by Howard White
you said it well
June 1996
David Zieroth
I Met You Only Once, Al Purdy
…but that was enough to know
your bluster wasn’t all of you
and if we meet again in the west
where souls are said to go
which you didn’t believe in
and which sometimes I do though
not today, one day closer to my own
departure, would I be nervous around
a giant like you, whether I mean
teetering from wild grape wine
or heads taller than us who followed?
but supposing we do meet there
let it be away from crowds, those
worshipping, those stabbing, let’s stay
outside where we’re invigorated
by a touch of northern air
coming down from that arctic
above our heads, the scent
of rhododendrons reminding us
distance is time more than space
and I’ll be wanting you to talk because
your voice says more than words
and it hardly matters there
what is said, companionship’s
the point, not warmth exactly since blood
has left us, our cravings and unfinished
lives of no interest yet aren’t we even so
still writing? the way thoughts keep
starting up despite the urge to record them
having ceased, and no pen
or portable Underwood
our physicality spent, and only angels
—or demons—to brave, but surely
we’d be free, neither of them wanting
our insubstantiality now our mouths
are full of dirt back where we left them
once upon a time
ardently believing what they said
Howard White
A Word from Al
Being dead isn’t so bad, in fact it has a lot going for it
Not so different from being alive in Ameliasburg
Which was my favourite thing to be before this
It was time for a break from eternally trying to top my own best lines
Except that wasn’t eternal as it turns out, a mere spark of time I see now
I guess I always knew it was a small window I had to make my mark
To leave some words that might hold a place in the living world
Something I thought important for reasons I can’t quite recall now
It made me impatient with bullshitters and small talkers
Forever stepping around the elephant in the room
Me forever saying “what is this fucking mammoth doing here?”
I was born impatient to break skin, draw blood, get to the heart of the matter
And I got a lot of flak for that, was shunned for lack of social grace
I could see how it made the better-bred avoid me and feel hurt
Like that time in the Cecil I razzed Curt Lang about fucking his mother
Or at least really wanting to, when they squatted in the old Vancouver Hotel
He blubbered and stammered denials in front of those wide-eyed strangers
He’d been trying to impress with his Übermensch act
I could never resist a target like that and anyway it did him good
To face whatever demons drove him from poetry to profiteering
Not keeping at any one thing long enough to make any real mark
Which is not something anybody could say about me
Despite a knockabout life in which no other one thing was constant
Except maybe poverty and my on-again/off-again contest of wills
With that amazing woman, the most amazing thing about her being
The way she hung in with me through all those years of trial and betrayal
And even says some half-assedly good things about me now that I’m safely gone
People, men that is, thought she was a hard case and asked what held me
Or at least kept me coming back after my many inconstancies
But it was just that hardness, as hard as reality, as real as poetry
That grounded me and gave me a north star to plot my rambling by
And not to be overlooked is the fact she always took me back.
Was that love? It is not a word we had much use for, but whatever it was
It was more enduring, more forgiving, more sustaining than any other
Rotten husband as I was, nobody can fault my faithfulness to my true mistress
Not Eurithe but Euterpe, the muse I served with far greater devotion
From the time that old fraud in a cape declaimed before my high school class
To those last scribblings I left on top of the fridge before I took the hemlock
I lived for nothing else but the magic word that would uncork the lightning
For the place and mood that would allow me to be the instrument
Of the good and true poetic utterance that would be seen as good and true
And despite everything including a complete lack of qualification
I did stay true to that purpose and I did write some poems
That must have been good, despite what the world’s bartenders thought.
They are easier to abide than those self-appointed champions I must endure
As I lie here beside this stagnant millpond weighted down
By the half-ton book of stone Eurithe placed to hold me till she comes
Droning on about inconsequentials like my drinking and fighting
The bullshit persona people constructed around me that was never me
Or was never more than the skin I wore like an old shirt from the Sally Ann
While I went about my business of courting that most fickle of muses
Like a blind man obsessed with capturing butterflies
And not just any butterflies, but the rarest and most breathtaking
And sometimes, against all odds, succeeding.
