My favourite Canadian poet, or a reply to Curtis Faville

Alden Nowlan

I've lately joined in a chorus of boos for contemporary mainstream Canadian poetry that, on the whole, I also happen to find "vanilla and inert and obtuse". But though, like Swift, I'm a hater of mankind, I happen to be also, like Swift, a lover of individuals. There are a few instances of Canadian writing that's in my opinion world-class. I've always lamented that Timothy Findley, for example, never received the Nobel for his exemplary fiction and that Bliss Carman, whose Songs from Vagabondia even got Pound's attention, was never seen as anything but a Confederation Poet. Knowing my own country as well as I do, I can see why.

There's the case of Alden Nowlan, hardly discussed anymore and yet is (in my humble estimation) Canada's greatest lyrical poet. His is the poetic voice I still revere after almost three decades. And he's the individual I love through the strength & beauty of verses alone. Of the many poems he's written perhaps none is more memorable than "The Bull Moose" (and more characteristically Easterner as well: I also happen to think the best writers are Easterners) . Here's the poem and some reasons why it's Canada's best offering to date. I may surprise some, though, with the discovery of dark corners in a place that's supposed to be cheerily lighted.

The Bull Moose

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps,
came the bull moose
to be stopped at last by a pole-fenced pasture.

Too tired to turn or, perhaps, aware
there was no place left to go, he stood with the cattle.
They, scenting the musk of death, seeing his great head
like the ritual mask of a blood god, moved to the other end
of the field, and waited.

The neighbours heard of it, and by afternoon
cars lined the road. The children teased him
with alder switches and he gazed at them
like an old, tolerant collie. The woman asked
if he could have escaped from a Fair.

The oldest man in the parish remembered seeing
a gelded moose yoked with an ox for plowing.
The young men snickered and tried to pour beer
down his throat, while their girl friends took their pictures.

And the bull moose let them stroke his tick-ravaged flanks,
let them pry open his jaws with bottles, let a giggling girl
plant a little purple cap
of thistles on his head.

When the wardens came, everyone agreed it was a shame
to shoot anything so shaggy and cuddlesome.
He looked like the kind of pet
women put to bed with their sons.

So they held their fire. But just as the sun dropped in the river
the bull moose gathered his strength
like a scaffolded king, straightened and lifted his horns
so that even the wardens backed away as they raised their rifles.

When he roared, people ran to their cars. All the young men
leaned on their automobile horns as he toppled.


The effect is of the palpable shock to lethargic seeing that the dying animal always creates. Nowlan knew his people and reactions well enough to write it. Of its kind the poem is unsurpassable. Tragically (or perhaps unsurprisingly) the Canadian psyche will find nothing to distinguish this "blood god" massacre from that of anything or anyone else. One only has to look at the always phantasmagorical blood-letting in the writings of another Easterner, David Adams Richards, and particularly in his For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, to see the same archetypal bull moose at work. In fact, I'd be disprizing Nowlan's great poem if I tried to do the toppled moose one better by calling it a kind of christ-figure, with its "purple cap of thistles" and passion among the jeering crowds. (The eerie sightings of Elvis in Matt Cohen's Last Seen might be, by way of contrast, a glimpse into the urban hero after it's been bled out: and it isn't Elvis we're talking about either)

It's characteristically Canadian to pour beer down the throat of our dying symbols: to mock our greatest fears. Even our critics seem to have an inkling of this. Atwood, and this most rightly ridiculed of Canadian symbols is always at her best in criticism, says of the poem in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, that the "sacrificed-god" didn't really redeem anyone (77). Certainly not. Perhaps she saw that the most terrifying image in the poem is that of the young men honking their horns: a sort of parallel "bellowing" more premonitory of human savagery than raised rifles alone.  Of course, Northrop Frye who didn't have the stomach for real "irony" might have described this (if he'd been asked) as an image of the fallen world that afflicts humans and non-humans alike (Anatomy of Criticism: 285). True but hardly insightful.

But can its claim to being lyrically supreme accommodate the horror of bloodied nature rituals in general? Is Canada, as I'm suggesting, really the place for this cruelly irreverent myth mockery?Atwood and Frye look too pitifully shallow to see through to real causes & conditions. It's perhaps time to give the origin of this penchant for malicious culture sport: namely, the usually bludgeoned psyche of a part of Canada where living conditions have always been historically the most depressed and Mt. Cashel sex scandals have lately called religious consolation back to the dark waters whence they came. Our best literatures are too stony and too strongly regional for anything but this.

Ernest Buckler, author of perhaps Canada's greatest novel The Mountain and the Valley, and also an Easterner, had a similar penchant for turning events in his fiction into troubling dream landscapes, mostly intactile, mostly gloomy. The Annapolis Valley, like Nowlan's slaughter-field, is a place "jealous of our breath" and where the vaunted Canadian indigenous is only a "shaly amalgam of replica". Which is to suggest that our greatest native traditions can't seem to find anything but dimming copies of themselves. The Totem's no longer the quintessentially native kinship symbol: carved now into images of children flailing the bull moose with alder switches. Note the unbearable friability of all things literary in the Canadian landscape: where we want literary referents to hang our hats on, we get loose slimy shale, the drama of children mocking a mock-christ.

Buckler's is no Dantean mountain in the southern hemisphere just as Alden's sacrificial moose is anything but sacrificial, nothing to write books about. There are no intervening desert slopes for archetypal heroes to anguish over either. What dying icons do in Canada is send people running to their cars howling with delight. And as there are no dangerous woods anymore, and with nothing better to imitate than the wailing moose, the horn's the only option. How well Alden knew his people and their Canadian myth-busting ways.

Alden's our best poet and my favourite because he understood as I wish more would understand. I wish our writers & critics would also admit that any literary output dissociated from the warnings & admonitions of our own wiser spirits ends in deplorableness (The plural 'spirits' is intentional here). He foresaw, or certainly wrote as if it were a truth, that  national smallness set mostly in stifling colonial (Susanna Moodie-type) narrative and never offset by anything grander than a field or valley amounts only to national smallness. It's hardly surprising that visitors at our shores see only the "vanilla" spectacles of cultural production comically dwarfed (most of the time) by its own stinking "tamarack swamps". It's best they never witness (as they will in one story, at least) the character of the cuckolded husband found frozen to death in a prairie storm, standing just meters away from his bedroom window.

Let's admit we've led only by accident many of our best literary kings to the scaffold, bull moose included: and nothing as grandiose as death by prophecy will ever appear here as a result. Canada's very best (who I happen to think hail from the East) have always served up that humiliating spectacle to us. I've at least admitted it to myself.