Alternator: Poems by Chris Banks
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
At the very centre of Chris Banks’s latest collection of poetry, the eponymous poem spells out the title’s meaning: “The mind is an alternator.” And his pentameter rhythm alternates between so many things – the exact and abstract, couplet and sonnet, sentence and stanza, metaphor’s tenor and vehicle, the raw and well-done, Spinoza’s lens and John Ashbery’s mirror. The first sentence of “Alternator” catalogues materiality: “Most things are made of wood, plastic, aluminum, / copper, glass.” The second sentence shifts gears and eases into lyrical longing where sensory items slice and open through balanced sibilance: “ocean spray, grass scent, sunlight, human longing.” After this Whitmanesque welcome, caesuras give way to “Science says we are all malformed celestial debris, / but no one ever resuscitates a meteorite, do they?” The scientific mind is cosmic, but so is the poetic, isn’t it? The mind forms and malforms from “CliffNotes” to “This map of the universe / has an index of affinities.” Yet the alternator tracks those affinities in its plenitude and yoking together French symbolist poets and UFO sightings.
In this omnium gatherum, “a fool’s hobby,” the poem advances from science says to “Spinoza said, All things / excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” If ethics and metaphysics are rare and difficult, then the poet intervenes to bring things down to earth: “I need a tuning / fork for the real. A rain check for the miraculous.” The alternator’s attuned wit surprises in its combination of concrete and abstract, things and resonances, demotic and miraculous, nuisance and numinous. The fork picks through à la carte items, raw and charred in the collage of a petri dish; a machete tines a tripwire. Sparks “thread fire through the eye of my imagination.” The final conflagration pits I against eye, chemical wit and witness: “The way seasons keep changing / the subject, and I’m always getting burned.” After the turbocharge and dynamic changes, a calming flame within the epiphany: “sometimes a dress of flame hangs in the dark, / sometimes I even see someone wearing it.” Banks’s sure-footed alternating and regulating rhythms keep the reader tied to the line.
“Alternator disguises though masks of persona that are regulated and removed.”
The title may also refer to that part of the car that works in tandem with a regulator to start the vehicle. Two epigraphs serve as another alternator introducing the body of poetry. The first epigraph by Mark Strand alternates between aspects of selfhood: “The self, we shall say, can never be / Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.” Alternator disguises though masks of persona that are regulated and removed. Kim Addonizio provides the second epigraph: “Writing is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror.” Banks shatters the vanity mirror with every turn of phrase, and the mirror itself acts as frame and governing principle for the volume from the initial vanity mirror to the book’s final section of sonnets, “Mirror Bouquet.” The mirror alternates between mimetic representation, synaesthetic reflection, and the shattered centre of vanity and gravity. The book’s cover reinforces the surreal juxtapositions of the poems: a hummingbird’s wings flutter and its throat songs cross-pollinate an empty horn of plenty that is attached to a gramophone of potential sound and snail-like features.
This cover design and epigraphs work their way through the ghazals in Part I of this collection, “Core Samples of the Late-Capitalist Dream.” Since ghazal originates in spinning, it is not surprising to find the mind spinning among the couplets within each ghazal. From slow rotisserie to “spinning and spinning, in a centrifuge of language,” Banks ghazals words and phrases. Between dream and hard core, each couplet alternates within itself and in relationship to its neighbour. The opening sample introduces Banks’s wit, rhythm, aesthetics, and philosophy: “Reality is not paint-by-number. Show. / Don’t sell. My castle I built out of twigs.” Numerical capitalism of sell vs. literary tell in the sly alternation of l and t consonants in reality, paint, don’t, sell, castle, built out, and twigs.
The first stanza runs into the second to specify number and complete the oxymoronic twig castle of miniature grandeur: “My castle I built out of twigs // when I was four.” The next sentence rhymes with number and alludes to automobile: “I still feel under siege / by rising gas prices.” The second stanza runs into the third, which makes explicit and implicit the alternator, catapulting late-capitalism and early selfhood: “Major depression’s // relentless trebuchet. I need an alternate. / An understudy.” With grinding r’s and t’s, each couplet acts as a trebuchet catapulting understudy back to under siege from depression to rising prices alternating between base and super-structure. The dramatic metaphor of understudy develops theatrically: “The red curtain / is rising. I am uncertain of my lines.” These red curtains match the rising prices, the uncertainty of lines referring to poet and actor in performance who composes internal rhymes and iambic pentameter, the regulator and kinetic energy of couplets: “Even though I play the hero, I improvise / on stage until the ghost within me speaks.”