Richard M. Grove
A Drive with Al Purdy
Al Purdy drove with me
up the 400 highway to Barrie
the 2 am waste land
north all the way to our cabins
up and down indigo hills
chasing shafts of light
wincing with the click, click
of bugs on windshield.
He regaled me with his genius
poem after poem never stopping.
He started with “At the Quinte Hotel”
he and I, sensitive men, driving
out of chaos into quiet,
through the ghosts of his past
blurred by speed
heading into my present.
We drove through draping mist
that clung to Al’s every word,
pungent, penetrating, succinct
and then the tape came to an end,
I drove the rest of the way
in silence. His words still hanging
from branches of tall trees, sparkling
through cloudless sky over
red polished Cambrian shield.
Uncle Al’s words whispered to me
unspoken as I walked down
our shrouded black lane
onto dew-covered deck.
Wildness
Milton Acorn
Problem
When you look into your golden beer
and talk about suicide, Al,
I can’t help dreaming laments,
obituaries, and how craftily
I’d cull my
quotations
of you; half martyr
to this dusty tasting time
and half damned decadent.
Like a green lignum vitae tree,
a nuisance on the lawn,
dead you’d carve into strong shapes,
living you’re a problem.
Milton Acorn
Poem for Al Purdy
With crowbar looks, tossing rock words,
let’s bash each other’s cages.
You’re caged man…I can see the bars.
Switch your tail like northern lights
with stars glinting thru it.
Pace…Pace.
How bone swings muscle and muscle bounces bone!
I twist among coiled currents of breeze
rolling in the sun
and leaves drinking light, air,
atom by atom.
But there’s something I only touch
thru a pillow of wind.
Something out there…I want it.
Don’t just make another me,
a doll for your cage.
Bash…Bash.
You’re caged man…I see the bars.
My own, I can’t see.
Julie McNeill
Acorn and Al Build Something
Pass me
your pencil
your glasses
Did you measure this?
How about a light?
Let’s take this to the window.
See what scribble amounts to in this place
You call this
a line?
a verse?
a cabin?
Pass me a cigar.
Rolf Harvey
“You Have to Keep Writing!”
We did some things that were wrong
socially and perhaps that is all—
Porter’s house rolling on the floor
with her dogs so we were covered in hair
when Julian came home
to insist we leave by cab.
Anna brushed us off.
Or that time when I was renting
half a house in Rosedale
when my friend came to visit
and blew my trumpet out the window
at 1 a.m. in Rosedale.
So the neighbour’s daughter rang the bell
and asked my wife, who was younger
and knew better: “please ask your father
to stop playing his saxophone.”
Ruth said it was a trumpet. Closed the door.
We called my friend a cab
but not before a lot of hoo-hah
and his constant reminder
to write all the time.
Hell, people need their sleep.
The world doesn’t run on poetry.
And that is why he had to live out there
pissing on his own lawn,
staring up at the sky in wonder.
Always building a bit more onto
that point of land
out into the water
away from his neighbours
so he could howl.
“Just keep writing,” he said
as he got into the taxi.
“You have to keep writing every day.”
He spoke to himself hoping I would hear.
My friend meant what he cried out
because it was his only way.
Sid Marty
My Editor
in memory, Al Purdy and John Newlove
I phoned him from the Purdys’ at 1AM
Al’s idea; it seemed
reasonable, at the time.
The first thing John said was
“Stay away from the sink.”
He’d broken his ankle weaving round
that homely receptacle.
Something about spilled water, beer
and arguing over poems.
The usual debacle (statistics prove
most accidents do happen in the home).
They’d put in pins; he had much pain, but
from what I know, I think he got off lucky.
Anyway, he claims
the leg’s two inches shorter now.
He’d noticed it while crutching in
to be measured for a suit.
