But he was born in Sudbury in 1968 and lived here until 1986 when he moved away for university. Recently, Noonan visited his mother in Garson after having not visited the city “for a fair amount of time,” he wrote to NorthernLife.ca this week.
“I was moved to think more than usual about what made Sudbury the place that it was when I was growing up there, what it has contributed to the person I became (for good or ill) and how it had grown to become a little more like everyplace else (as has happened everywhere in the internet age),” Noonan wrote.
NorthernLife.ca was struck by the strong images in the poem — and the lack of clichéd metaphors about the glory of nature, which so often suffuse artwork about the North — but also by the tone.
Many of us in Northern Ontario think of it as the place people leave — especially young people, who depart by the thousands every year for school and only a fraction ever return — not the place people often move to. Noonan’s poem is also somewhat of a lament for a darker, dirtier Sudbury, a pre-regreened Sudbury.
Noonan doesn’t seem to be pining for those years — few would — but he does seem to be saying that, for a Sudburian who was away for years and returned, the city seems to have lost some of its individuality. It’s an observation tinged with an adult’s nostalgia for childhood memories, though, not a criticism (we think).
We invite you to give “Epic Working Class Poem” a read. Be aware, there is some foul language used in the poem.
If you like it, check out more of Jeff Noonan’s work at his blog.
Epic Working Class Poem
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man.
I
Earth,
with the money extracted
and sent down South,
is just this blistered mass,
prime matter heaped beside railway tracks,
far from discriminating eyes.
But does that prevent
me, with broader tastes,
from suggesting (and not in jest),
that it is not waste,
but sculpture made by hands
that had no intention,
as they drilled and blasted,
crushed and roasted,
separated and poured,
colluded with the random geometry
of cooling and tumbling,
to produce something
that I am compelled to admire
here,
on this road,
that is quite literally,
the end of the line?
II
Grown
in the North.
Beards and bear piss blueberries,
rhubarb and Blezzard Valley potatoes;
these thin acidic soils
will not suffice,
I fear,
to attract network attention.
Unless,
in my long absence,
by grace of global warming blessing,
the sins of frost-bite winds
have been redeemed
with produce more exotic,
for your weekend farmer’s market,
just one more token of a type
now found everywhere,
and locally!
III
City,
perpetually off-balance,
wobbling atop granite pullulations
that seem alive,
although they aren’t.
Stubbornly, they refuse to hide
their still blackened surface from tourists,
otherwise impressed.
They used to say:
“It looks just like the moon!”
[“Really, lady, have you been to the fuckin’ moon?”].
Buzz Aldrin has and he,
il miglio fabbro,
saw and said it best:
“Desolation. Magnificent desolation.”
Not everything beautiful, you see,
needs to be green and pretty,
and no one should be ashamed,
of how they had to make their living.
IV
Work
you never had to live
is easy to romanticise.
The too-young dead might disagree,
if they could speak.
But only the living can tell stories
of heroic union battles
not to be repeated anytime soon.
Somewhere,
a dusty archive proves
this place once had some fight.
But today all you hear
from the old timer in Rudy’s,
coming in for a coffee,
and almost the best burger in the city,
is defeat:
“Hey Petey, where the hell is everyone?
I just drove past Little Stobie
and there was hardly a goddamn person on the line.”
V
Cold,
there is something clarifying about it
that you have to breathe to understand,
something that maybe unhinges a man,
and makes him think
that his monstrous trapper’s hat,
face of fox and tail of wolf
[I shit you not]
would intimidate the twelve year olds,
and ensure victory
for his son’s side.
But no one traps a loon,
whose perfect melancholy
is never sung,
until he’s sure that work is over,
and the sky’s quiescent purple
has settled us on the dock,
to pour the rye and ginger,
and drink
a toast to each of us,
to the cliches we once were,
and loved.
VI
It is summer now.
And the night is warm.
And no one needs to rush.
