Karan Kapoor: Your poems live inside questions — and often leave them unanswered. “Where do we go from here?” you ask, before pivoting into a description of clouds, oil changes, and personal injury law ads. I love that refusal to resolve. Do you think poetry should resist the impulse to provide answers? Is uncertainty an aesthetic position for you?
Chris Banks: I like uncertainty in poems and I think there are things one needs to communicate through language and metaphor that cannot be said otherwise in prose. Basically, I want to smash all the frosted windows inside words so the great mysteries of this life shine through. But as for providing answers to why we are here? I’m not sure I can do that except to say I am here, and you are here with me, and this is what I see and feel, and hopefully you see and feel some of that too. Poetry is a kind of deep empathy machine. Almost like one of the massage chairs. Sit with a poem long enough, and you always feel better.
- Chris Banks, in conversation with Karan Kapoor over at Only Poems. You can read the whole thing here.
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