Sally O

Alberta Views, March 2010
Charles Noble is a name Albertans should know. A hundred years ago the southern Alberta town of Nobleford was named after his grandfather. A former footballer at the U of A (one who didn't go into provincial politics), Noble farms for half the year and reads and writes for the rest. Four decades and 10 of his works are collected in Sally O: In the Betsy Sense of the Word (Selected Poems and Manifesto).

Sally O can be read chronologically, beginning with Noble's lyric poetry of the 1970s, or as a manifesto first, with the poems as proofs. I found myself reading Sally 0 as a fellow Banff resident. Noble has lived part time in Canada's most famous mountain town for decades. His literary connection to Banff begins with an early collaboration with Banff's renowned man of letters Jon Whyte.

Noble's debut collection, Unfounded Knowledge (1972), published when he was 27, at times reminds me of Leonard Cohen's wry early poems.

I hear / the young married couple who live I next door through a wall I thin as this paper I have just turned out the light
I hear them I I don't think this writing/ will poke through.

Compare this to Cohen, from his debut Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956):

I heard of a man I who says words so beautifully I that if he only speaks their name / women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body I while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips, I it is because I hear a man climb the stairs and clear his throat outside the door.

Noble is noted for his long poems, such as the excerpt from Banff/Breaking (1984) that describes an amble down Banff Avenue, summer sun rising, 6:30 a.m. Noble seems to look at Banff from both sides now. There is the landscape, and there are the people. The enclosing compass of Rundle, Sulphur, Norquay, Cascade and Tunnel. Noble writes, “the mountain beauty is too good to write.” That may be so, but he still has a go. In Banff/Breaking, Noble circles the town with scenes of Banff's perennial late-night revelry. Prodigal sons and daughters from across the country making Banff part of their personal history.

He writes, “once in a while a new couple / pluck out their love from some bar, / marry and stay home . . . “ But then: “Banff's the place to wreck a marriage / they say.”

Also from Banff/Breaking: “the poem is meant to stay / in time, / the monument built low / with ears / is momentous.” A good poem is always in time, like music. But this stanza seems to speak against anthologies.

Noble has a poet's playfulness with words and (I suspect) mistrust of meanings. His collection ranges wildly, which makes for a lively read. Fluid prose paragraphs from Wormwood Vermouth, Warphistory (1995) are followed by single-word stanzas from Death Drive through Gaia Paris (2007), in which Noble takes the haiku in new directions.

The heaviest lifting in the collection is Noble's afterword, appendices and “Open Letter to Alberta Views” Here Noble goes after the big fish, the philosopher-kings that inform his poetics — Freud, Lacan, Hegel. Written in the footnote-studded style made popular by David Foster Wallace, these endnotes are full of verdant digressions.
Reading Noble's Sally O I was pleasantly reminded that the poets are still among us. In our province, poetry is like the family farm, all around, continuing to disappear.