Recommended Poetry: Alden Nowlan
“Stoney Ridge Dance Hall” is Primer, Paean to Poet's Survival
Alden Nowlan (1933-1983)
1933: Born in Stanley, in Hants County, Nova Scotia
1945: Leaves school in 5th grade
1952: Moves to New Brunswick; begins writing career at Hartland Observer
1961: Canadian Council grant funds writing of first novel, The Wanton Troopers (1988)
1963: Marries Claudine Orser; moves to Saint John, N.B.
1968: Governor General’s poetry award for Bread, Wine and Salt; Guggenheim fellowship
1969: Appointed writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton
1983: Dies of complications from pneumonia; buried in Poets' Corner of Fredericton’s Forest Hill Cemetery; house on UNB campus named in his honor.
Few poems evoke a personal past as forcefully as Stoney Ridge Dance Hall by Alden Nowlan, born into poverty in the rough remoteness of inland Nova Scotia, a place where “men like him,” Nowlan later wrote of his father, “worked all day/for one stinking dollar.”
Stoney Ridge Dance Hall
They don’t like strangers.
So be careful how you smile.
Eight generations
of Hungerfords, McGards and Staceys
have lived on this ridge
like incestuous kings.
Their blood is so pure
it will not clot.
This is the only
country they know.
There are men here
who have never heard of Canada.
When they tire of dancing
they go down the road
and drink white lightning
out of the bung
of a molasses puncheon.
But they never forget
to strap on the knuckles
they’ve made from beer bottle
caps and leather
and there are sharp spikes
in their orange logging boots.
The poem magnifies the region’s tribalism, poverty, and abuse, alcoholic and emotional, with touches that make violence seem both inevitable and an odd, almost life-affirming ritual for lives rooted amid black trees and barren soil.
On the strength of a self-written recommendation, Nowlan landed a job with the Hartland Observer in New Brunswick—a life-saving, if lateral move, according to poet Thomas R. Smith. “It wasn’t culturally much different from the country that he escaped but there was enough remove there from his origin…enough pride in his new position working as a reporter that he was able to successfully begin his life also as a poet,” Smith said, during a 1994 reading (recorded by Ally Press), marking the first US publication of a major collection of Nowlan’s poetry.
Leaving Hants County also enabled Nolan to process his hardscrabble past and present the struggles of ordinary people with uncompromising clarity and compassion.
Further Reading
Bly, Robert (Foreword) and Smith, Thomas R (Editor) What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread: Poems by Alden Nowlan. St. Paul, Minn.: Nineties Press, 1993
Bly, Robert, and Smith, Thomas R (readers). What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread: The Astonishing Poems of Alden Nowlan. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press, 1994
Alden Nowlan
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Alden Nowlan
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