by Howard White
Beyond Forgetting
Many of the poets who contributed their work to this anthology chose to donate their honorarium money to the Al Purdy A-Frame Project to support preservation of the Purdy house in Ameliasburgh and the writer-in-residence programme at the A-frame. Harbour Publishing matched all donations.
To find out how you can support the Al Purdy A-Frame Project and help preserve a living piece of Canada’s cultural heritage, please visit their website at www.alpurdy.ca and click on “Donations.”
Beyond
Forgetting
Celebrating 100 Years of Al Purdy
Edited by Howard White & Emma Skagen,
with a foreword by Steven Heighton
Copyright © 2018 Harbour Publishing and contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
www.harbourpublishing.com
Text design by Carleton Wilson
Cover design by Carleton Wilson and Anna Comfort O'Keeffe
Title page photo by John Reeves
Printed in Canada on FSC-certified and 100% post-consumer fibre
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Beyond forgetting : celebrating 100 years of Al Purdy / edited by Howard White and Emma Skagen.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55017-846-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55017-847-0 (HTML)
1. Purdy, Al, 1918-2000--Poetry. I. White, Howard, 1945-, editor II. Skagen, Emma, 1991-, editor III. Title: Celebrating 100 years of Al Purdy.
PS8279.B495 2018C811'.6080351C2018-904061-0
C2018-904062-9
Tell the Ones You Love
Tell the ones you love, you
love them;
tell them now.
For the day is coming, and also the night will come,
when you will neither say it, nor hear it, nor care.
Tell the ones you love.
I have lost many who mattered, and I will say it again:
tell the ones you love, you love them.
Tell them today.
Dennis Lee
Contents
xi Foreword / Steven Heighton
xv Introduction
Encounters 3 In Purdy’s Ameliasburg / Earle Birney
6 Knowing I Live in a Dark Age / Milton Acorn
7 Once in 1965 / Robert Currie
8 Sensitive Men / Candace Fertile
9 Al Purdy: Voice / Bruce Meyer
11 Al on the Island / David Helwig
13 Purdy’s Otters / Russell Thornton
16 Interview at Eden Mills / Katherine L. Gordon
17 from Real Life—Can You Imagine It? / Brian Brett
19 Famous Last Lines / Linda Rogers
20 While You Were Out / Doug Paisley
21 Ancestor vs. Ancestor / Sadiqa de Meijer
22 In Al Purdy’s House / James Arthur
24 Transient / Grace Vermeer
25 Al and Eurithe / Rodney DeCroo
30 I Met You Only Once, Al Purdy / David Zieroth
32 A Word from Al / Howard White
34 A Drive with Al Purdy / Richard M. Grove
Wildness 37 Problem / Milton Acorn
38 Poem for Al Purdy / Milton Acorn
39 Acorn and Al Build Something / Julie McNeill
40 “You Have to Keep Writing!” / Rolf Harvey
42 My Editor / Sid Marty
46 For Al / Wednesday Hudson
48 Purdy’s Crocuses / Tom Wayman
49 Shoulders Descending / Gregory Betts
51 As the Days and Nights Join Hands / K.V. Skene
52 How I Think of Al / Susan McMaster
53 At the Cecil Hotel / George Bowering
Inspiration 57 This Inn is Free / F.R. Scott
58 Say the Names / Kate Braid
59 Standing on a Newfoundland Cliff / Magie Dominic
61 3 Al Purdys / Bruce Cockburn
63 Spring at Roblin Lake / Kath MacLean
65 Challenging the Law of Superimposition / Lynn Tait
67 Maps of the Top of the World / Steven Heighton
70 Stone Song / Christine Smart
71 Lament for a Small Town / Solveig Adair
73 The Sharing Economy / Karen Solie
75 Long Reach: Thanksgiving, 2000 / John Oughton
78 Cactus Cathedral / Glen Sorestad
80 Too Tall for Antiquity / Kath MacLean
83 The Last Spar-Tree on Elphinstone Mountain / Peter Trower
