by Howard White
Purdy’s accessible but profound poetry has found a way into the hearts of readers across the country. He had an even more salutary effect on writers of poetry, having mentored, or at least opened the way for, many younger poets throughout the years such as Tom Wayman, Maureen McCarthy, Lorna Crozier, Steven Heighton, Linda Rogers and many others. And though many of Purdy’s followers knew their role model personally, others experienced a proximate closeness through his poetry as Richard M. Grove evocatively recounts in “A Drive with Al Purdy.” Even Canadian legend Bruce Cockburn—who wrote “3 Al Purdys” at director Brian D. Johnson’s invitation to write a song for the documentary Al Purdy Was Here and its accompanying album, The Al Purdy Songbook—later credited his experience of reading Purdy’s work with reviving his own writing career.
This book also bears witness to a wholly new way in which Purdy’s mentoring carries on: through the work of the Al Purdy A-frame Association. Al and Eurithe’s lakeside cottage in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, built in 1957 by the Purdys themselves using scrounged materials, acted as a writers’ gathering place for decades. After the house was nearly lost to developers following Purdy’s death, a group headed by Jean Baird, Howard White, Alexandra Manthorpe, George Goodwin, Duncan Patterson and others—all encouraged by Eurithe Purdy—came to the rescue, raising funds to purchase the property, restoring the buildings and creating a writers’ residency program. Few who complete a stay at the A-frame fail to be moved by their own experience of the sights and sounds that informed Purdy’s writing, by the history embodied in every scuffed floor tile and by Purdy’s spirit, which hovers palpably over the property. The result is a body of work that might be labelled “Looking at Purdy with New Eyes,” seen in the work of Doug Paisley, Sadiqa de Meijer, Kath MacLean, James Arthur, Nicholas Bradley, Ben Ladouceur, Autumn Richardson, Rob Taylor and others.
This anthology was instigated by Eurithe Purdy, who, at ninety-four, had never stopped taking care of Al’s business. She approached Howard White, Al’s long-time publisher, with a folder of tribute poems she had collected over the years. Many of these were published pieces she had photocopied and kept, but some were given to Al and her as private gifts. Rodney DeCroo was surprised and touched to hear that Eurithe had held on to his typescript poem written over twenty years earlier, a charming account of encountering the Purdys called “Al and Eurithe.” With Eurithe’s pile in hand, the editors first sought guidance from that protean person of letters and veteran anthologist Tom Wayman, whose own career had received a crucial boost after being included in Purdy’s seminal 1971 anthology of emerging Canadian poets, Storm Warning. Tom did more than offer sage advice; he got the project off to a flying start by preparing a work plan and roughing in much of the selection. That lineup was altered and added to by other hands, but Tom’s overall design remains substantially in place. Without his expert intervention, the editors might never have succeeded in putting together this anthology in time to honour Al’s hundredth birthday.
Many of the poems chosen speak directly of the poets’ encounters with Purdy, either in the flesh or in print, but many do not. Some, such as Peter Trower’s elegiac “The Last Spar-Tree on Elphinstone Mountain,” are merely dedicated to Purdy. A considerable number by younger writers were inspired by stints as writers-in-residence at the A-frame. Some, like George Bowering’s “At the Cecil Hotel” brazenly parody Purdy while still others, like Rachel Rose’s “Iowa City” and Ken Babstock’s “Cromwell’s Head under the Antechapel,” are simply fine poems the authors offered in tribute. The whole is remarkably diverse but characterized by an overall vitality that attests to the strong responses Al Purdy continues to bring forth a century after his birth.
Encounters
Earle Birney
In Purdy’s Ameliasburg
(first visit 1965)
But Al this round pond man—
where’s Roblin Lake I mean the real one?
where’s that great omphalos I know
corpsegrey below apocalyptic skies?
this cosy girl’s-belly-button
brims with rosewater
from one of those frilly May sunsets
Don’t get me wrong I’m grateful to be here
after Toronto
still hairy from a long winter
after Trenton
that raped that hustled town
it’s good here it’s peace the blackbirds
are setting off their own springs in the air
but the air’s too bright
it could be I’ve come the wrong time
too soon for those horsecrap-fattened peonies
you reddened the shores with
too late for skulldeep snow
stubborn in the fence zags
man there’s only dandelions
barring the way to the privy
But no what’s wrong is place as well
it’s anybody’s church across the lake
the spire shrank
and that carpenter who fixed it once
against the sky is off in Trenton
banging thumbnails and wallboard
is you in fact
and you’re not here your mouse is hiding
quote representative of an equally powerful race unquote
that heron the cosmic crying rays
where in Roblin are they?
