It's Good To Be Here

A story about Valentine's Day, Poetry, and a teenage pregnancy outside of marriage in Nova Scotia in the 1930's.

Valentine’s Day is coming up. It’s a time when people might be tempted to share poetry.

I think that’s ill-advised. Poetry, dear friends, is a dangerous sport. It reveals too much, too soon. It invites judgment, and embarrassment, and it will make people sad.

You are not Rumi. You are, at best, a well-intentioned liability with a thesaurus. Your “sonnet” will be misread, your “haiku” will be mocked, and your “free verse” will be taken as a cry for help.

So, this Valentine's Day, if you must express affection, stick to time-tested methods: chocolates, flowers, and vague but enthusiastic affirmations like "You're just the best!"

Stay safe. Stay prose.

No one likes poetry these days, not really

Nobody believes anything that's put in a poem.

Well, maybe some people when they are sad

Whispering bullshit of heartache and rain

Or rhyming Moon and June like they’ve never been rhymed before.

But on most days

You have to trick people into it.

Nobody was better at tricking more people into poetry than Nova Scotia’s own poet, Alden Nowlan.

I won’t tell you the whole story of his life. How he grew up in 17th-century style poverty and violence in 20th-century Nova Scotia. How he left school at ten and went to work in a sawmill at 14. How he read books in secret. How he worked his way through life as a ‘poet’. As impossible then as now.

I can’t tell you how much poorer my life would be without his books of poetry. And I sure won’t admit to keeping a bound book of his poetry by my bed.

I know I’m supposed to couch my praise, however enthusiastic, with words like “among the most well-known”, “…of his generation”, “one of the best…”, but I refuse, even for the sake of polite equivocation. Free discussion requires an atmosphere unembarrassed by any suggestion of authority or even respect. If we can’t feel definitive passion for poetry, for what is life worth living?

It’s hard to explain how his poems often read like someone telling you a story over a beer. But within that casual style, he slipped in weighty themes—fear of death, hope for life, the aimless hunger for love, and the quiet tragedies of everyday things.

He wasn’t like the poets who revel in misery, he salt and peppered his work with smiles and warmth. He acknowledged life’s pain but never wallowed in it. There was always an undercurrent of randomness, resilience, and the ridiculous.

But I don’t want to be allusive, elliptical, or obscure either.

So, here’s the last of his poetry at the end of his life.

His last volume, I Might Not Tell Everybody This, in 1982, showed a hard-earned maturity - a sympathy for the human condition that raised the ordinary above all things.

He wrote:

Nowlan died on June 27^th 1983. He is buried at Poet’s Corner, Forest Hill Cemetery, New Brunswick.

And here’s his story of where it all started 50 years before…

It’s Good To Be Here

I’m in trouble, she said
to him. That was the first
time in history that anyone
had ever spoken of me.

It was 1932 when she
was just fourteen years old
and men like him
worked all day for
one stinking dollar.

There’s quinine, she said.
That’s bullshit, he told her.

Then she cried and then
for a long time neither of them
said anything at all and then
their voices kept rising until
they were screaming at each other
and then there was another long silence and then
they began to talk very quietly and at last he said
well, I guess we’ll just have to make the best of it.

While I lay curled up,
my heart beating,
in the darkness inside her.

Alden Nowlan