Twenty years after his death, Alden Nowlan is the supreme deity in the Maritime literary pantheon. His seminal poetry espouses a tough, growly, semi-formal aesthetic of shy alienation and tenderness, unafraid of rhyme and conscious of metre. It is violent, and the ache it articulates is a pastoral groan; moose are slaughtered in lyric, farmboys exchange their rural prisons for bank teller kiosks, and his love poems flare amongst a brutal cruelty. Yet the reputation of this giant of letters is relegated to his home region; there is little of Alden Nowlan to be found elsewhere in the greater Canadian context. It is as if the poet really were akin to the bear, the animal he was most often compared to during his life, confined to his natural habitat. The Maritimes cheerlead their native son's rise to prominence, but they also serve as the repository for his reputation. Nowlan's limited second-hand radius perplexes collectors and admirers alike, their sense of frustration begging the question: was Nowlan's regional authenticity a rate-limiting factor for general acceptance?
Famous in New Brunswick means: Famous in New Brunswick?
Nowlan received the "regionalist" epithet many times over the course of his career. In their introduction to The Selected Poems Of Alden Nowlan , Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier announce the generally accepted opinion of Nowlan as "someone who, because he wrote so intimately about the people and place where he lived, was not considered a writer of the first rank." Being called a regionalist for the quoted reasons is like being insulted for writing well, so well that this success is perceived to limit a writer's appeal to only like-minded individuals. In presuming to make the 'regionalist' argument, the critic does more than slander the artist; he extends his distaste to the reader, who must also be 'regionalist' -code for unsophisticated- if such fiction and poetry could appeal to them. In such circumstances, the critic metamorphoses into a snob. Why blame the audience because of its obvious cultural resemblance with the poems and stories in question? That they enjoy the material may be an indicator of quality control, wherein the local audience accepts the local product as acceptable for wider dissemination.
If regionalism is a literary crime, it is an offense perpetrated by all great writers. Novels and stories do not occur on a nameless plane of nowhere. They must happen in a time or place. Excepting the most militantly postmodern, all stories have a setting. And yet, because of the backwoods subject material, archaic in comparison, for example, to the erotic spiritualism of Leonard Cohen or the logorrheic hyperkinesis of Irving Layton, his detractors easily dismissed the art because of its rural countenance. This amounts to critical bankruptcy. "Regionalist" is an oppressive term designed to cinch borders around an artist from society's margins; it has no value as a descriptor other than signaling the decrepitude of one's analysis.
In the best sense, Nowlan is guilty as charged: he does indeed have a strong sense of place, evoking memorable characters like Warren Pryor, with "axe-hewn hands upon the paper bills", and the Cranston pair, whom "Hainesville calls... old bachelors,/ [who] live with their parents on a potato farm." Nowlan's sense of place doesn't just rely upon setting; it is also supplied by a deceptively simple narrative persona. The persona is familiar, colloquial, and utterly local, a voice as likely to be heard from a neighbor than a major poet.
"Warren Pryor" is seminal in its now-antique description of a farmboy's deprivation and futile triumph, a prototypical character in a Nowlanian Maritimes that no longer exists. Pryor's story seems standard enough at first: as the object of his parent's hope, he compounds their deprivations so that he may have opportunity.
When every pencil meant a sacrifice,
his parents boarded him at the school in town,
slaving to free him from the stony fields,
the meagre acreage that bore them down...
As a result of their scrimping, Pryor later in the poem obtains work in "the Bank". Note the lack of elaboration here. A reader doesn't need to know which bank; implicit in the poem is an image of the rural Pryor family, living outside a small town with a single bank. Leaving out specifics paradoxically increases our understanding of Warren. Nowlan then reverses the poem's polarity with the devastating lines,
And he said nothing. Hard and serious
like a young bear inside his teller's cage,
his axe-hewn hands upon the paper bills,
aching with empty strength and throttled rage.
Poems like this served to cement Nowlan's reputation as a "regionalist" - not only was he describing Maritime life, he was skewering a sensibility that believed the "young bear" was better off after the emigration and he was honouring the penury of Warren's origins - all grave crimes against the conventional, urban, view of economic improvement.