In this Ameliasburg a backyard of stones
is where they trucked off Roblin Mill
declared historical enough
for reassembly in Toronto
by god they’ll whisk your own shack away
if you don’t stop writing
(and Eurithe too the ferocious wife)
and the very cowpads before your eyes
Al I think they have
I think Somebody’s cleaned up
after your picknicking glaciers
they’ve raised the roof on the shack
ringed it with Summer Homes
told Ptolemy to leave town
made your spouse patient and young again
it’s the Same People of course
who took the wolves away
from Malcolm Lowry’s woods
sent Eliot’s London Bridge to Arizona
smoothed Jeffers’ headlands back
into Californian hills
so though it’s fine here of course
it’s not Ameliasburg
But wait
what’s popping up when I sweep the kitchen?
half an envelope
with half a poem scribbled
and from behind the battered wood-heater
yet another empty bottle
smelling absolutely of wild grape
Next morning I drift down a nebulous way
to the village hardware
like a madman’s tiny museum
Can-opener yep got one
got one all right You in a hurry?
yeah got mislaid some time back
I’d have to look drop in nex week mebbe
I return under the ancient clouds
the Lake is hazy endless
what bird is flapping away?
the shack’s doorknob turns planetary in my hand—
Al that’s your mouse on the floor bowing!
Milton Acorn
Knowing I Live in a Dark Age
Knowing I live in a dark age before history,
I watch my wallet and
am less struck by gunfights in the avenues
than by the newsie with his dirty pink chapped face
calling a shabby poet back for his change.
The crows mobbing the blinking, sun-stupid owl;
wolves eating a hamstrung calf hindend first,
keeping their meat alive and fresh…these
are marks of foresight, beginnings of wit:
but Jesus wearing thorns and sunstroke
beating his life and death into words
to break the rods and blunt the a
xes of Rome:
this and like things followed.
Know that in this advertising rainbow
I live like a trapeze artist with a headache,
my poems are no aspirins…they show
pale bayonets of grass waving thin on dunes;
the paralytic and his lyric secrets;
my friend Al, union builder and cynic,
hesitating to believe his own delicate poems
lest he believe in something better than himself:
and history, which is yet to begin,
will exceed this, exalt this
as a poem erases and rewrites its poet.
Robert Currie
Once in 1965
In a literature class at the U. of S.
—so stuffy my nostrils are clogged—
our prof announces we’ll meet next day
in the Arts Theatre and when we do
the place is full of students from other rooms.
“We’re gathered together,” he says, “to see and hear
a fine Canadian poet who’s crossing the land,
promoting a new book.” No one I know
has seen a poet before. We wonder
what he’ll say, what he’ll do.
The man who saunters up to the mic
looks like a carpenter taking a break
from building his own house
with lumber he logged and hewed himself.
“Please, welcome Mr. Purdy,” says the prof,
and the poet begins to read, a steam
locomotive roars across campus,
fresh air floods in, poems about Cariboo horses
and home-made beer, hockey players who marry
ballet and murder, not a trace of stuffiness here.
When the poet is finished, one student wonders
if he’d care to discuss tropes in modern Canadian poetry.
Purdy looks at him until we hear ourselves breathe.
“Sure,” he says, “you wanna go for a beer?”
Candace Fertile
Sensitive Men
The students watch
entranced
and they laugh as Gord
insults the beer
but drinks the yellow flowers anyway
and then chastises a rooster who knocks over a beer
but says nothing about the guys the rooster has punched out
while beer and blood blossom on the tavern floor
and Al tells his poem
ending with his lament
about the powerlessness of poems
to buy beer
or anything
but Al is wrong
says one student after a lengthy pause
because his poem
bought a place in my brain.
Bruce Meyer
Al Purdy: Voice
The day had been made in Hades
the way history is thwarted by time
and there’s never enough Canadian beer
to wash the air’s passion clean
as a starlit November night.
