by Howard White
one’s hat in the air at the ends of wars. One guesses.
Senses are a sickness here at the core, the corn,
the Cornwall Report.
Pendant lamps are a kitchen’s super moon,
which is to say light never gets closer or noon
is home’s apposite and frightening adjustor.
We murdered years with knives pry-barred
in toasters. These are cowbirds.
Legacy
Phil Hall
from Essay on Legend
Most days Al Purdy
wrote poems as good as Alden Nowlan
but maybe 30 times Al wrote a poem we now call a Purdy poem
as if some days his name were All not Al
Nowlan also at times sawdust flying achieved a wider name
All-Done-Now Land or Old In No Land
they both wrote a lot of friendly crap that sounds the same
if read now but who can stand to read them exhaustively now
they were drinkers & that will get a soul above itself some
as the booze digs under eloquence like surf
but Purdy seems to have seen & heard his over-self
he caricatured Al as All or was that us
while Nowlan just kept writing down memories & impressions
without distinguishing small-town small-talk from the bull moose secret life
so we tend to forget him
Otty Lake, 2016
Kat Cameron
How Students Imagine the Dorsets
they have never imagined us in their future
how could we imagine them in the past
—Al Purdy, “Lament for the Dorsets”
I thought it was a simple poem
a few remnants of the past—tent rings, carved ivory swans—
a forgotten people, reimagined.
I forgot how uninformed my students are
living in their solipsistic world.
Giants are important to storytelling.
Sometimes I want to weep
at their ignorance. The poem
is not a fairytale. The Dorsets
were not giants.
Back then people had nothing
and they had to survive in the wilderness.
True, in our glutted apartments, we cannot imagine the poverty
of a people who survived on seal meat
in a caribou-skin tent.
In “Lament” Purdy uses Canadian history to exaggerate
the negative viewpoint on settlers invading Dorset land.
No. Indoctrinated into the colonial mindset,
they can’t imagine that the little men
who came from the west with dogs,
the men who pushed out the Dorsets, were Inuit,
not settlers.
If the ivory swan can survive, so can the people in this poem.
Ye Gods, it’s a lament. They’re all dead. Extinct. Gone.
How to explain extinction to a twenty-year-old student?
Death has not entered their world.
They cannot imagine a tent in the frozen Arctic,
where one old man carves
his memories into ivory swans.
Purdy writes,
I have been stupid in a poem.
But this poet who left school at 17,
an autodidact who wrote about
Cuba, China, Greece, and Ameliasburg, Ontario,
Arctic trees, Plato’s cave,
imagines worlds he has never seen,
carvers and hunters who live again.
Piecing together stories—
poets piece together the fragments left behind.
John B. Lee
The Unveiling
i
I’m on my way
to an unveiling
the great poet
has been turned to stone
ii
in a bar
we raise a glass
mine is
dark ale
I remember
how the poet
whose statue
we have just
honoured
was here
with us in 87
raising a pint
to another friend
only then
a few days dead
and I saw
my face
in the looking glass
and joked
“oh, see there
they’ve hung
our picture
over the bar”
and three of us
look and laugh
to see ourselves
a pigeon
on each head
dove-shouldered
immortalized in white.
iii
at the unveiling
the shy couple
polish the poet
like the bathing of the dead
a week
in the sun
and he’s too tarnished
for ceremony
the mayor, the living laureate
the benefactor
all want shine
a week ago
installed by crane
the poet
hanged by the neck
came down
from the sky
to land on the slab circumference
of a grass-flat plinth
suspended
on the makeshift gallows
hung, as it were, for the crime of silence
a girl
climbed onto his lap
before the wax was set
two students
stopped and shouted
“that’s Al Purdy!”
and then, today, after the rubbing
the sheet dropped down
to drape his frame
and we drank
away an hour
as I wondered
“what is happening under the sheet?”
in the ripple
of the wind-stirred shroud
iv
his widow
touched by light
stood in the shade
of the life-like one-and-one-half-sized man
with whom she had shared
a bed
she reached out, briefly
caressed his black-marble calf
the crowd
let out a sigh
like wing-breath on a single shade of green
her mind alone
inheld
the meaning of that touch.
Jeanette Lynes
English Assignment: Situate Al Purdy’s Poems in Their Various Literary Traditions
The graveyard tradition
The tradition of fallen fence poems
Barroom brawl poems, hold your horses poems
Horse poems, rural party line poems
Mice in the house poems
Sestinas on train poems
Sick poems
Impermanent husband poems
Jackhammer poems
Anecdote poems
Argument poems
Gospel poems
Houseguest from hell poems
With all due respect poems
With no respect poems
Open road poems
Dead car battery poems
Neolithic skull poems
Starling poems
Island dream poems
Dude poems
Poems about Ms. Atw
ood
Say the names poems
The tradition of poems that allows cussing
And if there’s no tradition of cosmic
ass-kicking poems
there damned well is now
Rob Taylor
On Realizing Everyone Has Written Some Bad Poems
Another poem starts poorly, ends with pangs
of shame which cause my hands to reach out
like Purdy’s hands snatching up loose copies of The Enchanted
Echo to later burn, or not (a good legend’s never clear).
I read my poem and it bitters on my tongue
like the baking powder my father packed in pancakes
he poured and served out to us (unknowingly?) half-
cooked each early Sunday morning ’til his death.
I think of Purdy in his A-Frame, midwinter,
low on firewood, a row of Echoes fading on the shelf.
Maybe he reached out his hands and grabbed them.
Maybe he let them be. I don’t care which.
The choice matters, to be sure, splits hero from fool,
but it matters far less than its making.
