David Graham's POETIC LICENSE 2018 August No. 27
​Northern Light: Alden Nowlan
 

It’s often said Americans are woefully ignorant of poetry in other languages, even in translation. Sure, a few giants always do manage to break through the walls of our obliviousness (Neruda, Akhmatova, Rumi, Szymborska) but for the most part it’s a fair enough accusation.
 
Less often noted is how ignorant many of us are of poetry written in other Anglophone nations. There are of course practical reasons for this situation. Books from Canada, Jamaica, India, South Africa, Ireland, Barbados, Australia, and other countries where English is widely spoken can be hard to find and expensive to import. Few bookstores and libraries in the U.S. carry many, American anthologies typically ignore them, and reviews are few and far between. Even if one is possessed of an urge to learn more about the poets of, say, New Zealand, where would one start? Without the sort of research few of us undertake outside of school, how does one go about discovering the best?
 
Thus it was, back in the early 1980s, that I found myself asking a poet I’d recently come to know, Eric Trethewey, what Canadian poets I should be reading. Rick Trethewey, who unfortunately has since passed away, was a very fine poet who I’d learned was born and raised in Nova Scotia. (In case you’re wondering, yes, he’s related to former American Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, his daughter.) To be honest, aside from Trethewey himself, about the only Canadian poets I had really read back then were Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood. Maybe I could have named one or two others. Rick didn’t hesitate for an instant, but offered just a single name: fellow Nova Scotian Alden Nowlan. (Nowlan was I believe still alive at the time, but not for long; he died at age 50 in 1983.)
 
It was one of the best recommendations I’ve ever received.
 
For all the reasons noted above, my quest to learn more about Nowlan was challenging. He’s rarely anthologized, even today, on our side of the border. Most of his books were published by Canadian presses I’d never heard of, and at the time most of them were either out of print or unavailable in the U.S. (There were no Amazon, Bookfinder, or ABE Books websites then.) U.S. bookstores certainly didn’t carry his work. To this day, I don’t believe I’ve ever run across Nowlan in an American bookstore. In the end, I had to seek out large university libraries with extensive poetry collections to get my hands on some of his books.
 
I should emphasize that it wasn’t as if Nowlan was some obscurity--except to American readers. In his native country, by the end of his too-short life, he was widely read, heavily influential, and quite well recognized. For instance, in 1967 he had won the prestigious Governor-General’s Award, the Canadian equivalent to something like the Pulitzer later won by Rick Trethewey’s daughter. Not counting selected editions, he eventually produced a dozen or so collections of poems, plus a number of editions of fiction, non-fiction, and drama, and a considerable amount of journalism, which for most of his adult life was his bread and butter job.
 
For some reason I persisted in my quest over many years, turning up a poem here, and poem there, and occasionally driving to a large university to raid their library for Nowlan books. After more than a decade of this hunt, and by then with the help of the internet, in 1998 I finally acquired a whole book for my personal library. It had been published two years earlier by the House of Anansi Press in Concord, Ontario [Alden Nowlan: Selected Poems. Ed. Patrick Lane & Lorna Crozier].  This book remains your best bet if you want an introductory overview to Nowlan’s work. But to my delight, in the fall of 2017 the very first comprehensive collected poems finally appeared [Alden Nowlan: Collected Poems. Ed. Brian Bartlett. Goose Lane Editions]. It’s a 681 page monster, contains all of his individual published volumes, and is full of wonders. I’ve been exploring and savoring it for months now, finding something fascinating on nearly every page.
 
Aside from urging you, gentle readers, to go pick up one of these two excellent books forthwith, I’d like to devote the rest of my space this month to placing Nowlan in context, and illustrating just a few of the reasons why I find him to be one of most compelling 20th Century poets I know.
 
Nowlan was born in 1933 in rural Nova Scotia at the height of the Great Depression. His mother was 15 years old, and soon abandoned him. His father, twice the age of his mother, was an alcoholic who had trouble holding down a job. Nowlan grew up in the direst poverty, raised mostly by his grandparents. He dropped out of school after fourth grade, but eventually managed to give himself an impressive education at public libraries. He went to work at age 12 in a variety of menial jobs; at age 19 he lied about his nonexistent credentials to land a job as a newspaper reporter. For most of the rest of his life he made his living as a journalist.
 