Through the kitchen window
the lost mill of the Roblins
left its reflection in the lake
and a dying seagull
a relic from an old Coleridge number
flopped on the front lawn
as thirsty as a pilgrim of life
but too exhausted to drink anymore.
Halfway through a leak off your porch
you turned to me and noted
with the efficiency of a scholar in your voice
that you’d tried to write your name with water
but wished it had been one syllable less for penmanship
or you’d had just one beer more for pressure.
And I recalled this is the way the animals
mark the boundaries of their minds
their names carved in the scent they leave
with a glass of everything they have taken in
saying simply this is my place
and I will live in it or die.
There is never enough to fill us
though we pour for others
and our names are written on water
not by it
and the ink lake
close enough to see but just far enough so as not to be touched
caught the image of a passing cloud
that looked for all the world like an old plough
and fed it to the mill as grist.
Here my spreading Protean friend
is a promise I made to you as that dying albatross
hungered for the sky even as it clutched the ground
that wherever I sail
whatever zephyrs press me on
I shall write my name on a wall or passing rock
to declare the truth that I was here
measuring my thoughts in syllables and piss
that a common man might take for history
the way you taught me
when we gave our names to the earth.
David Helwig
Al on the Island
Striding off the ferry
in Eurithe’s white chapeau
you are taller than anyone.
At seventy-nine and warned
to keep yourself out of the August sun,
frailer flesh and less amused,
sober on doctor’s orders
you still grab up
a wide space in the air.
You have to bend your head
at every doorway here,
the house too small, the car
too small, besides
it’s running out of gas
and you don’t intend to walk.
You’ve smelled mortality
and the smell annoys you.
When someone says Earle Birney
had no real friends,
well, that annoys you too.
After a sort of lunch
there’s not that much to see,
thin soil, sun-stricken fields,
rolls of hay. The small deer
gone somewhere out of sight.
And the gas is getting low.
“I mean it, you better
turn back. The tank’s
on empty, and I’m not walking.”
There are books to be sold
at a store in Kingston, one way
to turn a dollar except
you always keep too many,
looking for the old secrets
you can put to use.
Between memory and possibility
the poems compose themselves
at night by flashlight
scribbling in the dark.
Might as well keep on,
you’ve done it all your life,
learned how to say
the words that come between
time and silence,
in a voice that went
beyond itself and came back
with news we’ve never heard
or almost forgot,
something almost human
(as you might have said)
and almost not.
Russell Thornton
Purdy’s Otters
I too visited Al Purdy
when he lived in Sidney, BC.
I acted as the chauffeur
for his old friend
the poet Marya Fiamengo,
whom he invited
to his and Eurithe’s home
for a late-in-life tea
after not having seen Marya
for more than a few years.
Creaking as he got up
from the couch, grumbling
a little more each time
Eurithe asked him to go
up the stairs to the kitchen
and put the kettle on,
and carry back down
another fresh pot of tea,
lumbering stooped,
obviously taxed by the job,
he was still unfailing
in getting that tea for us.
I was all ears
while he and Marya
brought up Canadian poets
and exchanged snark
about this one,
praise for that one,
also while they discussed
BC Medical and OHIP benefits,
(which I knew things about
because I took care
of my elderly grandparents—
and I piped up).
Then Al announced
that he and I might as well
go down to his library
in the basement,
where he proceeded
to show me the prize item
in his collection
of Victorian pornography,
replete with writings
and large illustrations
(a few years later, I saw a photo
of him holding up
the same book, and realized
he had probably shown
a lot of people
that particular volume).
He read a passage
out loud with great glee.
That’s how it is, isn’t it? he said,
a grin on his face.
Yeah, I guess it is, I said.
I figured he was teasing me,
but couldn’t be at all sure
(and I could see he liked that).
What I remember most
of the afternoon, though,
was going outside with him
to walk around the property.
I’d been calling him Mr. Purdy—
suddenly he said, softly, Al.
And there was a moment
when it seemed he wasn’t
peering down at me
from his 6′3″ to my 5′8″ anymore—
no, instead we were both
around four and a half feet tall
and around nine years old.
See, he said, otters come up
this creek from the sea
just down there.