Autographed Copy

A Bravo TV documentary profile made in 1980 on Alden Nowlan the maritime poet who states that writers only write about themselves,the implication being that the individual is hopelessly and totally isolated and self centered.
How this view affected his writing can be made clear by this poem by Nowlan

Not every wino is a Holy Man.
Oh, but some of them are.
I love those who've learned to sit
comfortably for long periods
with their hams pressed against their calves,
outdoors,with a wall for a back-rest,
contentedly saying nothing.
These move about only when necessary,on foot,
and almost always in pairs.
I think of them as oblates.
Christ's blood is in their veins
or they thirst for it.
They have looked into the eyes of God,
unprotected by smoked glass.

A good poem especially in comparsion to most academically approved writing but what about those guys dying on the streets that Nowlan lies so sweetly about?
Hasn't he made it easier for readers to accept their pain and suffering by his subjective distortion of their misery?

Contrast Nowlan's approach to that other maritime poet,Milton Acorn


'Knowing I live in a dark age before history
I watch my wallet and
am less struck by gunfights on the avenues
than by the newsie with his dirty pink chapped face
calling a shabby poet back for his change

The crows mobbing the blinking,sun-stupid owl
wolves eating a hamstrung calf hindend first
keeping their meat alive and fresh…these
are marks of foresight,beginning of wit:
but Jesus wearing thorns and sunstroke
beating his life and death into words
to break the rods and blunt the axes of Rome:
this and other things followed.

Knowing that in this advertising rainbow
I live like a trapeze artist with a headache,
my poems are no aspirins…they show
pale bayonets of grass waving thin on dunes;
the paralytic and his lyric secrets;
my friend Al,union builder and cynic,
hesistating to believe his own delicate poems
lest he believe in something better than himself:
and history,which is yet to begin,
will exceed this,exalt this
as a poem erases and rewrites its poet. '

Acorn is out there alive and living
He does not accept things as they are or write about people as if they only existed in his own imagination.And his passion, based on his activist approach to life, gives Acorn's poetry a range and edge that Nowlan in his self centered asocial detachment could never match