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.

Russell Carisse : Deepfake Serenade, by Chris Banks

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

Chris Banks : The Soul Freed - Dean Young (1955-2022)

 

 

 

“Whenever you put your feet on the floor
in the morning, whatever the nightmare,
it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion:
the solidity of the boards, the steadiness
coming into the legs. Where did we get
the idea when we were kids to rub dirt
into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania?
Maybe poems are made out of breath, the way water,
cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.”

--“Scarecrow on Fire” by Dean Young

As I write this, I am still reeling from the sudden announcement that Dean Young—that inimitable, endlessly entertaining, and gigantic voice of American poetry—has passed away. Tony Hoagland once said Dean Young was the most imitated poet in the United States which is perhaps a testament to just how important his poetry was to other poets. But, honestly, no one could could really write like Dean Young except Dean Young. He was a master of the non-sequitor, the kaleidoscope volta, the irresistable “stick-the-landing” poetic ending.

Take for instance, the ending of his poem “What Form After Death”:

“Maybe all that we become
is rhyme of our limited time alive,
an echo loosening almost no snow,
no avalanche, just some puffs of white
like clouds that seem like nothing
until the pilot hits one.”

This is the mastery of Dean Young. The unrelatedness or seeming disconnection of his material which somehow culminates in a hard-won wisdom by the poem’s ending. Whether he was taking about William Butler Yeats or Stan Rice, the futility of cathedrals or the world’s biggest lightning bug, Young could somehow “gift-wrap” it all—the whole damn world—into meaning.

I wrote him once and he kindly wrote me a very short witty email back:

 Hello Chris,

Thank you for your message.  Forgive my slow response.  But honestly, who can tell one day from the other?  I've been listening to too much Scandinavian jazz which is as close as I can get being here in Texas cactus-stuck to vanishing in a snowstorm.

Just want to say thanks for reaching out.

Best,
Dean

Even in this small kind gesture, an email I am sure he wrote very quickly and then promptly forgot, you have some of the hallmarks of his poetic genius. The contradiction of being “Texas cactus-stuck”, listening to Scandinavian Jazz, and the pendulum of thought swinging rapidly to “vanishing in a snowstorm”.

In his book “The Art of Recklessness”, he said “our poetry is our haunting and adventure”.  Indeed, he went on to write on the same page:

“I’m asking you to consider poetry that is unhindered by doubt (while acknowledging that doubt can begin the inspiration toward liberation), a poetry that arises out of recklessness and is composed off first needs, first minds, of truth in language arising from the active impulse of emotion, moving through the calculation of the rational toward irrational detonation” (12).   

His book of criticism I drank down like mountain spring water at a time in my life when I had said everything I wanted to say about my life. I felt there was still more to say certainly, but this time in language itself, in pure imagery, in word-play and mischief, and especially in freeing the imagination from the chains of the self. Perhaps these are the greatest gifts of Dean Young’s poetry. The illusion that everything belongs in a poem. Especially the weird, the undomesticated, the improvisational, the truly imaginative.

I wanted to write a kind of critical eulogy for Dean Young but, honestly, I feel like nothing I can say will ever be enough to thank him for the poems he gifted us. I never knew him. I know he had a bad heart that needed to be replaced. I know he could be a difficult teacher who had a fraught relationship with many of his students. But his poems remain.

As I think of his loss, I am reminded that he said, “the blood may be fake but the bleeding must be real.” He detested quaintness and said, “the worst thing that can happen to an artist is to become a bore, to become complacent.” He never was. He was the Great Oz of American Poetry. He had a wizard’s voice and all too fragile human heart. He will be missed.   

 

 

 

 

Chris Banks is a Canadian poet and author of six collections of poems, most recently Deepfake Serenade out with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2021). 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, GRIFFEL, American Poetry Journal, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.