Out of this difficult background he wrote a poetry that is clear-eyed, unsentimental but emotionally powerful, and remarkably honest. Like William Carlos Williams, he often tackles what Robert Coles termed “the great unmentionables”—uncomfortable truths about social class, gender relations, politics, and more. Like many American poets born in the 1920s and 1930s, he first mastered traditional rhyme and meter before shifting to a conversational free verse for his later work. His early work is musical, dense with image and drama, and well worth reading. But it is his later free verse that made his reputation. In his best poems you hardly notice the art; look, for example, at how he opens “The Social Worker’s Poem”:


“You know them better,” said the girl,
whose face glowed with benevolence as from
too much cosmetics, speaking of the poor.
“What can you tell me that might help?”
She planned to do summer social work in a slum.
 

Easy, conversational, direct with an undertone of something darker (benevolence as akin to “too much cosmetics” is a nicely done jab at do-gooders), the poem seems straightforward enough so far. Then the speaker, who in most of his poems is indistinguishable from the author, begins his reply with something neither social worker nor reader is probably expecting:
 

Do it as a bribe to God, I answered.
Do it because you hate
morons and dirty underwear. Do it because
you are one of those a sense of power causes
to breathe deeply and exhale aloud as if
it were a richer oxygen. Do it to cure
or satisfy some obscure sexual deviation.
 

Not the kind of answer the naive young social worker wants, surely, but in it you can hear the whole history of poor people’s resentment of the unwitting condescension and general cluelessness of those higher on the economic ladder. And the poem ends with the sort of unvarnished honesty for which Nowlan became famous in his country:
 
And remember, Miss, your admonishments
they'll find as irksome as
you’re finding these of mine
 
Take my word for it. They’re human.
Most of them will hate you
 
Throughout his career Nowlan wrote many poems, on many topics, with this sort of bite. Sometimes it shows up in passing, as in “What Color is Manitoba?,” which begins:


My son, in Grade III or IV
and assigned to make a map,
asked us, what colour is
Manitoba? and refused to believe
it didn't matter, provided
it wasn't the same
as Saskatchewan and Ontario.
I remember his face.
I've seldom observed
such constrained rage
except in small children
and university professors.

 
Anyone who’s ever sat through a debate at a college faculty meeting will recognize the truth of that last analogy: in our stiff politeness not quite masking rage, we do indeed resemble frustrated children. But the poem isn’t simply a satire on academics. From there it ranges widely through history both personal and public (the Boer War, the conflict of Hutu and Tutsi, George Washington during the French and Indian War, etc.) The poem finally becomes a wide-ranging meditation on the difficulties of generalization, how hard it is to understand anything at second hand, particularly the experience of poverty if you haven’t lived it. The poem concludes with a straightforward recognition of the power of tribal identity:

 
My brothers and sisters
fill the slums of every
city in North America.
(God knows this is no boast.)
The poor, whom the Russians
used to call the Dark People,
as if it were in the blood.
I know their footsteps.
We meet each other's eyes.

 
What seemed at the beginning like a winsome portrait of childhood innocence has turned into something much more complex and open-ended. Imagine, for instance, that final stanza without the sentence in parenthesis, or the careful “as if” qualifying the remark about “the Dark People,” and you’ll see what I mean. Nowlan pulls off this sort of deceptively simple maneuver often in his best poems.
 
Like “What Color is Manitoba?”, his poems often turn in surprising ways. “The Broadcaster’s Poem” opens by describing the disquieting feeling a radio DJ experiences, all alone in a sterile studio in the middle of the night, speaking words into a microphone. He was never any good at it, the speaker declares, “mostly because [his] peculiar / metaphysical stupidity” made him doubt that anyone could be listening to words uttered “in a room no bigger / than an ordinary bathroom.” By the poem’s end he is describing yet another job, that of a newspaper reporter on the scene of a horrific wreck. A train has struck a car, killing three people, “one of whom / was beheaded.” It’s all detailed in the matter-of-fact tone of a reporter. But what strikes him most is that in the wrecked car the radio is still playing:

 
I thought about places
the disc jockey's voice goes
and the things that happen there
and of how impossible it would be for him
to continue if he really knew.

 
So it turns out that this speaker’s “metaphysical stupidity” isn’t so stupid after all, but a typically Nowlan-ish way of pondering the essential oddity of sending one’s words out—in broadcast, news article, or poem—into the unknown, to be absorbed or ignored by strangers we will never meet.
 
