JP
How do you go about choosing the poems you'll submit for publication?
AN
Well, to an extent, it's arbitrary, in that I simply choose those that I like best myself. But quite often in the interval since the last book, I'll have written quite a number of poems on a very similar theme that are essentially about the same aspect of life, and I'll have to pick out one of those which I think is most successful and include that in the manuscript and file the others.
JP
In your childhood, what did the poet or writer represent to you?
AN
I had an enormously romantic conception of writers. My great hero was John Keats, and if someone had told me when I was sixteen years old that I had consumption, I would have loved it. If I'd started spitting blood, I'd have felt just like Keats. I was eager to die in Rome at twenty-six. I'd have loved the idea when I was fifteen or sixteen.
JP
Where did you go to get books when you were young?
AN
In the neighbouring town of Windsor, there was a little public library run by a wonderful lady named Eleanor Geary, who allowed me to join even though I was outside the district and, if I kept the books overdue, didn't charge me any fines, God love her. And the marvellous thing about this library was that it was very small and old
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fashioned and really hadn't been endowed with any money, so most of the books had been contributed. But since they'd been contributed thirty to forty years ago, the things that had been contributed were the complete sets of Dickens and Thackeray, and they had all the works of Charles Darwin. I'm probably the only living person in the entire world who's read the collected works of Charles Darwin. Whereas now they'd have ten copies of every current bestseller and none of those standard classics at all. I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky there, and all that sort of thing.
JP
Cocteau believed that sexuality is the basis of all friendship. What do you think?
AN
I suppose it's probably true, if you use sexuality in the broadest sense.
JP
Do you find that personally true?
AN
Not consciously, no, but I don't deny that it might be true. It seems to me that is the sort of thing that would be unconscious anyway.
[interview section omitted]
JP
You're a writer with a highly developed sense of professionalism. Do you think that is generally true of young writers today?
AN
I don't think that enough young writers have a sense of professionalism. I think that a great many of them think that it is largely a matter of being inspired. Some of them, of course, have a highly developed sense of professionalism.
JP
Where do you think your sense of professionalism comes from?
AN
I think the young writers of today tend to have a greater sense of professionalism than the young writers back in the sixties, because in the sixties it was really fashionable to be a young poet. You had all sorts of young people with a certain amount of raw talent going around writing poems on the backs of envelopes and putting them in their pockets. But it isn't nearly so fashionable to be a young poet now. So I think that those who are young poets now are more serious to begin with, and inevitably that leads them to a more professional attitude.
JP
Milton Acorn has said that there's no such thing as a young poet, that you have to have some years to be a poet. Would you agree?
AN
I think it depends on your definition of a poet. Years and years ago, Irving Layton said to me that anyone could be a poet at eighteen, but in order to be a real poet, you had to be still writing poetry at forty-eight. And I now would agree with that, in the sense that during the years I've been around university campuses . . . in the early years around university campuses I would see some young person who had an enormous amount of basic talent and I would think to myself, “Well, if I'm remembered at all in the history of literature, it will probably be just as a footnote on page 180 of that person's biography.” Well, a year after graduation that person could very well be selling insurance, and if he were reminded that he had written poetry when he was at university, he would probably laugh in embarrassment. Quite possibly, some other young person who didn't really show as much raw talent might have gone on to publish books and build up quite a body of work. I suppose it's the same as a musician or dancer or anything else. The people are divided into those that have a certain amount of raw talent that makes it comparatively easy for them to write poems or play a musical instrument, and there's the other group who are prepared to go through all the drudgery involved in improving themselves at doing that.
JP
You told me a story once about a young poet from the university who came to visit you. Could you tell that?
AN
Well, partly because of the various media, a lot of people â not just young people, but a lot of people in general â have very unrealistic ideas about the financial rewards involved in being a writer. And a number of years ago, a university student dropped in at my house to show me some of his poems, and I looked at them and said something about them. But several months later, I read poetry at the university where this young man was a student, and one of his teachers said to me that after young so-and-so visited your house he gave up writing altogether. I was almost devastated because I felt that I must have said something so unkind and so hurtful that perhaps I'd killed a future Yeats in the bud. I said something to this effect to the teacher, and he said, “Oh no, it's nothing like that at all. What happened was he came to me and said, âAlden Nowlan has as much prestige as any poet in the country and he's living in a hovel in Fredericton. So if that's all there is in it, what is there in it for me?'” I think he expected me to have a butler.
JP
What contact with other writers have you had throughout your development? [question not recorded]
AN
One of the wonderful things about Canada, where the population is so small, is that the literary community is a large extended village, in a kind of way. Or, as Margaret Laurence calls it, “a tribe.” The first time Margaret Laurence and I met, she kissed me and she said, “I always kiss members of my tribe.” And some people have remarked that when you get a group of Canadian poets together, they never discuss poetry and certainly not literature. The first thing they do is gossip about all the other Canadian poets.
JP
In your poetry and prose, Alden, how much importance does love hold?
AN
Love plays an enormous part in all of my poetry and prose and, I think, in all good poetry and prose, because I think basically there are only two subjects anyone can write about, and one is love and the other one is death.
JP
All writing is a form of comment on those two, you think?
AN
I think so, yes.
JP
Can you speak a bit about the importance of economy of words in poetry?
