by Howard White
It’s the best thing
about this place.
They’re quivery, quick
little things, gone in a flash.
They’re not here
right now, but they
often are. Come back anytime
for another visit. You’ll see.
Katherine L. Gordon
Interview at Eden Mills
Colourful crowds gathered on a grassy steep
overlooking the ruins of the storied Harris Woollen Mill.
Shelagh Rogers sat across from Al for a last interview,
his manner flinty as the stone
not accommodating the superfluous or ingratiating.
He parried with a humour gleaned
from observation of our fickle species,
his life already detached from the fray
but celebrating it as keenly
as a whiskey at a wake.
My last encounter, fixed in memory’s favourite corner,
of a fiercely talented poet seer,
who shaped a nation’s vision,
lifted us out of formal connections of habit
to an appreciation of a raw Canadian perspective
with the courage to paint it in vivid free verse,
conferring value on the everyday drama
transforming it to vibrant art of life.
Al’s “ordinary” always the undertow of extraordinary.
Brian Brett
from Real Life—Can You Imagine It?
Al Purdy at the window
looks over the farm while
the peacock fans a white goose
and the evening sun flames
on the burnished leaves of the giant maple.
Then he turns to me and says:
“Real life—can you imagine it?”
Douglas Fir,
Arbutus,
Garryana Oak,
miles and miles of them,
reaching down to blue ocean
where illuminated ferry boats
glow unearthly in a sea mist.
Can you imagine it?
Is it real?
What’s real?
You couldn’t,
you shouldn’t,
you wouldn’t.
You might get shot in Salvador.
A redback spider could bite your ass.
The parrot will say good morning.
An igneous rock hardens near the earth’s core.
The aliens are introduced to Elvis Presley.
Can you imagine that?
Yes, I think I could.
Elvis Presley always was an alien.
For that matter,
who could imagine
Al Purdy,
an ageing poet at the window,
and is he real?
Real life—a trick, a joke
a quest to find what shouldn’t exist at all—
the spirit?
The only part of the body which doesn’t
survive the atomic swirl of chemical
action and reaction?
Who could have imagined all of this?
Not God in a vacuum some place near
where the Vega galaxy originated?
It’s too hard to imagine
a vacuum with imagination,
and harder still to define
God as an explosion
with such creative flare.
The big bang invented finger painting?
The lord of the unreal universe
designed bad porno pictures?
Encephalitis?
30 foot long tapeworms?
What kind of God is that?
What kind of universe is this?
Who could have imagined it?
Linda Rogers
Famous Last Lines
I knew how to cultivate asparagus.
Just like poems, it likes manure.
Bullshit, the voice of the land said
when he pulled his famous last lines
out of the compost. That wild man
knew he couldn’t force words any
more than he could grow a turnip.
He had to find them. Like children
waiting in the forest to be discovered
by the right parents, his poems hid
under cabbage leaves, or dangled
from the beaks of Valkyries looking
to reverse the tolls of war and natural
selection. Verse lurked here and there,
everywhere the poet searched, from
the fenced pastures of Prince Edward
County to the minarets at Samarkand.
Unlike poetry, which isn’t particular
whether it grows in sun or shade, in
the sand around ancient monuments
or ice floes cruising the Beaufort Sea,
the wild asparagus called out to him
from Ameliasburgh ditches as precious
as the wisdom written in ancient script.
Then as now, every green stalk an
epiphany, every mouthful a poem.
Doug Paisley
While You Were Out
Thought I should leave you a note
I was here while you were out
I could tell by the furnishings and the magazines
You’d been gone a long time
I answered the phone, it was for someone else
I even saw your tombstone in the cemetery
I found your leather coat behind a door
Put it on
Sat down on the porch to smoke
I began to creak like an old club chair in your coat
Later in a photograph of you in the yard
I saw a sapling at the fence line
I turned to the window and the trunk reaching out of sight
When it got dark I locked your door and went to bed
What was I afraid of?
I had a dream about a boat in a marsh
That I nearly missed
There was something I had to do
A pump was thumping behind my head
The shoreline was flooded and water was up against the side of your house
How nice it would be not to worry about that anymore
Some friends were stopping by
Before guests arrive I’m always tense
Like a fugitive
Maybe that’s what makes gossip dreadful
When you’re gone people can only talk about you
Sadiqa de Meijer
Ancestor vs. Ancestor
The darkness then was darker than we know;
it never left the corners of a room,
rose velvetly from cellars, where it blinded the potatoes—
like curd it formed a film on wooden spoons.
Grains of darkness clustered in the orchards.
Dark moisture kept the cabbage leaves apart.
All over the old country, there were nights. No hands, no ground.
You’ve never really seen the stars.
And what was in it? Spectres, wraiths—
they spooked the horse. Some things that people did.
A continent was dark. It could be what we wanted.
Animists, ivory, pith of strange fruits.
We must have been, for all intents, asleep.
When those nations flickered and were lit,
there was no fault to speak of.
And we didn’t speak of it.
James Arthur
In Al Purdy’s House
It is strange, living in the house
of a writer who has died. I use your cutlery,
your typewriter. I read your autobiography
while lying in your bed, trying to imagine Roblin Lake
and this lakeside piece of land
as they were sixty years ago, when you and Eurithe
built the A-frame by hand,
with no experience of carpentry, using salvaged lumber
and whatever materials you could find.
Critics seem to always talk you up or talk you down,
casting you as the forerunner
of all Canadian poets who were to follow,
or else as a roughneck and a clown.
For me, it’s enough that you were endlessly demoted
during a war you found unreal;
that you lived and wrote according to an image
you had in mind;
that you called your house A drum for the north
wind, a kind of knot in time.