85 When the Deities are Tended, Morning Comes / Autumn Richardson
86 Roadtripping / Jeanette Lynes
87 Iowa City / Rachel Rose
89 Stockpile / Ben Ladouceur
90 Ode to Al Purdy—A Litter of Poets / Dymphny Dronyk
93 Chrysalids / Autumn Richardson
94 Ground Rules / Ian Williams
95 Al Develops His Pleasures / Cornelia Hoogland
96 Cromwell’s Head Under the Antechapel / Ken Babstock
Legacy 99 from Essay on Legend / Phil Hall
100 How Students Imagine the Dorsets / Kat Cameron
102 The Unveiling / John B. Lee
105 English Assignment: Situate Al Purdy’s Poems in Their Various Literary Traditions / Jeanette Lynes
106 On Realizing Everyone Has Written Some Bad Poems / Rob Taylor
107 The Statue of Al Purdy / Sid Marty
110 Roblin Lake / Doug Paisley
112 The Poet’s Wife / Howard White
113 On Being Archaic / Nicholas Bradley
115 At Queen’s Park / David Helwig
117 Thirty-Two Uses for Al Purdy’s Ashes / Susan Musgrave
121 Al Purdy’s Place / Laurence Hutchman
123 A Cat Named Purdy / Lorna Crozier
Elegies 127 Last Night / Doug Paisley
128 Breakout / Doug Beardsley
129 Trains, Beer & Bronze / Julie McNeill
130 For Al Purdy / Patrick Lane
132 The Oracle / Autumn Richardson
133 Al Purdy Took a Bus to the Town Where Herodotus Was Born / Susan Musgrave
135 Each Life is a Language No One Knows / Susan Musgrave
136 In Memory of A.W. Purdy / Tom Wayman
141 Variations / John Watson
142 from An Oak Hunch: Essay on Purdy / Phil Hall
145 Biographies and Statements
173 Acknowledgements and Credits
Foreword
Steven Heighton
On Trying to Wear Al’s Shirts
The following is an abridged version of a paper delivered in 2006 at the University of Ottawa symposium “Al Purdy: The Ivory Thought.”
One afternoon sometime in 1983 or ’84, Dr. Leslie Monkman of the Queen’s University English Department managed to bring both Al Purdy and Earle Birney into our Canadian Literature class for a reading. I was in my early twenties, just beginning to write poetry, and in awe of both poets. Birney, tall and cadaverous, read first, in a croaky
voice, ancient and wavering. He read for about twenty minutes and clearly it taxed him. He had a heavy cold. He seemed to grow smaller and more concave as the reading progressed. He left immediately afterward on the arm of a beautiful young woman who looked as though she could have been a student in our class.
When Al Purdy got up for his turn and peered down at us, the crown of his head almost grazed the bank of fluorescent tubes on the ceiling, or so it seemed to us. In a big, barging voice he prefaced his reading by asking what we had thought of Birney’s performance. Nobody spoke. Purdy’s high, sunned forehead was stamped with a scowl and his shaded glasses made it hard to decode his expression or even to know exactly where he was looking. After some moments of laden silence I put up my hand and offered that I’d liked the reading but had hoped Birney would also read from David, his famous long poem. Purdy stared at me with an unamused grin. A few long moments more and he said, “Yeah, sure, nice old man like that comes here to read, what else are you going to say?” Then he took the toothpick out of his mouth and launched into a long reading, brilliant and riveting.
If I was surprised that Purdy would crack wise about a fellow poet who’d just left the stage—in fact, an older poet, and one who, I later learned, had influenced and encouraged him—it was because I was naive then, maybe a bit wilfully, about a natural and unavoidable aspect of the literary world: the competition. Every poet wants to loom tall. Fiercely competitive poets like Al Purdy aim to loom tallest.