Couplets link late-capitalism and post-modernism: “Who needs Hell, or a classical underworld / when you have a shuttered Walmart.” The understudy roams through the underworld to arrive at his neighbourhood superstore – site of pandemic, corporate convenience, and demonic greed. “A corporate / tombstone painted slate grey” – long a’s stretching colour, magnitude, and vacancy. The grey drifts, marking graves of unknown cashiers, the soldiers of capitalist society. Shopping carts resemble the metal vertebrae of some creatures made extinct long ago. In this excavation of the present moment, “Memory is a tax-free savings account. / On a scale of demon to angel, I am a man.” In this postmodern chain of being between devil and angel, the speaker resorts to Pop images juxtaposed with classical tradition: “I am more Lilliputian than Gulliver. / More Popeye than Plato.” Banks’s Gulliver travels in a K-car rather than a limousine, a diminutive vehicle rebranding prose and poetry, alternating between childhood and the grave. His alternator is “a hunter-gatherer of successive surprises.” Each couplet is a successive surprise – a bus driver argues with a passenger to put on a mask, as the bus’s alternator contends with the pandemic: “People whose last touch is a paramedic’s hands.”
In a surreal mimetic mode, Banks flashes Addonizio’s looking-glass: “Crust of a white moon, / cutting through darkness, hangs above / the fallen city. A poet’s heirloom.” Cutting through these visuals is a soundscape of near rhyme and alliteration – moon and heirloom, crust and cutting. Lyric alternates with harsh facts. Dream and nightmare, surreal and real range though the couplets: “Real estate prices are core samples of the late- / capitalist dream.” By hyphenating and splitting “late-capitalist” across lines, the poet emphasizes the belatedness of apocalyptic scenarios in his catalogue of tattoos, trauma, A Little Golden Book of Hurts, the afterlife, fallen star, neon graveyard, and genocide. His world is a faithful mirror looking through us lightly and darkly.
Zoom to zodiac signs or prescriptions for “restless / imagination syndrome.” Amidst the mundane, “Awe flares momentarily to life.” Alternating between colossal and diminutives in a tattoo of a snake wrapped around a sword, a memento mori of democracy, the beat and list go on in late capitalism. The semiotics of a pandemic – “No Vaccination, No Vacancy” – and the couplet’s vacillation. From winter’s deep freeze to spring’s hopeful gardens, the mind fails to navigate the pursuit of money. A new reformation emerges, and the brain rewires itself in spring’s sunshine. The poet dances through happy shades, the macabre, and pas de deux:
“Hark, the volta! Choose your weapon:
the cha-cha or the yo-yo?” Instead of the Romantic apostrophe to a skylark, Banks recharges his battery’s voltage and poetic turn through the lark of an alternating yo-yo.
He ricochets his couplets through abrupt and agile shifts in semantics and referents. “Tomorrow’s daily special is more // climate change with a side of spite.” After the more in morrow, the marginal phrase concludes the sentence, while the next sentence shifts the sense of “change” to a town fountain “full of nickels and dimes.” That spare change flips once again in the following couplet: “Make a wish. Toss a coin. Watch it sink. / Hope’s secret password is hope.” The coin toss of capitalism lands on hope, which springs eternal. This yoking together of discordant elements becomes the hard sell of “gun violence, neoliberalism, nuclear families / in packs of four. Knock-knock.” In this school of hard knocks and ontological who’s there, “The world’s on fire. This isn’t a joke / Think of poetry as a burn unit.” Poetry is both a slow burn and an apocalyptic conflagration.
