Pete Johnston recalls when his love of Alden Nowlan’s poetry began.

Today, he’s a professional musician in Toronto, but in 1999, he was studying at Halifax’s Dalhousie University, taking a Canadian-literature course.

“I had to write an essay and I liked a poem by this guy Alden Nowlan,” he recalls. “When I started researching him, I discovered he was from Windsor (N.S.) where I grew up. That felt like a cosmic connection that resonated for me ... My degree is in composition: my professor wanted me to set poetry to music for a singer and piano. So, I set some of his poems for piano and voice in an operatic style.”

Born in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, in the village of Stanley, just outside Windsor, Nowlan had only four grades of formal schooling, but became a vociferous reader. At 19, he began working as a journalist for a New Brunswick newspaper, settling permanently in the province and soon publishing books of poetry.

His writing was raw and visceral, initially sharing his rural East Coast experiences and the alienating effect of poverty, then growing to explore broader themes of humanity’s relationship with the natural world and, after a near-fatal bout of throat cancer and three high-risk surgeries, the fragility of life. By his death in 1983, he’d published dozens of poetry collections, novels, plays, and non-fiction books, garnering pretty much every plaudit a Maritime writer can earn. The Canadian Encyclopedia hailed him as “one of the most original voices of his generation.”

Author and University of New Brunswick professor Ian LaTourneau, also managing editor of The Fiddlehead literary magazine, highlights Nowlan’s power. 

“He elevates the everyday lived experience,” he says. “He makes the mundane beautiful. Someone new to poetry … you’re bound to understand it. A lot of people think poetry is kind of esoteric, but I find his writing, although it is very high-level poetry, it’s very plainspoken. He uses language everyone will understand. He speaks the way you’d speak to someone at the grocery store or at a party.”

Perhaps that’s why Johnston remains transfixed.

“I moved to Toronto in 2001, and just kept coming back to Nowlan’s poetry,” he says. He spent the next decade and half as a professional jazz musician, occasionally setting one of Nowlan’s poems to music. As he aged, he became more interested in Celtic and roots, genres he once disdained as tourist clichés, finding a natural marriage with Nowlan’s writing.

The fusion grew into his group Stranger Still (with Johnston on guitar, plus bassist Rob Clutton and vocalists Mim Adams and Randi Helmers), which has recorded two albums of the poems set to music and often performs live. “The poetry is quite dramatic,” Johnston says. “I want people to come away with an appreciation of his words, feeling the music has supported his storytelling, highlighting the emotion of the story.”

Early in the project, he connected with Nova Scotian writer and professor Brian Bartlett, who edited the enormous Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan. From their shared appreciation of the poet, a friendship blossomed, with Bartlett sometimes joining Stranger Still on stage to do the unadorned readings that precede each musical performance.

“The poem’s allowed to exist as a poem first, read aloud ... emphasizing the words,” Bartlett says. “Pete’s extremely faithful to the poems, doesn’t change the words, though for the songs he does repeat some some lines, making good choices for doing so.”

The music provides a different setting for Nowlan’s words, but the artistry is unchanged.

“I have a record CBC produced about a decade before his death, and I’d seen Alden read many times in public with his deep cancer-scarred voice,” Bartlett says. “When I got the music and found there were an alto and a soprano, I was surprised. But poetry needs to be adaptable, convey the universality of what he’s writing about. The basics. Birth and death and suffering and joy.”

The ongoing interest in Nowlan doesn’t surprise Bartlett.

“His work has lasting power,” he explains. “Readers still respond … I think it’s partly the clarity of the language. He speaks directly about human fundamentals. He’s been oversimplified and misrepresented as a simple poet. But nuances and subtleties often emerge. He wrote with a lot of humour and irony and complexity. The apparent simplicity is just that — apparent.”

Nowlan’s rawness and honesty is universal.

“He had this way. He was unafraid to appear vulnerable,” says Bartlett. “He writes with a lot of different masks and personas that exaggerate parts of his character. But he’s not afraid to reveal his vulnerability, his fears and nightmares.”

He points to two Nowlan poems, about his conception and birth: “Beginning,” written early in his career, and “It’s Good To Be Here,” which came years later.

“Wow, it’s a powerful poem,” he says. “Alden is reflecting back on the troubled time. His mother was very young and they were very poor in rural Nova Scotia. The discovery of the pregnancy is a distraught scene of shock and profound worry and anger ... But obviously something wonderful came out of that … The title adds something to the poem that’s not in the poem itself.”

Yet in that universal experience is a sense of place that makes Nowlan’s work unique, and particularly special for Atlantic Canadians.

“This place shaped him,” Bartlett says. “He was aware the word regional could be used pejoratively but he saw it as a descriptive word. He saw parallels to Thomas Hardy, who he identified with and who also wrote from his cultural background … There are poems where he speaks more as a cosmopolitan or a Canadian, but most of his work is about what it’s like to be a Maritimer in the ’30s and ’40s, and into later decades. Nowlan’s poetry is  full of place, the Atlantic Ocean … He was born in the worst year of the Depression. Grew up in poverty, with no running water, surviving on potatoes and molasses. That scar from the Depression remained with him. He remained self-conscious about his background in that way, satirical about the bourgeoise.”

If you’re exploring Nowlan for the first time, or rediscovering after many years, there’s no bad place to start, adds LaTourneau, who recommends the comprehensive Collected Poems. 

“It is a treasure trove. You can jump in anywhere. I do like ‘The Bull Moose,’” he says. “It humanizes the awe of the creature through the voices of the poem. It speaks to the very remarkable things that happen in everyday life.”

Johnston, whose music streams at petejohnstonmusic.com, is happy to evangelize for Nowlan.

“We’ve just not celebrated this man enough,” he says. “I’ve seen firsthand how his works touch people. We just seem to celebrate the stuff that’s kind of touristy. Work like his is harder to wrap your head around. It’s not designed to engage a mass audience. It’s specific and regional. We really need to celebrate what we got … It’s developed into a bit of an activist element for me … Living in Ontario, it’s great to introduce people to Alden Nowlan.”

He’s also discovered an ongoing, growing, community of Nowlan fans.

“He’s both artful and accessible to the common person,” he says. “We were playing in Baxters Harbour (on Nova Scotia’s Fundy shore) and a guy drove all the way from Saint John (N.B.) to hear us, like five hours. He always has a Nowlan collection in his glove compartment and he sat there leafing through his book, following along.”