I met him and Eurithe Purdy a few years later, at the famous A-frame in Ameliasburgh, in the summer of 1988. He seemed if anything to have grown taller. Over the preceding years I’d gotten to know his poetry well, this process having begun with an essay I wrote about his Arctic poems soon after he and Earle Birney gave that reading at Queen’s. Now Tom Marshall and David Helwig had brought me and a couple of other young poets out to meet him. We sat in a circle of chairs on the deck in the sloping afternoon sunlight and we drank beer and talked. David and Al talked, mainly. Al had only a vague memory of his reading at Queen’s and when I reminded him of what he’d said about Birney, he smiled wryly as if to suggest, “I don’t remember saying it, but it sounds about right.”
A scene from the early nineties, one of our by-now annual summer visits to Al and Eurithe Purdy in Ameliasburgh. Al has taken me into his windowless, clammy, mildewed writing shed. It’s above ground but feels like a root cellar. Still air, muffled sounds. From one of the bookshelves he pulls a slim volume—his first published book, The Enchanted Echo, from 1944. “Here, have a look at this poem.” An awkward moment. These were Al’s first published poems. I’d heard he’d disowned them, more or less, but maybe he’d had a change of heart, or had always retained a private affection for the one poem he was now asking me to read. It was clumsily rhymed doggerel, a sort of Edwardian pastiche. I hadn’t known Al long enough to be frank. “Well,” I said softly, “I think there are some nice sounds in it, but I guess on the whole I prefer your more recent work.” Something like that. Al snorted, grabbed the book away and bellowed, “NOW DON’T BE SO GODDAMN MEALY-MOUTHED—IT’S A PIECE OF GODDAMN SHIT!”
Maybe that was the secret of Al’s continual improvement. He wasn’t just in competition with others, he vied with himself. Was hard on himself. I believe it was Jakov Lind who said that a good writer is somebody who hates himself and loves the world.
I remember saying to Eurithe Purdy, shortly after Al’s death, that I thought he was a man who had always taken death very personally. And she said, “Yes, I think that’s true.” I will add that I think his life’s work in poetry was a way of talking back to death, to time and gravity—the gradual attrition of the flesh. In fact Al competed with death—not just with other poets, mentors, and himself. I sense that for him this vying with death was the ultimate competition. And the beautiful fuel of his poems.
Al’s best poems have, if anything, grown in stature or, as the saying goes, they stand up. Maybe I’m just making a case here for aesthetic emulation, since the competitive urge is dangerous to a poet’s growth only when its object is status rather than achievement. It’s utterly natural but slowly damaging to yearn for plaudits another poet has enjoyed. On the other hand, it’s utterly natural but aesthetically healthy to read a good poem and then set out to write one as good, or better. It was the second of those urges, I think, that most drove Al’s writing.
In the spring of 2000 I saw him for the last time, dying at home in Sidney, BC. Jay Ruzesky and I drove up from Victoria and sat at his bedside for a couple of hours, talking with him and at times just sitting there as we waited for him to wake from another short nap. At one point he tried to eat a piece of bread we brought him, but he couldn’t manage. …No eighty-one-year-old, horizontal for the last time, exhausted and unable to eat, rages at the dying of the light. That, after all, was a young poet’s prescription. And Al himself—though he took death so personally—seemed at the end to have made a grudging peace with it…
Watching a mentor leave makes an apprentice suddenly feel (like a child watching a parent die) much older. You sense how promise is no longer enough and it’s necessary for the real work to begin. Death as the gift of a call to life. The front-line trench, long occupied by elders, who stood between you and mortality and other apparent failures, has suddenly been vacated.
I received one of Al’s trademark polyester shirts as a sort of deathbed gift, and in 2006 I wore it while delivering an earlier version of these reflections. I still sometimes wear the shirt because it’s my connection to a mentor who understood that I not only loved his best work but envied it, vied with it, took inspiration from the challenge of trying to stand equally tall. I wear this shirt because it’s a reminder of all that can’t be kept but must be passed on. And to be part of a tradition. And, to be sure, out of love.