A poet for all seasons, Banks ends his odyssey on the money in autumn: “Falling leaves in October. / So many desiccated colours!” Like Whitman, he yanks books and leans into tropes, lines, language, and the slant of stanzas in lyric and aphoristic wit. His surname in part accounts for his critique of impure capitalism: “The teller behind / shatterproof glass hands back your change.” In this fair exchange, Banks is the teller of truth in lyric and narrative poems from “Ode to Disappearing” to “Ode to a Broken World.” In the former, he sails with Yeats to Byzantium; in the latter, he uses Kafka as the ax to break the frozen sea within us. This book is a nail gun that shatters the frozen glass within us, even as it fastens Keats to Yeats in the fire of forge, kiln, and collage. In “Say Dynamite” he places the Romantics and Surrealists in a blender – Apollinaire, Wordsworth, Dean Young, and Shelley. In the verse sigh of “Versailles” he is tender and playful with the human heart’s wants, love whisper, and palace castled. And that “palace castled” at the beginning of his middle section echoes his first ghazal with its castle built out of twigs, for he inhabits the sublime and basement rooms of poetry.
Banks is as inventive in the sonnet form as he is in couplets of ghazals. The first sonnet in “Mirror Bouquet” begins with a negative that is positive: “I never read Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs or Lowell’s Notebook / but here I am, improvising a long sequence, trying not to leave / anything out, my intelligence a little restless, my imagination / all-inclusive.” In his all-inclusiveness, Banks has read the American Modernists throughout his sonnet sequence. He alternates between nested syllables and amplitude: “I am hoping to put the then back in authentic / and now back in knowledge.” A free-wheeling lexicographer, the sonneteer is “the first to admit I am not ideally / suited to restraint,” imposed by sonnet or couplet. Packing it all in, he outfits his poems “with pennies on train tracks,” the highs and lows of the sublime and kitchen sink, depth and irony. The sonnet turns self-referential in the eleventh line, “already eleven lines deep,” and concludes with a final sentence that highlights polarities: “So I sacrifice a little intensity for immensity, / trying to piece together a Tower of Babel that won’t fall down.” Banks’s slanted structures and leaning language endure within the moment’s monument.
His sonnets are inventories of blunder and begonias, faux pas and bouquet sounds of Pachelbel and air conditioning, firsts and lasts, confessional and formal. A sonnet begins with a casual question, “Do you mind if I get personal?”, where personal pronouns flip in Alternator’s mind. It ends with the image of “a giant bronze sundial, the hours growing late.” The sundial reaches across the future’s island of I’ll, becoming ours. Another rhetorical question in the future follows: “What shall we say about this sonnet leaking blood all over the page, / whispering old songs and feral emotions?” The whisper of Berryman’s dream songs? His sonnet is a “fluctuating self-portrait” with a fire escape that leads the red coal stuck in his mouth to a rooftop garden, to “Burn or be burned.” A Promethean persona plays with fire in Banks’s poetry from “The Halftime Show Is on Fire” to “Chariots of Fire.”
Personal pronouns, questions, fire and mirrors abound in “Mirror Bouquet.” “How can you stand to tell the truth of yourself? It is mainly smoke / and mirrors.” Autobiographical poems walk us through depression, divorce, drinking, and gratitude. Hope is “a blue Morpho, fluttering within.” His well-wrought “urn of images” ranges from Keats’s Odes and other Romantic poetry between the ordinary and the ecstatic in Lorca’s duende, between basement and penthouse. His series of firsts from the first girl he slept with to his first poetry love affair with Al Purdy and Gwendolyn MacEwen. He is “proud and patient for the first time in my life.” Also influenced by American poet Jack Gilbert, who lived in Greece and wrote The Great Fires, Banks strikes another Promethean note: “I remember waking years ago on / Naxos, the blue and white of the buildings, places hewn from ancient / volcanic rock, thinking the Aegean had sewn its moody allure into me.” Tethered to that rock, the Grecian-inflected poets borrow fire and lava for their heroic odysseys, “thinking of the future, a world on fire.”
In his index of paradoxes, the poet hears the cash nexus of homophones – owed or ode, heresy or hearsay. Alternator is a three-fold mirror that reflects mind, world, and poetic form; its lexemes and self-portraits jostle and lamp the demotic sublime to alter egos and the still-life of core samples. From the sublime to the demotic drop in the bucket list, Banks says dynamite, and detonates.
About the Author
Chris Banks is a Canadian poet and author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Alternator by Nightwood Editions in 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 Memorial 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 and PRISM International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Nightwood Editions (Oct. 21 2023)
Language : English
Paperback : 96 pages
ISBN-10 : 0889714584
ISBN-13 : 978-0889714588