside of oneself. The compulsion to write takes over for no other reason except because you have to, for not writing leads to anxiety, Major depression even, madness.
That Other voice I recognized as the one which made the hairs stand up on my arm when I first heard Earle Birney and Al Purdy read poems as part of National Film Board of Canada videos my English teacher had cued up for us in our portable classroom in Stayner, ON.
It was also the voice I heard when I listened to Gwendolyn MacEwen on vinyl in the McLaughlin Library on the U of G campus. But, at some point, I think you begin to hear that voice inside you, saying, write the poem. Write it. Even if you get nowhere. Even if failure feels like a given. Write it.
Certainly, my parents found my writing poetry a little eccentric, and quaint, and they treated it like a hobby which was not how I saw it: for me, it was clearly a vocation that had chosen me, a shy, skinny, awkward kid who wanted to express something about the world that told him his labour would be better spent making minimum wage washing dishes for the Bookshelf cafe, rather than writing poems in a journal no one might ever read. I wrote anyways.
And writing has always felt like entering a warm trance for me. This was learned after brushing aside the workshop bullies’ comments, wiping away the fetishization, the hope of writing a real book, and not listening to one’s own self-doubts.
I always found Keats’s poetry hard to read, but finding his letters was a revelation. There, I recognized a brother poet who wanted to write great poems, who worried about sniping critics, who thought deeply about the processes of writing, and coined that wonderful phrase ‘Negative capability’ for when a poet is capable “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.
Writing because you have to write. Preparing oneself to receive some grand theme or never-before-seen image. I never really liked the idea of the Muse, but I did like the idea of negative capability. Poet as antenna. Poet as receiver of information. It seems the vocation had chosen me.
But calling oneself a poet to a classroom of teenagers one teaches can make one feel a little like an imposter, like it’s just a fanciful hobby, even after you have a few books under your belt.
And I think of my friends who are poets who also are teachers, professors, editors, bookstore employees, and I wonder sometimes if we have chosen these occupations, not just to keep that Other Voice which whispers poems to us alive, but also to quiet the baritone voice of Late Stage Capitalism which snidely remarks writing poetry is nothing more than a peculiar obsessive hobby.
Are we hobbyists? I ask myself this question, sometimes seriously, but the answer is always an overwhelming no. For me, it’s been a part of who I am, threaded deeply into my overall well-being, and I’ve certainly learned more about life, the human experience, the sizzling spark of creativity, from a lifetime of reading and writing poetry than I did from attending eight years of university.
Talk of awards, or the Canadian Canon (is there even such a thing?) can get one down, and there is a universal wish to be read, to be understood, to be loved for one’s creative endeavours, and sometimes this wish can be, at odds, with the small poetry audience made up of mostly other poets here in Canada.
Poets most often read to small crowds in small venues, but that audience is fiercely loyal, and compassionate, and understanding for that Other Voice whispering among the words, the images of one’s poems, the audience hears it too, and it is this voice that is great within us which raises our work above talk of hobbies.
Poetry is a vocation, pure and simple. It is no hobbyhorse, and if you fail to heed the call to write the next poem beckoning, it will simply trample you. At least, that has been my experience.
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.
