by Howard White
Autumn Richardson
The Oracle
Scars, glacial drift, bog-
cotton, dwarf willow
nameless lakes—cold has stripped
all colour from their waves
there is no compassion here, except
that which I carry for small things
yet still I throw lines into water to lure
what may feed me, bones onto flames
to see the art that carbon makes
what I see there:
this day is a momentary haven;
an interval between longer notes
pines are shifting into crows; the wolf
is a deer’s viscera; each is becoming
another’s vision, another’s gait
and so I drink the trees
soon my salts will feed the next
short sharp life.
Susan Musgrave
Al Purdy Took a Bus to the Town Where Herodotus Was Born
“The town we visited,” Al says, “remember
the town—we caught a bus there.”
Eurithe can’t remember the name of the place,
either, but she recalls a wake-up call
and a foreign voice saying “Your cold breakfast
is coming up.” The last time I made Al
a birthday cake it fell, but Al was gracious
enough to say thank you for your largesse.
There are vast areas of my ———
that are missing, for instance the name
of the restaurant in Dublin where each dish
was an approximation of its ideal,
or the Christian names of my daughter’s
school bus drivers I said I’d never forget:
Mrs. Blood, Mr. Wolf, and Miss Hood.
I wanted to write a Young Adult book
about “the late bus,” the one the bad kids
always took, but I didn’t want my obituary
ending up in the Entertainment Section
of the newspaper where I once found a prognosis
of Elizabeth Taylor’s tumour. I don’t want
to be anybody’s Smile of the Day
which is why I’m glad I didn’t shoot myself
cleaning Henry White’s house on Haida Gwaii
last summer—my death would have made
the National Enquirer along with Wife Used
Cheating Hubby’s Toothbrush to Clean the Commode.
In Henry White’s house I sucked up a .22 bullet,
heard a bang, saw sparks, and the next thing
I remember I was seeing headlines: Woman Shoots Self
in Head with Vacuum Cleaner. The photograph
of my sad brain looks like a honeydew melon
soaked in V8 Juice all night after being run over
by a train the time I went pub-hopping in Oxford
and landed in a punk bar eating drugged cookies
which I worried about later when I started
hallucinating because I was pregnant
with Charlotte and didn’t want her to be born
in the corridor of British Rail while I peaked
on Peek Freans Digestive Biscuits. Mary Oliver
says poems are ropes let down to the lost, I wish
someone would keep that in mind when they ever
find me. A critic in the Globe asks why
poets are always losing things, especially
people, why can’t they find something
instead, and I believe he deserves an answer.
“The town where they lost your suitcase,” Al says,
“remember the town—we caught a bus there.”
Eurithe can’t remember if her luggage showed up
but she does recall a wake-up call, a foreign
voice saying, “Your hour has come,” and the line
going dead. You cherish people
then they are gone: what more can be said
about the ones I’d rather be with,
the ones I love best.
I thank them for their largesse.
Susan Musgrave
Each Life is a Language No One Knows
It went well. That’s what the man who helped take
my friend’s life said after my friend drank a last glass
of Chilean wine laced with date rape drug
and then allowed his helper to place an Exit Bag
from a box marked Party Balloon Kits
on my friend’s head, and pump him full of helium. It went
well. That’s what the man said to my friend’s wife
who waited in the living room, in her dressing gown
dwelling deeply in her own thoughts and feelings.
Whose thoughts and feelings—apart from her own—
might she have dwelt upon? The man said the inflated
helium bag rose above my friend’s head like a chef’s hat
before being pulled down over his face. I like to think
my friend drifted up and away into that unknown country
he had written about, but death that day
was the sound of one cold hand clapping as I made my way
back down my friend’s driveway, which looked as if
it had been paved recently with crushed bones. It went
well. A person spends his life saying goodbye
to other people. How does he say goodbye to himself?
Tom Wayman
In Memory of A.W. Purdy
(d. Apr. 2000)
Death came for him in the spring:
a dark crocus.
For even winter, that emblem of
age and aridity,
sickens and dies
and by that act nurtures
a different season. The snow, the crocuses
appear and vanish repeatedly:
the spinning biosphere they help form
is bound in turn to a rotating planet
—on which Al Purdy lived once
and just once.
Sid Marty phoned
from his ranch up Willow Valley Road
in the Alberta foothills
to let me know.
“All the fathers are dying,” I responded
—my own father, exhausted to the core by a hospital’s
intrusive and agonizing procedures
to restore one collapsed bodily system after another,
had convinced his doctors the previous May to grant
the peace of the hospice ward
in which he could sleep his solitary way out of the world.
“This point in our lives,” I told Marty,
“must have happened to our fathers, also.”
“We’ve been able to paddle around,”
Marty mused, “in the shallows
as long as they were beyond us out in the open ocean.
Now we have to voyage
where they went, onto deep water.”
I remembered a poem by Earle Birney,
Purdy’s old colleague, now lost as he under the long swells
of the expanse with no further shore: That sea
is hight Time,
Birney wrote, adopting an archaic tongue,
we drift to map’s end.
II
Purdy shambled across the earth, a big man
whose hands en route pushed at a taxi meter, at
pens, at newly manufactured mattresses,
used books, typewriters, the edges of lecterns,
case after case of beer.
As he travelled, he delighted in
the contours of the l
andscape,
its swales and bluffs, ridges and
hollows. He marvelled, too,
at much he discovered among this geology:
electrical switchyards, grainfields, magistrate’s courtrooms
and the men and women who inhabit each region or district,
with their dogs, flower beds, rusted-out cars.
On everything Purdy loved most
he bestowed
the name of his country.
Yet he was wrong.
In the forest that straddles the border here, the firs
on each side do not clutch
differing small flags in their twigs.
The Great Divide, as mapmakers understand,
occurs along another line.
Still, Purdy did not know what else to do
with his huge affection for all he encountered.
He gazed at what pleased him
with the proprietary eyes
of pure joy. He called it Canada, but
it was Purdy.
III
Now the poet lives in his words, which
as Purdy himself would note,
is a damn strange constricted airless waterless
place to live
—no rhubarb pies or Molson’s Ale,
no girls in their flirty summer tops.
And any language can die, or change shape
until only pedants and their victims
are able to drudge through it:
maybe one in ten thousand of these
feels the neuron’s spark of wit in a phrase
or description regarded as ironic or humorous by a former time.
Yet those weakest of constructs—words, poems—
have endured centuries
so far, which given the track record of
most things humans create and believe in
isn’t shabby at all. So perhaps some of Purdy’s words
will stumble a little tipsily into the future
viewing wonders—and possibly horrors—he now
won’t be able to see for himself.
His gift to me
was his rambling: his itinerant lines and
peripatetic stanzas—apparently relaxed, inquisitive, opinionated,
exactly like someone talking:
a conversation with the reader so cunningly shaped
that the choice of structure or other artistic details
is not the point of the piece, any more than a news story
reveals its architecture. His boozy self-confidence
took poetry to a place nobody else had been.
Who cares? you say. I care,
and maybe the eons will. If not, his life and achievements
were no less futile than those of the rest of us.
I drive back from town on an asphalt road
dry in the middle of the lanes now that the rain has passed.
Over my truck’s speakers
I hear a guitar chord struck,
then a second one, and a human voice
begins to chant a story,
singing me home.
Purdy wasn’t a singer, even if a fan or reviewer
occasionally waxed rhetorical.
But when he depressed a key
and the shaft lifted and fell toward the paper,
that passage of metal through air vibrated like
two people who argue in bed or
in a bar, a coyote taunting the Valley dogs,
the raucous blast of a diesel train engine
that approaches a crossing, a class of grade twos
squawking their version of anybody’s national anthem,
a bellow from a steer in Kooznetsoff’s field
along the Lower Road, wind
swooping over tundra.
And since Al Purdy was at ease
with the currents and rollers of Time, I’ll add
that the sound was whatever noise dinosaurs uttered
in an amorous mood, the skritch-skritch of a quill pen,
a choir in full flight during a requiem mass
(okay, maybe he did sing a little),
a black crocus breaking through soil
into the light of day.
John Watson
Variations
It’s like coming out of a dark room
to find yourself
under the wheat blaze
of a Saskatchewan sky
—Al Purdy
A sky of wheat
Saskatchewan blue
Stepping into the light:
Saskatchewan wheat sky
To find yourself
find a Saskatchewan sky
In 2000 Al Purdy
comes out of a dark room
into the wheat blaze
of a Saskatchewan sky
Phil Hall
from An Oak Hunch: Essay on Purdy
IN THESE PROVINCIAL JERK-WATERS
turnpiked by eagles
his carbon & foolscap
local Legion
o wouldst thee lyrics
(stumbling in dark plowed-under cornfields
widening & falling—in arrogance with flaws
dismissively monumentous)
glance against the sublime!
he discovers sublime limestone
where all of the old surveys wallow white
HIS COCKY DEFIANCE DROPS AWAY
increasingly awe is its own music
a surety of doubt-tone visits
after years of homemade laments & elegies
his Opeongo eyes take in & translate
a petrified flaming tongue’s filibuster
when are you coming down again
how are you getting on with the two new ones
THE TRAILS HE CHOPPED NORTH FOR OUR COLONIES
of inattention (Romanticism as History’s axe)
stop behind us now—hacked markers—a pile of stanchions & cables
staggered images—almost mayday—perhaps caught
NOW EVERY JACK LIAR & THIEF
reflected in the black granite
gravestone of the voice of the land
reads “book” as “voice’s tomb”
& carries home some keepsake
(a stone or cement chicken)
the giant & I went way back
he gave me this before he died
but thrown stones are talking
stolen cement chickens are talking
the land’s voice sacred noise
thunder & lightning unlike us
SHOCKED AWAKE
by a speck of red on a white A
woodpecker
on the slushy tin roof of this unfinished A-frame
wrong with gusto
now both of us hammering away damn radio plays
blood untribalized—territories amplified
art a quirk-of-patience lingo
that lifts the tongue of the sky
there is always a better thunder
pending than gatling but gatling pays
PITY WHAT IS LEFT OF US & OUR COUNTRY
as we dismantle & burn for cheap warmth
the guy-tropes he brought forward on his back
to get us here & past here
STOP IN A DARK FIELD
his white shirt—jacklit—glows
tails out among stones
a white shirt & a hockey stick
whacking rocks into the trees
then stopping to listen
THE FALL WIND RUSHING THROUGH THE DRY CORN
in all of the cornfields for miles around here
the paper applause of an ancient voice
that has just come around with some news
&
nbsp; the roll-your-own salvos of the wind in the corn
a standing ovation surrounding each farmhouse
sh bravura sh
Biographies and Statements
Milton Acorn (1923–86) was a friend of Purdy’s; their sometimes fractious relationship is captured in Purdy’s poem “House Guest.” Three of Acorn’s poetry collections were edited by Purdy, however. Acorn was a fervent Canadian nationalist; two books of his poems were published by the now-defunct Canadian Liberation Movement. He “was a Communist and a traditional Conservative,” James Deahl writes. “Not at different times; at the same time.” In 1970 a group of fellow poets presented a medal to Acorn, dubbing him “the People’s Poet.” He won the 1975 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.
Solveig Adair has lived in many places, but her body, like her writing, is drawn inexorably back to the small towns of the North. Solveig has been published in a number of journals and anthologies including, most recently, Dreamworks, filling Station and Snow Feathers.
As someone growing up in a small northern town, there were few voices that spoke in the clear beautiful unforgiving language that I saw reflected in the world around me. As a young teenager, I found a worn copy of Wild Grape Wine and a lifelong love affair was born. Al Purdy gave voice to the people I met and knew. He allowed them to survive long after the communities they established faded back into poverty and obscurity. As for me, what he gave me is perhaps best said by Al Purdy himself. The pictures painted by his poems are etched within me and, as in the closing lines of “The Last Picture in the World,” it occurs to me “that if I were to die at this moment / that picture would accompany me / wherever I am going / for part of the way.”
James Arthur grew up in Toronto. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press. His work also has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Poetry, Brick and The New Republic. Arthur teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
During the summer of 2017, I spent two months in residence at the Purdy A-frame in Ameliasburgh, writing. I never met Purdy when he was alive, and never heard him read except on tape—but his poems were part of my education, and I deeply admire his decision to organize his life around poetry, without compromise, and without much encouragement either, at least during those early years.
I hope that my poem explains itself. I wanted to pay tribute to Al Purdy, and also capture the experience of living in another writer’s house, surrounded by his things, trying to understand one’s own life by understanding someone else’s.