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Beyond Forgetting

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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, info@accesscopyright.ca.

  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.

 

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