Deepfake Serenade,
Chris Banks
Nightwood
Editions, 2021
Chris Bank’s sixth collection, Deepfake Serenade from Nightwood Editions, fits on any bookshelf. These poems are contained for the most part on single pages, with the occasional poem wandering onto second pages, but no further, with each poem being a nebulous collection of subjective reactions, images, anecdote, aphorisms, and a sundry host of other fascinators. Presented in chunky blank verse, the line lengths can vary from several to over a dozen syllables, and reads like stream of concious phrases that often carry over more than one line of text, rarely breaking a spoken grammar, if at all. In total, the book spans fifty poems over seventy-nine pages including colophon etc., hidden behind a black cover bearing a colourful broadstroke face. With a cover price of 18.95 CAD, this book provides a good word to penny ratio, which is important to me.
It is, as well, a book that can stand the rigours of off-hand dipping into random pages, it springs back when jumping into the middle of a poem, and/or allows a spelunking from an initial point of contact. Over several months of intermittent expeditions, possible rereadings, and/or misinterpretations, the richnees of the book unfolds onto a rather large topography of the intentional utterance, while maintaining a formal plane. The poet, lighting a torch near what appear as certain clichés and/or tropes, reveals a crooked slight of hand at work instead. Examples can be found at the pedestrian entrance, and titular poem, where the setup of serenade, balcony, and early death, leads along the path of immenant confrontation with Romeo and Juliette, only to realize our guide is Romeo himself, but rather than continue affirming the setup, he begins to dismantle the mechanisms, uncrossing stars, finishing with a loaded backhanded, ‘Sadly, we all die in the final act’ implicating the reader in the crime of the poem? or the play? fun.
There are entrances for all tastes too, some where the page flip allows the random finger to make its claim as indicator, a process that can be repeated, looking for echoes, and broadstrokes of some of the inner caverns of the book. It is thus, that an interior aphoristic enthymemish lattice can appear on facing pages 43-4, the lines:
“Adulthood is carrying a bag of
darkness
over a shoulder. Sometimes you stick
a hand in it.”
“The river is charged with multiple
drownings
but gets off scot-free on a
technicality.”
touching each other’s letters.
Flipping again, landing on pages 70-1, and so pointing to constructions of a musing subjectivity, that grows along romantic notions of hidden knowledge & negativity, with passions high & low, while sustaining a contemporary ironic pose, these two poems, ‘True or False’, and ‘Replicants’, are at the same time placing the expected sign posts of romantic poetry, such as; the orientalism in ‘True or False’, “desert sabbatical”, to “trade...an angry soul”, where the ego searches for a desired “secret knowledge”, etc, in ‘Replicants’ there are imperialist yearnings expressed by making apposite, and questioning, the popular penetration of corporations ‘Diet Coke’ and ‘Splenda’ in respects to cultural icon ‘Coleridge’ and romantic favorite ‘the sublime’, to then go on to a wistful wish to bring back the ‘National Geographic’ quantitatively universalised “in every livingroom”. Have no fear though, there is critical reflection and the subject undercuts themself at every turn turning away from these identifiers, with a sort of irreverence of classics competing with full and passionate devotion to personalised details of the self, place, and others,
Overall this Neo-Romantic collection is an admirable subversion, or undermining, of “Romantic poets [...] on dusty bookshelves”, and by handling the cliché and stereotypes of these poets on The Bookshelf in a manner that surpasses old themes and tropes with an humility unfamiliar to most Romantic poets of past, these poems sit at the rupture of the old with the new, turning a critical eye to what in the contemporary condition is rooted in that past, today providing a rich terrain for multiple excursions.
Russell Carisse is currently living on unceded Wolastoqiyik territory in New Brunswick. Here they have resettled from Tkaronto into an off-grid trailer in the woods, with their family of people and animals, to grow food and practice other forms of underconsumption. Russell is the author of chapbooks, BRICKWORKS (Frog Hollow Press 2021), and English Garden Bondage (above/ground press 2022). Their work can be found online and in print. Twitter: @russellcarisse