Clearly a sense of place is important in Nowlan's work, but how central is it? A cursory scan through the poem titles in his Selected tells the tale: "Saint John River". "Britain Street." "At the Hainesville Cemetary." On the face of it, much of Nowlan's output has a narrative situated in the Maritimes. However, a closer look reveals that this Maritime focus is front-loaded into the early part of his poetic development. As time passed, Nowlan increasingly came to employ a more generic locale in a poetics of reflection, perhaps in response to the regionalist epithet.
When examining Nowlan's literary life after death, it is important to consider the schism that divides Nowlan's poetic career into its two phases, early and late, because both Nowlanian modes were very different and consequently cultivated two different audiences.
Nowlan's career acquired two types of readership; one that prefers the restrained formalism of the early period, and another that enjoys the simpler narrative pleasures of the later period. Rarer are those that profess admiration for both phases; his fans usually divide into two vehement groups. The late Al Purdy, in his autobiography Coming to Ameliasburgh, is on record as an Early; Robert Bly, in his introduction to Nowlan's Playing The Jesus Game, is a firm Latecomer. As a poet with two followings, Nowlan is further insulated from the criticism that he is solely applicable to a single audience.
The Earlies are predominantly poets. No wonder. What made Nowlan's early work fresh and remarkable was his skewed adoption of standard conventions: Nowlan favoured a loose, non-capering metre; he liked hard vowels and sharp consonants, the base material of Maritime diction; and he preferred unobtrusive rhyme. Early Nowlan was not a revolutionary in terms of technique, being part of a general movement away from formalism and towards free verse. Yet there is one area in which he distinguishes himself: Nowlan packs into his poems an awesome amount of narrative despite his exclusively lyric form.
Free verse is the choice medium for anecdote, allowing the poet a less-constraining way to tell his story. Nowlan instead uses stanzaic convention to his advantage; his storytelling is strengthened and made more memorable-even memorizable!-by masterful use of rhyme and metre. "Warren Pryor" is but one example. "Beginning" is another. In this poem, Nowlan considers his own conception in three dense stanzas of abab rhymescheme:
From that they found most lovely, most abhorred,
my parents made me: I was born like sound
stroked from the fiddle to become the ward
of tunes played on the bear-trap and the hound.
In these four lines, Nowlan introduces the ambiguous set piece of the aftermath of a couple's copulation, the "that" of the first line. This act occurred perhaps to a music that was once joyous (the "fiddle" of the third line) but which is now predatory and harsh (the "bear-trap" and "hound" of the fourth line.) Thus the poet is cast as both the product of love and shame (the sex is described as "lovely" and "abhorred"). In terms of compressed narrative, Nowlan writes four short, formal lines that describe the arrival of a child and the circumstances of that arrival. The poem continues:
Not one, but seven entrances they gave
each to each other, and he laid her down
the way the sun comes out. Oh, they were brave,
and then like looters in a burning town.
The metaphoric intensity in these lines is difficult to parse, but the reader gets the sense that potential disgrace did not trouble the lovers much. The man was tender in his attention, but also implacable (a sunrise is romantic, but it is also unstoppable). The image of the sun provides a benedictory illumination upon the lovers but it also emits a searing light: the lovers are "brave", and so they know that they transgress against societal norms. Thus they have sex quickly, and haphazardly, "like looters in a burning town." The poem concludes:
Their mouths left bruises, starting with the kiss
and ending with the proverb, where they stayed;
never in making was there a brighter bliss,
followed by darker shame. Thus I was made.
Nowlan earlier denotes the looter-like violence that belies this couple's transience, but curiously he invokes biblical overtones (the "proverb" of original sin, perhaps) in order to provide a context for the act and a sanctified "bliss", but also a consequent guilt (the "darker shame."). Religion has guilt as its corollary to joy. Religion also tries to reconcile ethic with consequence, and so the child-cum-poet writes a lyrical reflection upon his conception, ending the poem with a loop back to this same premise.
If this poem were unpacked into free verse form, it would require a much greater length in order to convey the same content. The compressed drama of two illicit lovers would require chapter-length investigation along unnecessary detail!
