One poet's life …

… On Alden Nowlan, a unique figure in Canadian literature born in poverty and raised in poetry | National Post. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

At 16, he discovered the new library in Windsor, nearby. On weekends, he would walk or hitchhike 18 miles to return books and borrow new ones. Soon, he was trying to write stories and poems. His father never approved of that ambition. “I wrote (as I read) in secret,” Nowlan remembered. “My father would as soon have seen me wear lipstick.”