Chris Banks : On Tiny Grass Is Dreaming

 

 

 

Everyone starts in a little magazine (for me it was Carousel Magazine), and then probably a chapbook. I was lucky enough to publish my first chapbook with a group of talented young poets—people like Carmine Starnino, Sina Queyras, and Trish Salah—back when we were students at Concordia. My next chapbook came out almost ten years later called Form Letters with Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books press. In my writing life, Form Letters is a small treasure. A small reminder that I didn’t give up, even when it might have been the smart choice during a difficult creative drought during my late Twenties. 

I love poetry chapbooks. I love poetry collections. This latest poetry chapbook Tiny Grass Is Dreaming is not simply about a bewildering English sign in translation, but about the creative spark, and how that is translated into poetry. Out of nothing, something.

I will always, always appreciate that poems come out of nowhere, out of the imaginary world, and often they tell us truths and small wisdoms we did not know we needed to hear. Tiny Grass Is Dreaming is comprised of lightly surreal poems, reconfigured Chinese fortune cookie fortunes, a long poem about the Canadian identity, poetic or otherwise, but most of all, joy. The joy of making. The joy of finding one’s voice amidst all the other voices that came before, and will certainly come after.

I love writing poems about aspiring to be a cloud, or the need for a giant mural of Tantoo Cardinal, or my yellow belt in masculinity, or my love of Shoegaze indie music. To me, it all makes sense. It is all worthy of poetry. Buy my chapbook Tiny Grass Is Dreaming and see for yourself what it is saying.

Now, let me just hang this sign that says, Gone Hunting Ambient Thoughts. I will be back, maybe not in fifteen minutes, maybe not after lunch, maybe not even next week, but the store of Imagination will eventually reopen. And you can count on me having something to say.

 

 

 

 

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.

Chris Banks will be launching Tiny Grass is Dreaming in Ottawa on August 10 as part of the above/ground press 31st anniversary reading, alongside Mahaila Smith, Gil McElroy, Pearl Pirie, Carlos A. Pittella and Shane Rhodes; tickets available here.