Exploring the Boundaries: Steve Noyes
by Vivian Moreau
copyright Times-Colonist, 2006
Across from poet Steve Noyes' tidy bungalow at the end of Admirals Road a biker has just finished polishing his Harley. It shines in gleaming afternoon sun while the biker, a large man with a bald head, sits at a table in the driveway carefully adding finishing touches to a colourful piñata. It's the kind of dichotic moment that requires a double take and is probably one of the reasons why Noyes lives where he lives.
Noyes is waiting by his front door, the sole of one foot propped on the wall he is leaning against. With eyes squinting from a Player's he's smoking, Noyes could be intimidating if this were a steaming alley in Winnipeg's north end, the city in which he grew up and left in his mid-teens. But it's not. It's a cozy, white-sided, green-trimmed home with an overrun garden and an oasis of shade trees on a sticky August afternoon.
Inside the house is another oasis of sinking sofa and arm chair placed by the window to catch the best reading light. His wife, also a poet, is introduced, something cold is offered to drink and we head to the deck to talk.
Noyes is waiting by his front door, the sole of one foot propped on the wall he is leaning against. With eyes squinting from a Player's he's smoking, Noyes could be intimidating if this were a steaming alley in Winnipeg's north end, the city in which he grew up and left in his mid-teens. But it's not. It's a cozy, white-sided, green-trimmed home with an overrun garden and an oasis of shade trees on a sticky August afternoon.
Inside the house is another oasis of sinking sofa and arm chair placed by the window to catch the best reading light. His wife, also a poet, is introduced, something cold is offered to drink and we head to the deck to talk.
From the way he ducks his head, one gets the impression the writer, who has just published his first book in 10 years, is equally anxious about meeting. In blue T-shirt, grey slacks and running shoes, Noyes, 45, looks away when asked difficult questions about his life's many dichotomies: about the occult-loving parents he had to leave at 15 and about the Chinese fiancée, a catalyst for many of the book's poems, but whom he also left when he returned to Canada after teaching in Bejing for a year in the mid-1990s. At first he lights cigarette after cigarette with nicotine-stained fingers, but when the questions turn more egg-headed and less probing, the cigarettes slow down and his gazes at the scraggly backyard poppies becomes less fixated.
"When you start writing a series of poems or a novel, you do have a sense of expansive freedom," Noyes says. "But as things develop that freedom constricts somewhat, the book starts telling you what to do and that's desirable, right? It takes on its own shape and propulsive force and you have less and less freedom as you go but also more excitement because if you're lucky you're tapping into a sort of source that isn't you exactly, it's something else."
It's the type of literary discussion writers love to indulge in, but it's also one Noyes excels at, adding "you know" at the end of every stanza, a sort of chummy inclusiveness rather than patronizing interrogative.
"When you start writing a series of poems or a novel, you do have a sense of expansive freedom," Noyes says. "But as things develop that freedom constricts somewhat, the book starts telling you what to do and that's desirable, right? It takes on its own shape and propulsive force and you have less and less freedom as you go but also more excitement because if you're lucky you're tapping into a sort of source that isn't you exactly, it's something else."
It's the type of literary discussion writers love to indulge in, but it's also one Noyes excels at, adding "you know" at the end of every stanza, a sort of chummy inclusiveness rather than patronizing interrogative.
Ghost Country is Noyes' third book, a revelatory collection of narrative poems that explore boundaries -- both cultural and domestic -- and the ensuing tensions that exist on either side of the borders. His poetry is unique for its prickly vulnerability that rubs against a startling penchant for reviving words and language assumed long lost or relegated to another more structured, non- poetic world. In Desire, he writes of a "daffily serious young woman" and the "re-educative labour" that comes with examination of failure. In Outsider he notes Chinese workers' "chonking chisels prying at the road wall and the trucks wallowing their shocks with unseemly loads."
In Lottery he is offended by a young innkeeper's offer of his sister as a xiaojie, then pauses "only to wriggle in the thought, Well, do I want a xiaojie?" He dismisses the idea not from any moral stance but because there is a fan dangerously close to the bed that might trim his thrashing toes.
In Lottery he is offended by a young innkeeper's offer of his sister as a xiaojie, then pauses "only to wriggle in the thought, Well, do I want a xiaojie?" He dismisses the idea not from any moral stance but because there is a fan dangerously close to the bed that might trim his thrashing toes.
It's that kind of rough edge that likely prompted Al Purdy to remark that Noyes was "a damn good poet" after Noyes connected with him, establishing a relationship that lasted until Purdy's death.
A fascination with language and culture (he's studied Turkish, [Arabic], and Mandarin), took Noyes to Bejing for a year to teach at a university and college. He fell in love with a student he met on a bus but, for a variety of reasons he prefers not to discuss -- and one he doesn't mind discussing: his young daughter was missing her dad -- he came back to Canada without his fiance.
He says he has been lucky to brush up against other languages because it has widened his sense of the possible. He dismisses the idea of bearing witness as a poetic imperative.
"Bearing witness has some element of judgment about it," he says. "It's more like you're finding out something about what is possible to do with language and that our language or languages is what is available to all of us and is its own reality, you know. As a writer, you like to make it look seamless and you're actually looking to transmit a direct experience, but ... I have found that all the good things in my writing come out of the relationships between words. It's a developed skill of putting words together; that is what enables you to see."
Having done nothing with a journalism degree, yet persevering to an MFA at UBC, Noyes taught creative writing at the University of Victoria ("I didn't think I was good at it"), worked as a millworker ("a very hard job but I was in great shape") and as a parking lot attendant (the low point in my writing/work career") before landing a much appreciated day job as a Ministry of Health policy analyst, where he has been for five years.
A fascination with language and culture (he's studied Turkish, [Arabic], and Mandarin), took Noyes to Bejing for a year to teach at a university and college. He fell in love with a student he met on a bus but, for a variety of reasons he prefers not to discuss -- and one he doesn't mind discussing: his young daughter was missing her dad -- he came back to Canada without his fiance.
He says he has been lucky to brush up against other languages because it has widened his sense of the possible. He dismisses the idea of bearing witness as a poetic imperative.
"Bearing witness has some element of judgment about it," he says. "It's more like you're finding out something about what is possible to do with language and that our language or languages is what is available to all of us and is its own reality, you know. As a writer, you like to make it look seamless and you're actually looking to transmit a direct experience, but ... I have found that all the good things in my writing come out of the relationships between words. It's a developed skill of putting words together; that is what enables you to see."
Having done nothing with a journalism degree, yet persevering to an MFA at UBC, Noyes taught creative writing at the University of Victoria ("I didn't think I was good at it"), worked as a millworker ("a very hard job but I was in great shape") and as a parking lot attendant (the low point in my writing/work career") before landing a much appreciated day job as a Ministry of Health policy analyst, where he has been for five years.
A poetry collection,
"That's what you've got to pay attention to, the texture of real life," he says. "Because that's what makes the books live, that's where the poetry is, in how things unfold in your real life."
Hurriya, was quickly produced after his return from China and then a 10- year stasis followed in which Noyes worked on a novel and fell in love again with poet Catherine Greenwood, whom he married in 2004. He says their lives together propel his writing."That's what you've got to pay attention to, the texture of real life," he says. "Because that's what makes the books live, that's where the poetry is, in how things unfold in your real life."