“Warren Pryor” Alden Nowlan (1933-1983)
Canadian poet and novelist, Alden Nowlan was born in Nova Scotia and
spent much of his career in New Brunswick. His collection, Bread, wine
and salt, won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1967.
Nowlan started writing at eleven, dropped out of school in grade five,
yet later became a journalist working for the Observer and The
Telegraph Journal in St John, New Brunswick. He was a large (6'3")
burly man, a hard drinker, who, because of his difficult family situation,
tended to invent the facts of his life. He came to poetry through life
experience and reading. Greg Cook characterizes Alden Nowlan as "the
bravest of Canadian writers."
Nowlan's childhood, "a pilgrimage through Hell," proved to be strong fodder for the force of
his poems. Although he sought to write accessible poetry to be enjoyed by ordinary men and
women, his work transcends its regionalism, its populist roots, and its seemingly commonplace
incidents. He wrote, as Eli Mandel noted, poignantly of the ironies, poverty, and repression of
small town life, yet his poetry transcended these limits.
Nowlan struggled in a fight against cancer and his attitude toward his illness says a great deal
about him as a writer:
When I was in hospital, every time that I was operated on I thought I was going to die. The
thing I was worried about after worrying about what would become of my wife and son was
how much I wanted to write–how much time I had wasted when I could have been writing.
Every time I went down into the operating room I thought how many more things I wanted to
say. For this reason, my illness was good for my writing.
In the poem, “And He Wept Aloud”, Nowlan makes a strong statement about the nature of
poety:
oh, admit this, man, there is no point in poetry
if you withhold the truth
once you’ve come by it
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What is Nowlan saying about writing and poetry in both of these quotes?
How might what he says here apply to “Warren Pryor”?