Sid Marty
The Statue of Al Purdy
The Statue of Al Purdy unveiled
that day in Toronto, felt wrong,
seeing the complex man
I had come to know
composed, forever, in one mode.
I should have been forewarned
to see Al Purdy turned to bronze.
To me he seemed more often
poised to spring, like a mountain lion,
an active man who’d throw
a big paw around you and growl
“Let’s talk about those poems
you sent me.” (Or sometimes, not.)
Yet skepticism made him question
formal compliments betimes,
as if they compromised
his blue collar style.
So the sculptors got it right,
leaving out the jacket and tie.
Eurithe Purdy, age 84,
had dragged herself from hospital
to be there, and after the speechifying
bid them pull the veil aside,
but damned if it didn’t fall right over her,
So she struggled under the canvas
for air, in a scary cartoon.
Say what you want about Toronto,
but nobody laughed as we rescued
Al’s muse from the fallout
of his great honour,
a glitch that might have levelled
a weaker old-timer.
I asked Jim Purdy what he thought
of it all and Jim, built on a Purdy frame,
with his father’s voice to match
rumbled, “Well, I don’t recall
the beatific smile.”
I’d like to think Al
might have said exactly that.
But friend Ruth Harvey remembers
an edge of hubris in the voice
of that insouciant Everyman one time,
when Al, his feet hanging out the window
of the Purdy land-ship to cool, challenged
a puzzled yokel with, “Do you know who I am?”
then muttered, “Well, it doesn’t matter.”
And once, in my wife’s café in Pincher Creek
with the Purdys sitting there
we could not find one customer who’d heard of him.
Angered, Myrna hissed “Do you realize who he is?”
But that was Pincher Creek,
a town named after a pair of pliers.
Now his statue answers the question
for anybody wandering by:
“The Voice of the Land.”
Well, I guess I’m glad it’s there,
though I prefer the human voice
to the noble inscription.
Still, I wonder if the author
of The Cariboo Horses,
wrangler to the wild horses of poetry
might “Cast a cold eye”
even on that sincere depiction,
as if Al Purdy ever could be
frozen in fiction.
Willow Valley, Alberta, 2017
Doug Paisley
Roblin Lake
Where I shouldn’t be
Wearing someone else’s coat
This place doesn’t want me
Or I don’t want to be here
Asking so little of myself
Chainsaws are running across the lake
And I’m too timid to fart
Too conspicuous on the road
And I slept too late
Let the time sail by
Tried to enjoy a smoke and a beer
What kind of person tries to enjoy that?
Pick up the phone put down the phone
Let the food spoil
Let the fire die
Couldn’t sit still
What’s original here? people asked
I guess I don’t know
Saw a chip bowl from an old photograph
Up on a shelf
That wall looks too white and new
That chair could be from back then
20, 30, 50 years ago
Who doesn’t want to turn away from today
And picture all those struggles that resolved
or just ended?
My infant son for one
This place with no toys
A heron on the shore he’d like to chase
Its murky, skeletal presence
No sinew on the bone
Of scribbles in books and luggage tags
Shelves of cobweb spines
Where once a path was hacked
Through forests of words unpublished
Skirting glades of certainty
To build a home rough and unruly
Sending lines arcing through the sweetest point
That draws our minds’ own words
Like no song, no siren
And lay down by the millpond with a culminating sigh
That swallowed everything
Howard White
The Poet’s Wife
for Eurithe Purdy
For fifty years her role was to be the brake
On a runaway imagination
Also to put up with a lot of crap
In the name of art (poverty, infidelity, anonymous toil)
Now that she is fifteen years alone it is different
She has become the keeper of that flame
That once gave her so much anguish
She is the one left to make the case
For that bewildering and troubling journey
She found her life carried away on
And poetry, the strange obsession
That gripped her otherwise prosaic man
Has become the focus of her nostalgia
As she recollects the work she always left to him
Realizing that she is now in some ways
Its best and only witness and advocate
People press her constantly to interpret and explain
That work she always left to others
And slowly she discovers she knows it
After all with a lived-in authority
No one on earth can match
She knows the desolation and horror
That lay behind some of those sweet lines
She knows something nobody else could know
About how poetry is formed from life
Like the pearl that hides the oyster’s pain
Nicholas Bradley
On Being Archaic
But there is no going back in time
—Al Purdy, “On Being Human”
Tuesdays and Thursdays
I meet my classes
and each time surmise
again that each student
is half as old as their teacher,
while they, I imagine,
watch him step cautiously
into the room, one foot
dangling in a private,
unimaginable
middle age beyond
even curiosity.
Each time we talk
about poems written
before any of us
was born, that some of us
love, and that none of us,
I worry, understands.
And I remember
my teachers, ancient
men and women
in their fifties and forties
(and sometimes younger)
who taught me the same
old poems, who must
have fathomed the rift
between us. And maybe
they disliked or feared
it as well, and maybe
they saw with clarity
how little I knew
and banished the thought
so we could continue
our game, throwing
from third to second to short
to first without the yips
getting in the way.
We size each other up
from across our field,
none of us able to say
just the right thing,
and now and then glance,
as the hour passes,
Tuesdays and Thursdays,
through the window
at metrical lines of rain
David Helwig
At Queen’s Park
We cross the park—a burly
victim of bad luck and not enough
cash asleep on the grass
among the strollers in the August sun,
and the murmuring green leaves say
that old trees grow tall.
We know what we’re searching for,
make out the dark figure across the wide
green public space as the cars
motor round their circle and bronzed
bearded Edward the Seventh stands
sentry over his mother’s park.
Al Purdy, Poet. I read the plaque,