Composer and Dalhousie music graduate Pete Johnston will bring his band Stranger Still to Alumni Hall, where they will play musical settings of poet Alden Nowlan’s work.
Poet Brian Bartlett and Neil Robertson will join Pete in conversation.
Join us for this free event.
Poet Alden Nowlan (1933–83) was born into poverty in rural Nova Scotia during the worst years of the Great Depression. He dropped out of school after Grade 5 and went to work at the local sawmill, spending as much time as he could developing a “life of the mind” by reading the formative texts of western literature, including the epic poems of the Greeks, the Bible and Dante. After successfully lying about his education in response to an advertisement for a job at a newspaper, at the age of 19, Nowlan left Nova Scotia for New Brunswick. He spent the rest of his life working as a writer, first as a journalist and later as a poet and writing teacher at the University of New Brunswick. Along the way he developed a distinctive poetic voice that knit together imagery and language from classical literature with his lived experience in the Atlantic provinces. Despite—or perhaps because of—his deep readings of the great books of the past, Nowlan was fond of saying that his poetry was “all about people, and to hell with literature.”
