| they were all at Skoki for a week
and watched in awe
a Grizzly Bear on the way in
chase catch and eat a squirrel
– from Doubt’s Boots by Charles Noble
A hundred years ago, Charles Noble’s grandfather homesteaded in southern Alberta. Today, Charles Noble and his younger brother Bryan farm eight sections, or more than 2,000 hectares, outside of Nobleford, Alberta – the town named after their family. Their various crops glimmer poetically as Noble lists them off – spring wheat, winter wheat, peas, lentils, canola. When Noble is not helping his brother get a crop in, or harvest it, he’s back in his small cottage off Banff Avenue.
Noble first arrived in Banff in 1971, after studying philosophy, contributing poems to the campus review and playing varsity football at the University of Alberta. But like a lot of students, Noble admits, "I didn’t start any serious reading until I got out of university." In Banff, he began spending time with Jon Whyte, while corresponding with John O. Thompson. Together, in 1973, they published their collection of poems, Three.
Fast forward 30 years to the Saltlik on Bear Street, and Noble is treated like an underground poet laureate. They refer to his spot at the bar as his "office," Noble says, "because I bring a book in here most nights for an hour or two." Noble is known by all the staff, who smile and greet him with a casual, "Hi, Charles." He knows them all by name, too, and can tell you that the bartender reads Orwell, or what stages the waitresses are at in their university studies.
It is early evening when we sit down to discuss Noble’s eighth book, Doubt’s Boots: Even Doubt’s Shadow, published earlier this year as the first title in the new series Open Spaces from the University of Calgary Press.
"My esthetic is digression, then recapitulation," says Noble. "I like theoretical things, random observation, the attempt to be empirical, outside of oneself. In the poem, I am organizing, spinning out a world, and then allowing it to be punctured by this other world going on."
In Doubt’s Boots, references to Adorno or Spinoza are counterbalanced with Auden or Eliot. But Noble plays trickster with the old philosophical guard, too. He writes, "the argument good/about fifty years old hat/notwithstanding Pound’s news/that stains." He also mixes in artists, writers and photographers from Banff, past and present. So, Alex, Ernie, Jon and Myra people the poem with first-name familiarity, while Foucault, Hegel and Kant hang in the background, ready to cause theoretical trouble.
In the brief forward to the book, Noble writes, "Doubt’s Boots is a long poem that gathers itself as it scatters to chance…." A page later he concludes, "with its correcting seal of silence ever broken by the erratic singing of junk bon mots or motes, word particles going uncollapsed again, puffed-up and everywhere as waves. Step into the poem, and drown in the ocean."
Doubt’s Boots feels like an ocean at times, with its ebb and flow of stanzas. "The operative rule of the poem is that there is a voice in a fixed position," says Noble. In Banff, the fixed position is found in a stream of consciousness in which he writes, "sushi bar pizza place wine store/liquor store shirt shop/film lab card store something else/and the Rose and Crown on top on top of that."
At the end of our long, leisurely talk, Noble says of Doubt’s Boots, "I don’t want to govern the way it’s received or read. I still like the perceptual world and a wild, free play of language." |
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