“That’s why I always stick with jeans,”
I told him.
“Stay clear of doctors, tailors
anyone equipped to measure bones.”
I don’t know what they had him on, but
“Listen,” he said, in that
late night DJ undertone—it always
drew me in, as co-conspirator.
“Something you can do for me.
Little favour. For your editor.
“Listen closely now,” he said
with voice that took a rising edge
of menace. “When Al passes out
just cut about two inches
from his right leg
—make sure you get the marrow.
And bring it to Toronto
packed in ice.
Now will you do that for me?
I need it for a transplant.
This goddamn ankle isn’t healing right.”
“Ha! I don’t think Al
would go for that,”
I chuckled.
“I’ll be waiting at the station,”
said my editor, breathing hard.
“Okay, John, get serious.” It was
the wrong thing
to say. The phone vibrated in my hand
and I could feel him leaning on that wire
like a grim, meat-eating bird.
“Look, chum, you want me on this book
or not? Just say the word.”
“Well, shit, the guy’s a friend, you know.”
“Look, he won’t even miss it,”
my editor cajoled.
“He never uses that leg.”
I felt the sweat bead
in my thinning hair.
Young poets need an editor
like Jesus needs the devil,
and the devil needs his exorcise;
they’re mates, coeval.
I shot a furtive look
at my recumbent host,
lost in a cloud of cheap
cigar smoke, on his divan.
Al looked about as sleepy
as an irritated grizzly
and was no slouch at truculence, forsooth.
“John, I dunno.
I lack tools for major surgery
as well as a medical licence.”
“C’mon,” he said, “I know you’re an EMT.
They have a hacksaw there
that’s all you need.”
(I can see now I was succumbing
to my editor’s spell.)
“It seems so drastic somehow, man,”
I whined. “Why not wait for a donor
to drop dead, like everybody else?”
“Because I need a poet,”
breathed my editor.
“Get the picture?”
It made my blood run cold.
“Until tomorrow, then.
We’ll talk about your script.
Just make sure you get that marrow:
bring it
with
you…”
“So how is he?” demanded Al
suspiciously. “Did he sound bitter?”
“No more than usual,” I replied
and I cracked another brewski,
dodging Al’s appraising eye,
t
ried to deflect with
“I think he’s got some more
healing
left to do.”
Then I went outside to drop a litre.
Thought about Al’s famous poem
trying to piss upon a star.
But the breeze was up on Roblin Lake,
so I focused on not pissing on a stair.
Banff, Alberta, 1979
Wednesday Hudson
For Al
Al
my stack of failures loom like the goddam Rockies
I see every morning
when I drop that big kid off at the fancy school
(that appeases my guilt for failing as his mother)
and the grief catches up to me
like the next small town on a road trip
and I wish you were here
with a glass of Ameliasburg wine
but you’re not even alive
and for now, it’s my turn
I guess I’ll just write
write
to try and right a lot of wrongs
like a marriage that got too broke to fix
the wrenches piled up, along with the towels
and there’s nothing for me to stare at—
no lake, no Eurithe
no Milton to curse at—
just me and the walls of an echoless bedroom
freed from the snores
of a hairy man I’m sure to love and hate
’til death do us part—
even though we’re no longer together except
at opposite ends of front doors
watching our genes-that-came-together
cross over the gulf of a family in splinters
I haven’t built a house for my self yet Al
I know there’s a stack of scrap lumber
in those failures of mine
some dirty work to do
some nails to pound
some blisters to spawn
how to architect them into a wholly different tale
that just might end in redemption of shit to flower?
Tom Wayman
Purdy’s Crocuses
They say when Al Purdy
was poet-in-residence at Loyola
he would drive up to Montreal Tuesdays and Wednesdays
and enter the office they had given him
with a 12-pack of beer under each arm.
For two days each week he would sit
talking to students, looking at poems or whatever, and drink
and toss the empty bottles out the window.