by Howard White
Something I wanted to work into the poem and couldn’t was the blue heron that came every few days to wade in the shallows of Roblin Lake. It couldn’t possibly have been the same heron that Purdy cast as a harbinger of death, twenty years earlier, in his late poem, “The Last Picture in the World” (“A hunched grey shape / framed by leaves / with lake water behind / standing on our / little point of land / like a small monk”)—and yet it was hard to see the bird any other way.
Ken Babstock is a poet, editor and teacher. His collection Airstream Land Yacht (House of Anansi, 2006) was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. His collection Methodist Hatchet (House of Anansi, 2011) won the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Doug Beardsley was born and raised in Montreal. After Expo 67 he spent a year in Connecticut, followed by three years in England and two in France. He returned to Canada in 1974, settling on the West Coast in Victoria.
In the fall of 1974, Al came to read at the University of Victoria. I was immediately aware that this giant of a man was a giant poet. Our friendship began when we discovered we were fellow sufferers and devoted fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Weekly lunches and intense conversations about poets and poetry developed into two book collaborations and the idea for a third.
Gregory Betts is the author of seven books of poetry, editor of five books of experimental Canadian writing, and author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestation. He is the Artistic Director of the Festival of Readers, the Curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and a professor at Brock University.
The first time I imagined a living poetry was in Kingston, Ontario, down deep on Princess Street halfway toward the water. Coming out of the repertory cinema, after seeing Bleu (the first, and best, of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s trilogy), we saw there was a light snow falling, but we were excited by the movie and walked to talk until we came across a crowd spilling out of the Sleepless Goat café. Curious, and drunk with the spirit of the night, we pushed our way in to find a long, gaunt man holding forth. Every word moved in a charmed air from him out to every ear around the room. In the film, we’d just seen Juliette Binoche fall in ecstasy at a printed line of music. I’d never seen a poet in their natural element before. Beside him was Eurithe, with whom we spoke after the reading had ended. I asked her who the poet was, and she said without smiling, “Oh, that’s just Al.” People jostled us from behind for blocking the book table. I felt like a turnstile at the gates of a secret garden. I’m not sure what it was about the event, but two things happened immediately after the reading: I scrambled to assemble a small chapbook of my own writing (but gave it to no one), and I bought a book of poetry (Poems for All the Annettes, recommended by Prof. Ware) for the first time of my own accord.
Earle Birney (1904–95) was arguably the pre-eminent Canadian modernist poet, twice winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for his poems. He was “a friend, a model and a mentor” to Purdy, in the words of Birney’s biographer, Elspeth Cameron. “I look at Birney’s poem ‘Bushed’ as an example of somewhere near the way I’d like to write,” Purdy said. “Behind that poem is a whole universe of meaning waiting for the reader.” In 2014 Harbour published the 1947–87 letters between Birney and Purdy, We Go Far Back in Time, edited by Nicholas Bradley. “As I grow old,” Purdy wrote, “I think of myself as a slightly older Birney (discontent, cantankerous…and damn well other points of similarity, too).”
George Bowering is a Vancouver poet who has often written about Al Purdy and his work. He first stayed overnight in the A-frame in the sixties, and did so again in the twenty-first century. He is fortunate enough to be married to Jean Baird, who started the movement to save the A-frame. His most recent book of poetry is Some End, his half of a flip book shared with George Stanley and published by New Star Books.
Nicholas Bradley lives in Victoria, BC. He is the author of Rain Shadow (University of Alberta Press, 2018), a collection of poems.
I never met Al Purdy, though I heard him read once when I was a student. The poetry was lost on me then, and I was far too shy to introduce myself to the poet. Now, as a teacher of Canadian literature, I regret the missed opportunity whenever I read Purdy’s poems in the classroom, my imitation of his voice reminding me that I heard the real thing only for a half-hour that I can scarcely recall. In time, his poems showed me something of what it means to be here, and I am grateful to the good teachers who helped me listen to that unmistakable voice on the page.
Kate Braid has written, co-written or co-edited fourteen books and chapbooks of non-fiction and prize-winning poetry. For fifteen years she worked in construction though she now builds entirely in words. See www.katebraid.com.
Especially when I became involved in construction, Purdy’s down-to-earthness and rough humour (just like construction guy-humour) were a continual affirmation that I was on the right track, that it was okay to write about work, to say it plainly, to aim to communicate with so-called “ordinary” people. Thank you Al Purdy, indeed!