AN
Economy of words is enormously important to me. It seems the natural way that I have of looking at things, perhaps because I'm the product of a culture which tends to use very economical speech. Just as Robert Frost was the product of a very similar culture, and he tended to use economical speech. I remember back in the early fifties when I developed an enormous admiration for the work of Dylan Thomas, whose work I still admire. But at that time, I admired it so much that I felt that this is the only way anybody could possibly write. And so for several months, I attempted to write Dylan Thomas poems. Of course, they were utter disasters because the ways in which Dylan Thomas and I tended to think and look at the world were entirely different. I think probably one of the most important things for a young poet is to find the people he can learn from. The ones whose work, whose characters, and whose outlook on the world is similar enough to his own that he'll be able to usefully learn from them.
JP
Do you have any other advice for young writers and poets?
AN
I think the most important advice of all to give any young poet or any young writer is to attempt to learn to distinguish the things that you really think and feel from the things you think that society expects you to think and feel. I've received poems from people in penitentiaries, and in the early days I always opened these with a feeling of excitement, thinking that here is going to be something that will give me an insight into the lives and attitudes of people whose lives and attitudes are very different from mine. But invariably I would find terribly sentimental, sort of Edgar A. Guest type of poems. These people were in some place like Kingston Penitentiary and they were writing something like: “Oh, it's a glorious moon . . . shining in June,” type of thing â “God bless the little daffodils that grow upon the greeny hills.”
JP
How do you choose the form of a poem?
AN
I used to, when I began to write poems, use very metrical patterns. There was a time when every poem I wrote started out to be a sonnet. They didn't always end up sonnets because sometimes they turned into other things, but they always started out to be sonnets. And at one time, in the early days, I bought a book on English poetics, and I wrote one of everything in the entire book, you know, sestinas and ballade royales and all sorts of forms. But in more recent years, I've tried to let the poem choose its own form, and I've worked very, very hard on this, but sometimes the reviewers, being a careless lot, don't notice it at all and so decide that the thing is formless. While it sounds terribly naive, and I suppose was terribly naive, I think I learned a great deal in the process. Mind you, most of the poems were dreadful, but it was a learning experience.
JP
What sorts of things trigger poems?
AN
Well, with me, almost anything that happens to me can trigger a poem â conversations overheard in the doctor's waiting room, people I've glimpsed from the window of my car, things that I've seen on TV, things that I've read, pictures that I've seen â almost any part of the human experience. Mind you, they aren't all necessarily good poems, but almost any conceivable thing that would trigger a thought or trigger an emotion with me will trigger a poem.
JP
Your poetry seems to appeal to a large audience. Why is that, do you think?
AN
Well, I think my poetry potentially would appeal to a very large audience if so many people hadn't been put off poetry by poets who aren't really writing poems at all but are simply engaged in kind of incestuous word games. And the reason it does appeal is that it does express emotions and thoughts that we all share as human beings, that it basically speaks, I hope, about the human condition. That's the sort of response to my work that pleases me the most. It isn't praise, really, from a critic, although that's very pleasant. The response that pleases me the most is to encounter some person who has been moved in some way by something that I've written. I've been deeply touched, for instance, on the occasions when I've met some young person, a complete stranger to me, who has told me that, in the course of some relationship with a boy or a girl, one of my poems expressed what was felt at this particular time so well that he or she has sent the poem, you see, speaking for them. And in a lighter vein, I've had a woman come up to me after a poetry reading and say that she always quoted a certain poem of mine to her husband whenever he became too pompous. I've even had people tell me that they've framed certain poems of mine. That sort of human reaction is what's most important to me and, I think, what's most important, really, to any writer. Someone has said that the critics and the teachers are concerned with literature and that the writers are concerned with life.
JP
What has your evolution been as a poet â in terms of form and theme?
AN
I've moved from being a very traditional poet into much freer and looser forms. But I'm grateful that I did work in the traditional forms first, unlike a lot of young poets today, who start out trying to write free verse before they know what free verse is. They think all you have to do is simply blather away on the page. And from having written things like sonnets and villanelles I learned from very early on that you didn't blather away on the page.
JP
Which of your poems do you feel closest to right now?
AN
Invariably the poem I feel closest to is the last one I've written. Mind you, a few months or even a few days later, it may seem like a very inferior piece of work to me. But at that particular time, it's always the last one that I've done. I think the most devastating thing that can be said to any writer is for someone to come up to him and say, “I like the things you were doing five or ten or fifteen years ago much better than the things you're doing now.” I think that's about the most devastating thing.
JP
Does your poetry have a point of view or seek to answer a recurring question?
AN
I think my poetry tries to answer questions, but not so much for other people as for me. It's sort of a process of organizing experience for me. Because all creation, I think, beginning with the creation of the world as described in Greek mythology or in the Bible, consists of taking chaos and giving it form. And I think that this follows through. That's what you do in a poem or a story. You take chaos and give it form.
JP
It seems often that modern poetry sees man as a victim, as ordinary individuals pitted hopelessly against the world. How much do you assume that point of view?
AN
Well, I suppose that, in the ultimate analysis, all of us are pitted hopelessly against the world in the sense that we all face an inevitable death, so that every life ends in defeat and all the stories have sad endings. But I don't think that's something we ought to be obsessed by. I mean, the mere fact that the journey ends in tragedy doesn't mean that we have to overlook or denigrate all the beautiful things we encounter on the way there.