Introduction
Alfred Wellington Purdy published thirty-three books of poetry during his lifetime and forged a reputation as one of Canada’s greatest poets. Two of his books, The Cariboo Horses (1965) and The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (1986), won the Governor General’s Literary Award. Over the course of his career he picked up most other awards open to Canadian poets including a special one devised by the League of Canadian Poets called the Voice of the Land Award, a once-only honour to recognize his personification of the Canadian idiom. Like only a few poets in Canadian history, Purdy transcended the literary quarter and forged a profile among the broader public, adding the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario to his honours, but unlike other poets who succeeded in connecting with the popular imagination, such as Earle Birney and Irving Layton, Purdy is unique in continuing to be a vital presence well into the twenty-first century. This volume of poetic tributes honouring the hundredth anniversary of Purdy’s birth amply indicates that he continues to inspire contemporary poets today.
Also unlike many poets of his generation, Purdy still has a thriving readership: since his death in 2000, sales of his selection Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962–1996 have topped an impressive thirteen thousand copies and the book was featured in the CBC’s 2006 Canada Reads competition. A larger-than-life bronze sculpture of Purdy has been erected at Queen’s Park in Toronto. Wilfred Laurier University Press has published a new selection of his work and House of Anansi Press has published a new edition of his 1962 breakthrough collection, Poems for All the Annettes. Two theatrical works featuring his writing have been produced, along with three short films. A feature-length documentary, Al Purdy Was Here, was released to general acclaim in 2015. Popular Canadian musicians Gord Downie and Dave Bidini have cited Purdy in their songs and The Al Purdy Songbook, an album of musical tributes by such musicians as Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen and Jann Arden, was released in 2018. That year, readings and events were scheduled across the country to celebrate Purdy’s hundredth birthday on December 30.
Born and raised in rural Ontario, Purdy dropped out of school at age seventeen to go out west. After serving in the air force during World
War II, he worked various jobs while determinedly writing poetry. His first book, The Enchanted Echo, which he later disowned, was self-published in 1944. By the time The Cariboo Horses was published in 1965, he was able to write full-time, which he continued to do for more or less the rest of his life. To a very great extent his lengthy and productive career was made possible by the assistance of his wife, Eurithe (Parkhurst) Purdy, a Belleville native he married in 1941, who was a superb business manager.
Known for the outspoken and unruly behaviour memorialized in poems like “How I Think of Al” by Susan McMaster and “Purdy’s Crocuses” by Tom Wayman, Purdy’s personality looms large in his legend, just as his gangling six-foot-three-inch physical being did in life. And yet in spite of his oversized public persona—or perhaps because of it—Purdy is hard to pin down, hard to faithfully describe, hard to do justice to. For he was not only the rough-edged iconoclast he was correctly reputed to be; he was an enigmatic—and yes, sensitive—man whose entire life was fuelled by poetry.
Jeanette Lynes’ poem “English Assignment” playfully invokes the underrepresented complexity of Purdy’s character as it manifests in his poetry: yes, as anyone who’s read his most popular pieces knows, Purdy is well established in the traditions of “Barroom brawl poems” and “Dude poems,” but he also essayed many other styles—including tender lyrics like “Winter at Roblin Lake” and what Lynes classifies as “cosmic / ass-kicking poems” like “Gondwanaland.”
Purdy’s range of interests and poetic forms is no doubt one key to the breadth and durability of his appeal, given that his poetry has touched—and still touches—such a diverse set of readers.
Perhaps more than anything, Purdy is celebrated for his poetic voice—the Voice of the Land as the League of Poets characterized it—a vernacular style unique to himself yet reflective of a universal, pan-Canadian species of English. Writing in a vernacular style did not begin or end with Purdy, but he developed it as an instrument capable of probing the subtlest perplexities of existence in a way nobody had done before and few have attempted since.