Nowlan’s thematic and stylistic range is wide, and I haven’t space here to illustrate all of his themes. He wrote many portrait poems, love lyrics, historical pieces, and philosophical poems about religion, mortality, marriage, and more. He can be pithily aphoristic (“My country has no history, only a past”; “The easiest thing to do for a Cause / is to die for it”) and as skilled at vernacular drama as Robert Frost. One perfect example of the latter occurs in “The Red Wool Shirt,” spoken in the voice of a fisherman’s wife who is about to learn that she has lost both her husband and son (or  father?) to a shipwreck. She’s in the yard hanging clothes on the line. Look with what absolute sureness and understatement Nowlan handles the scene:
 
 
Then I looked up and saw
Charlie Sullivan coming
towards me.
He’d always had a funny walk.
It was as if he was walking
sideways.
                 That walk of his
always made me smile except
for some reason
I didn’t smile
that day.
                 He had on a hat
with salmon flies
that’d he’d tied himself
in the brim.
 
Poor old Charlie.
 
It’s bad, Mary, he said.
I finished hanging up the red wool
shirt
       and then I said,
Charlie, it’s not
both of them, and he said,
Mary, I’m afraid it is.
 
And that was that.
 
 
Nowlan is especially astute in dramatizing the complexities and confusions of what we’ve come more recently to call “toxic masculinity.”  Poems like “The Rites of Manhood” demonstrate why reviewers and critics often reach for words like “honest,” “compassionate,” and “empathetic” when describing Nowlan:
 
 
The Rites of Manhood
 

It's snowing hard enough that the taxis aren't running.
I'm walking home, my night's work finished,
long after midnight, with the whole city to myself,
when across the street I see a very young American sailor
standing over a girl who's kneeling on the sidewalk
and refuses to get up although he's yelling at her
to tell him where she lives so he can take her there
before they both freeze. The pair of them are drunk
and my guess is he picked her up in a bar
and later they got separated from his buddies
and at first it was great fun to play at being
an old salt at liberty in a port full of women with
hinges on their heels, but by now he wants only to
find a solution to the infinitely complex
problem of what to do about her before he falls into
the hands of the police or the shore patrol
-- and what keeps this from being squalid is
what's happening to him inside:
if there were other sailors here
it would be possible for him
to abandon her where she is and joke about it
later, but he's alone and the guilt can't be
divided into small forgettable pieces;
he's finding out what it means
to be a man and how different it is
from the way that only hours ago he imagined it.
 
 
Many of Nowlan’s greatest poems (“The Bull Moose,” “He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded,” “On the Barrens”) are a little long to quote in a brief essay. But here is one compact example of his many wonderful poems on nature, particularly the often conflicted human relationship with animals. His lyrical gift is considerable:
 
 
The Fox
 

For weeks I’ve heard him barking in the woods
that half encircle the oatfield, each bark
set in a space of silence, like a word
printed on paper. Dogs are drivellers
or blusterers, no doubt because they speak
mostly to humans. This could be the cry
chosen to signal other warriors.
 
A fox, I’ve seen him twice, but only when,
preoccupied with something, I’ve looked up
for no particular reason and seen
a flash of flame just as it has been snuffed out.
 
 
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Nowlan’s prolific and wide-ranging work, naturally. Let me end by quoting two more of my own favorites. “Back to Earth” is a very winning, humor-filled piece from late in his life, when Nowlan—much to his own surprise—had begun to achieve some real fame in Canada.
 
 
 
Back to Earth


Three hundred people,
everyone of them loving me,
that night I read verses.
I don’t apologize for this.
I wanted to hug everybody.
 
Boarding the flight for home,
I smiled at customs officers,
tried to joke with policemen,
inquired after the health
of the stewardesses,
 
nodded at anyone
who looked me in the eye,
winked at rude children;
if I’d met a snake in the aisle
I’d have stooped to pat it.
 
Saw my luggage searched
a second and a third time,
was required to show
some identification
other than my ticket,
and was viewed with
universal suspicion:
one child hid his face
in his mother’s dress
and blubbered, another
stuck out his tongue at me.
 
The steward said
I’d have to stop
being so friendly.
The other passengers
were complaining.
 
That part about
the steward is a lie.
But if I hadn't run out of
love, shortly after take-off,
it might have come to that.
 
 
 
And finally, a poem that serves both as a fatherly love lyric and a sort of ars poetica. In this spare, profoundly simple (or simply profound) piece, it’s easy to see why so many readers not only admired Alden Nowlan, but came to love him.
 
 
 
Johnnie’s Poem

​
Look! I've written a poem!
Johnnie says
and hands it to me
                                    and it's about
                                    his grandfather dying
                                    last summer, and me
                                    in the hospital
and I want to cry,
don't you see, because it doesn't matter
if it's not very good:
                                      what matters is he knows
and it was me, his father, who told him
                                      you write poems about what
                                      you feel deepest and hardest.

​​©2018 David Graham