An interview with Chris Banks

Chris Banks is a Canadian poet and author of five collections of poems, most recently Midlife Action Figure by ECW Press 2019. 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, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.


How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I began writing poetry because I wanted to be creative. I tried playing guitar and was useless at it. I tried visual arts and was unsuccessful. I wrote poetry only after discovering Al Purdy’s “The Country North of Belleville” and realized he was talking about the land around Bancroft, ON where I spent a significant portion of my childhood. So that is where it started. I was sixteen. What keeps me going I suppose is the magic of image-making. Poetry still delights and surprises me.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem, now that you’ve published five full-length collections?

After five books I am less interested in mining my childhood memories, or in writing narrative poems, although they still crop up now and again. The real challenge for a poet is what happens when you run out of autobiographical material after a couple of books, what then? My poetic voice has shifted from deeply lyrial, meditative, narrative poems over the years to wildly associative, even surreal poems. I use to take a lot of time writing poems, weeks sometimes, counting syllables, etc. but now I’m much more in a hurry to get the feeling of spontaneity into a poem, that particular energy, which leads me stumbling forward.

How has the process of putting together a manuscript evolved? How do you decide on the shape and size of a manuscript?

In my first two books I did with Nightwood Editions, I relied heavily on my editors Carleton Wilson and Silas White for helping me decide which poems stayed in the manuscript, which poems would go first and in what sections, etc. but now I’m much more aware of how to put together a manuscript. I like a book to weigh in at about forty-five to fifty poems. Sometimes I use sections like I have for my new collection « Midlife Action Figure » out with ECW Press, but other times I will let the poems decide an appropriate batting order based on affinities between individual poems.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

This is a great question. For my first three books, the poets I most admired were Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Mark Strand, Dave Smith and Patrick Lane. Things shifted in my fourth book where I started to dapple with more associative writing so I would say Campell McGrath, Kim Addonizio, Bob Hicok and Dean Young became important to me and still are.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I received a Masters in Creative Writing from Concordia University and I have mixed feelings about it. The MFA workshop can be a tough proving ground. I was young and met many equally talented young people which was exciting but also intimidating. My thesis advisor was Gary Geddes and he treated me like a professional even though my poetry was not very good. He would calmly and carefully explain what parts of the poem were working and what parts should be thrown away. He did this with near clinical precision. I wrote a failed poetry book for my Master’s thesis and nearly stopped writing. After I picked myself back up off the floor and dusted myself off, I began writing much more seriously and fearlessly once outside the strictures of a creative writing program. My Masters experience taught me about failure and it was a useful lesson. I would say Gary Geddes absolutely instilled in me that I have to be my own worst editor. Always.

What are you currently working on?

I am just finishing another manuscript entitled « Deep Fake Serenade » which I hope to have completed this Fall. I am just writing the last few poems now. I try to have a manuscript completed before I have a new book launch so when the reviews come in they sting much less as those poems are much further away from me. I try to be writing all the time.

Can you name a poet you think should be recieving more attention?

This is a difficult question. So many of us would love to be acknowledged for our craft. I always joke one day I will get to be the grand old man of Canadian poetry for six whole months and that would be fine. I received lots of attention for my first book and then very little for my subsequent books which are much better. Attention is strange. So many young people in Canada are writing better than I did in my twenties so it is hard to single people out. I like the American writer Dobby Gibson right now. In Canada, there are poets like Kayla Czaga, Matthew Henderson and Kevin Connolly that I enjoy reading.