In the abrupt break from this formal Nowlan to the free verse Nowlan, there is an accompanying alteration in intent: the poet not only exchanged styles, he also aimed for a different effect. Nowlan recognized that his published efforts thus far languished in mimeographed magazines and small-circulation chapbooks, so he consciously undertook a more proletarian poetics. He decided that he would write poems that could be admired as much for their overt poeticisms as for their unadorned ramblings, in essence a kind of popular poetry. As biographer Patrick Toner writes in If I Could Turn and Meet Myself, the first published life of Nowlan, "... he made a conscious, clear-headed decision to sacrifice praise from the ivory tower so that people who would not normally read poetry and fiction would read his."
This position gestated in the early poems, but it became the modus operandi of his later work. Latecomers love Nowlan not only for his identification with rural subjects, but also for his celebration of them as a personal troubadour of their struggles and foibles. Nowlan evolved from what many believed was a backwoods poetics reliant upon traditional verse forms and into a free verse mode that was to consciously occupy him for the rest of his career. He decided to appeal to popular sentiment, leaving behind the ornamentations that made his early phase so remarkable. This was a real risk-as a poet writing poetry for an uncomplicated target audience, he embraced a public that increasingly was alienated from verse. Gone were the formal frills of his early work, so integral to its initial success. Exchanged for Early poetic devices was a bold bare line that could be taken literally; often his poems were channeled through a narrative persona that closely resembled Nowlan himself, this narrator providing us with his thoughts about random subjects.
Nowlan's great task was to convey the poet's message in an easily understood way, without grand abstraction. This was a radically egalitarian undertaking. Nowlan, on the vanguard to wed poetry to the vernacular, attempted poetry as an informal talk between poet and audience. Not purely confessional, Nowlan instead wrote monologues. The poems that fit this model are numerous: "It's Good to Be Here", "On the Barrens", "Driving a Hard Bargain", and "An Exchange of Gifts":
As long as you read this poem
I will be writing it.
I am writing it here and now
before your eyes,
although you can't see me.
Perhaps you'll dismiss this
as a verbal trick,
the joke is you're wrong;
The real trick is your pretending
this is something fixed and solid,
external to us both.
I tell you better:
I will keep on
writing this poem for you
even after I'm dead.
In this poem, as in the others written during the second phase of his career, Nowlan directly addresses the reader. In this way, he sacrifices form for popular appeal. Yet not all of his later work is as successful. In numerous late poems, loquacity overwhelms the essential message. The risk of his policy of deceptive simplicity is to oversimplify, to lose art's subterfuge, causing the poetry to be not only plainly rendered but also rather plain. Nowlan did overly indulge himself on occasion, too much a convert to his own way of thinking about poetry. This frequently caused him to versify about mundane matters, and he consequently failed to escape jotting down banal, unprofound reflections.
The common thread bridging the binary of Nowlan's career was the resonant honesty of his artifice; when successful, his poetry was empathic. In his early poems, Nowlan was wholly given over to capturing his subjects; in the later poems, Nowlan himself was the subject/narrator, consciously addressing his audience, alerting them to a deceptively simple observation about himself that was a well-observed comment on the weakness of the human condition.
Nowlan's manifest intimacy and his self-exposure for audience enlightenment should destroy any lingering qualms about his appeal outside the Maritimes. His early period is invulnerable to charges of "regionalism" because of its humanism, and his later period, best summed up as one man's daily truck with the world, is as universal as art gets. Nowlan surrendered a heaping helping of himself to his prose and poetry, displayed all of his guises (comic, tragic) in an ambitious enterprise: write to embrace all of humanity.
The irony is that, despite his efforts, Nowlan's legacy resides in the Maritimes, the tradition-bound locale he tried to imaginatively transcend later in his life as a poet. The audience he hoped to reach is today impervious to the bygone depictions of his early period, and also to the guilelessness of his late period. Only his homeland appreciates his early anachronisms and late monologues, and so here I am, adopting one of Alden's favourite guises: that of prophet, spreading the word.
iHouse of Anansi Press, 1996
Shane Neilson is a writer from New Brunswick.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading