Steve Noyes is the author of seven collections of poetry. Among them are Ghost Country (Brick, 2006), Rainbow Stage–Manchuria (Oolichan, 2011) and small data (Frog Hollow, 2014.) His chapbook The Conveyor won the 2024 bpNichol Prize. Noyes holds a PhD from the University of Kent, and lives on Vancouver Island.
You can read Earth in the April 2025 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
I wrote “Earth” because, like so many, I am anxious about climate change and the inadequate response by governments. I have long loathed the people responsible for running the war, greed and pollution machine. William Burroughs warned us about them in the sixties, but we wouldn’t listen and it’s proving difficult to stop them. There seems a straightforward relationship between those political ideas and the poem, but I didn’t realize that connection until well into composing it. The poem emerged because of a memory, probably from my teens, of a couple of houses on the Red River in Winnipeg whose property was being eroded to the point that the houses were in danger of falling into the river. That is the core of the poem. Those houses. The ending of the poem encourages accepting a wider ambit of the metaphor.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
This is not so easy to answer. In general, initial lines and ideas come to me just announce themselves unmistakably as poems. They come accompanied by a rising thrill of possibility and an inner whisper: “That could be a poem.” They do not recur and haunt me over years as the idea for a fiction might; although, who knows, perhaps I have killed off many novels by turning them into poems. “Earth” is written in couplets because the first few lines occurred to me that way. In an action that moves forward in time, couplets are good for evoking processes in stages, for little leaps in time or twists in theme, for centering each stanza around an image, and for capturing the dialogue later in the poem.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I like John Donne and I return often to “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”. Similarly, Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man.” Al Purdy’s long poem In Search of Owen Roblin also means a lot to me, and may have affected the sort of narrative poetry I started writing in my 20s.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I would pursue cadence and groove by trying to become a drummer.
How do you revise your work?
I let a little time go by after the first draft and then I read it and note my disappointment at ‘empty’ lines, lines with nothing interesting to them. I look for ways to make things clearer to the reader. I look for places where I’m trying too hard.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Well, since I’m probably not going to get a modelling contract like Amanda Gorman, I equate success with publishing books, which is getting harder for everyone. I also like to look back at what I’ve published, and sometimes I’m pleasurably surprised, and I think, “That’s pretty good.” That’s a sort of success. I also like to make my books different from each other–to try something new. That was the impulse behind writing a long poem about a fictional rock group (“Rainbow Stage”) and the Chinese poems in Morbidity & Ornament. Success is having the audacity to play.
That said, I was grateful to win the bpNichol Prize and to get a few grants over the years. As 10 cc sang, “Art for art’s sake / Money for God’s sake.”
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
I recently loved the film “Universal Language” by the director Matthew Rankin. A hilarious, surreal movie in the Farsi language set in Winnipeg–who would have predicted that?
What are you working on now?
A series of poems incorporating my Muslim and Arabic knowledge. I’m experimenting with a new and aleatoric (using chance as a tool) way of composing these poems.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
That depends on how you choose to proceed. Sometimes the impulse is quite deliberate. “I really should write a poem about X.” Sometimes it’s playing around with an image or the sounds of words. Sometimes it’s happenstance that catalyzes something. Or a memory has a trap-door that drops you down into another memory, and another. Often my poems begin with something someone else has said, something overheard, that struck me as original then, and has resurfaced now.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
The music of Roxy Music (Bryan Ferry’s lyrics), Steely Dan, The Guess Who. The paintings of Pieter Bruegel.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I don’t. These days, I make space for researching a novel-in-progress. In the midst of that, I write poems when I have to, when it comes over me, like a fever.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I am always inspired by the Arabic of the Qur’an. Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob. Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
I am also inspired by Catherine Greenwood’s example as a poet. To think I have lived with this fastidious and powerful artist for more than 20 years. What good fortune, mashallah.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
I’m not sure, but several people told me way back when to take more time with a poem, to revise, let the poem mature, if you like, and that has probably helped a lot.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I used to belong to a writer’s group for a few years and it was a great group. I correspond with a few poets: Steve McOrmond, Catherine Owen, John O’Neill. I go to poetry readings. I have reviewed many poetry collections and appreciate it when someone reviews one of mine.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
Again, difficult to answer with precision, but I remember Robert Kroetsch reading his poems in my 11th grade English class, and I thought that was pretty cool. I was stupid enough to think I could write poems as good as the ones in our Canadian poetry textbook. I was wrong. A couple of years later, I advertised in The Winnipeg Sun as a poet-for-hire and only had one customer. I wrote a terrible sonnet for her. In 1982 or 83 I took Christopher Levenson’s poetry writing class at Carleton University and started to learn something.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
Right now, I am experimenting with alternatives to the narrative poem, as I mentioned. It has always baffled me that Wallace Stevens dazzles so much that his language transcends the ostensible subjects of his poems. That’s something to aspire to.