Your mother’s good china
is still here, asleep inside the hutch. History,
your personal history, hangs around the record player,
which I haven’t dared to touch—
but this year there’s been so much rain,
Roblin Lake has climbed up fifteen feet on the grass,
making an island of the short peninsula
you and Eurithe added to the shore.
Standing at the window near the kitchen,
watching a single sailboat pass
back and forth across a distance
that couldn’t be more than a mile from end to end,
I feel a collapse of distinctions
between the real and the unreal,
between what has already
taken place, and what is happening right now,
as if time had been doubled over into itself,
like a sheet of folded steel.
Cottage country becomes backcountry,
as houses along the shoreline
blink out and disappear.
I know better than to make myself at home
in a house that isn’t mine.
Soon, I’ll leave the keys
on the counter, turn the lock
on the inside, step out, and close the door—
and from that point forward
there won’t be any of this, anymore.
Maybe because I’m left-handed
I made my way through your collected poems
back to front,
so I ended with the love songs of a young man—
poems for women
you seduced, or thought you might seduce—
and I began
with your regrets, the many places you visited,
and your elegies for friends
who during my backward progress
came to life one by one.
Grace Vermeer
Transient
I was searching for Al Purdy on Dundas in London,
Attic Books, second floor, poetry section
when the phone rang. It was Al, calling to say
he was riding the boxcars out of Winnipeg,
headed west toward Regina with a drifter.
This guy wants a handout, but there isn’t
a sandwich in two hundred miles—just a minute,
he wants a smoke.
I stood there and listened, he rustled around
in his pockets, found a cigarette, then a match.
That’s the thing about Al, you can stand there
on the rumbling roadbed while he draws a map,
you think you’re holding summer in your mouth,
then you notice—
no arrivals, no departures,
it’s just you, standing there, getting old,
and then older.
Rodney DeCroo
Al and Eurithe
sitting in the vancouver press club
with al purdy and his wife eurithe
feeling uncomfortable
not sure what to say to the man
whose every poem i’ve read and admired
whose voice sounding the depths in my head
has become more familiar
than those of my friends
right up there with my wife’s voice
but there are places in me
his poems have touched
marked keep out even to her
so what do you say to a man
whose words have opened
rooms in your head
you didn’t know existed
what do you say
not much
because there are no words for it
except maybe
fireflies sparkling in the brain
or
fox fox fox
which i can’t say because
he’s already said it
so i shut up
grateful he’s more than willing
to direct the conversation
yet i sit there feeling like
a six year old nodding and agreeing
with everything he says forgetting
i ever had a thought of my own
jumping up to get peanuts from the bar
when eurithe says she’s hungry
wishing i could stop myself
feeling like polonius must have felt
a stuttering sycophant
fawning and scraping
at the skirts of royalty
but they aren’t exactly royalty
more like an old odd couple
trying to make an extra buck
at the local flea market
hawking al’s books spread across
the table the prices written out
in black marker on a piece of cardboard
al arguing with eurithe about a pen
he’s lost eurithe says never existed
cutting him off saying al it’s not worth it
in a tone my grandmother uses to warn my
grandfather the discussion has come to an end
i go to light up a smoke
and al says eurithe is allergic
to cigarette smoke cats and him
eurithe smiling thinly through pressed lips
al’s getting impatient
complaining loudly because he wants to read
so he can get back to the sandman inn
to watch the news and get some rest
he stands up a bit shakily
to go corner the organizer who’s running
around trying to organize
not doing a very good job of it
leaving me to make small talk with eurithe
who is pleasant enough but she knows this is al’s night
that’s why i’m here
so when i botch her name introducing her to friends
she says bluntly i’m mrs. purdy
sparing me any further discomfort
for which i’m grateful
al’s back
all six foot something of him
peanut shells and spittle
at the corners of his mouth
i want to wipe it off thinking
good god man
you’re a literary giant
which he is but that doesn’t spare you
the traits of other mere mortals
the reading starts
three local poets on stage
ten minutes into their reading
al lurches up nearly knocking
over the table shouting
how goddamn long do i have to wait
then marches out the front door
with the organizer following
tailed by eurithe to negotiate
you can hear al
bellowing outside on granville street
>
while everyone pretends not to hear
the poets continuing to read
tension filling the room
like when a parent behaves badly
at the dinner table
the kids afraid to say anything
door bangs open as they come back in
al sitting down his arms crossed glaring
as if defying me to say anything
i stare back not wanting to look a coward
when eurithe says jokingly
al think sweet thoughts
or you’ll have a bad reading
it’s al’s turn
he’s up there working his magic
the audience is laughing
this curious old man
who’s so much himself
he fills the whole room
i’m listening to the poems
getting lost in that twilight space
where time stands still or suddenly speeds up
momentarily glimpsing the hairs of my soul
in the flux of another man’s words
my defects forgiven
in that straining to be human
a gift he’s given me so many times.
i’ll never get his voice out of my head
when i glance over at eurithe and
she’s nodded off to sleep
the reading’s over
a crowd hovering around the table
congratulating al on being al purdy
while buying his books i excuse
myself to go sit with some friends
saying a quick goodbye promising
to return al’s letter at which he smiles
then al and eurithe leave slip out early
al counting in his head
the take for the night
eurithe just wanting to get some sleep
exhaustion all over her face
suddenly i’m ashamed of putting al up
on the mantelpiece of my icons
making him less than human
wondering if i’ve ever really read his poems
i want to run out to the street
shout wait have a good trip
hoping al sold enough books
and eurithe will have a good sleep
before the long trip back to the island—
so thanks al
for the poems
for being so much yourself
you had to write it all down
helping us to see ourselves
inhabiting eternity and the shining mountains
in this too brief allotment of time
where only the saying of things is possible
and goddamn it