Brian Brett, former chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada and a journalist for four decades, is best known as a poet, memoir writer, and fictionist. He is the author of thirteen books and was the 2016 recipient of the Writers’ Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Kat Cameron is the author of two collections of poetry: Strange Labyrinth (Oolichan Books, 2015) and Lightning over Wyoming (Oolichan Books, 2018). Her poetry, fiction and book reviews have appeared in over fifty journals and anthologies. She teaches English literature and writing at Concordia University of Edmonton.
Until the summer of 2017, when I took a writing workshop with Steven Heighton, I wasn’t very familiar with Purdy’s poetry. I had read “Trees at the Arctic Circle” and loved some of the lines, especially the description of the trees whose “seed pods glow / like delicate grey earrings.” Heighton’s enthusiasm for Purdy’s poetry inspired me to read Rosemary Sullivan’s essay “Purdy’s Dark Cowboy” in Memory-Making, and I decided to teach “Lament for the Dorsets” in a first-year English class. After explaining the history of the Dorset people and showing an image of a two-inch swan carving, I had the students write a paragraph analyzing Purdy’s use of history in the poem. Some answers depressed me; some astounded me. One student thought that the poem was about actual giants. But another recognized that Purdy is “piecing together stories” from Dorset artifacts. This is the work of poets: piecing together stories. Purdy’s poem reimagines the past, creating what Sullivan calls a magic “of memory and place.” Like Purdy and the Dorset carver he imagines, I write from “the places in [my] mind / where pictures are.”
Bruce Cockburn is a distinguished Canadian singer-songwriter. He has received thirteen Juno Awards, is an officer of the Order of Canada and a winner of the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. His autobiography, Rumours of Glory, was published in 2014.
I went out and got Purdy’s collected works, which is an incredible book. Then I had this vision of a homeless guy who is obsessed with Purdy’s poetry, and he’s ranting it on the street. The song is written in the voice of that character. The chorus goes, “I’ll give you three Al Purdys for a twenty dollar bill.” Here’s this grey-haired dude, coattails flapping in the wind, being mistaken for the sort of addled ranters you run into on the street—except he’s not really ranting, he’s reciting Al Purdy. The spoken word parts of the track are excerpts from Purdy’s poems. After that, once the ice was broken, the songs just started coming.
Lorna Crozier’s latest book is What the Soul Doesn’t Want, published in 2017 and nominated for the Governor General’s Award. In 2015 two books came out: The Wrong Cat, which received her third Pat Lowther Award, and The Wild in You, a collaboration with photographer Ian McAllister. She’s an Officer of the Order of Canada, the recipient of the Governor General’s Award, the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, BC’s Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence, and five honorary doctorates, most recently from McGi
ll and Simon Fraser. Born in Saskatchewan, she lives on Vancouver Island.
Robert Currie is the author of seven books of poetry and four works of fiction. He served as Saskatchewan’s third Poet Laureate and received the 2009 Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. His most recent book is The Days Run Away (Coteau, 2015).
Al Purdy was the first poet I’d ever seen. There he was in 1965, at the University of Saskatchewan, live, unlike most of the poets we took in class. His poems, too, were full of life, original and gripping, nothing stuffy about this man or his work. Hearing him read made me want to read more of his poems, and though I was too shy to approach him then, I later bought The Cariboo Horses. Reading that collection was exciting; it enhanced a compulsion I was already feeling to write poems of my own. In those early years I was lucky to be inspired by Al Purdy.
Some years later I applied for membership in the League of Canadian Poets and asked for a recommendation from Ron Everson, whom I’d published in Salt, a little magazine that I was grinding out in the seventies on a borrowed Gestetner. Ron wrote that he’d be happy to recommend me, and so would Al, who was there for a visit. Al who, I wondered. No, it couldn’t possibly be, but when I looked at the letter there was the signature of Al Purdy. What could be better than that?
Rodney DeCroo is a poet, singer-songwriter and actor. He grew up in a small coal town in western Pennsylvania, USA, but has lived in Vancouver for many years. He has published two collections of poetry with Nightwood Editions. He has released eight albums through Northern Electric Records and his current label, Tonic Records. DeCroo also wrote a one-man show, Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town, that has toured throughout Canada and was featured at the Vancouver International Writers Festival.
Sadiqa de Meijer was born in Amsterdam, and moved to Canada as a child. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and in 2012 she won the CBC Poetry Prize. Her first collection, Leaving Howe Island (Oolichan Books, 2014), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award.
I spent a July at the A-frame, and I will always be grateful for how seamless life could feel there; I was writing in a space with an animate past, I was making a living, my child was having glorious days at the beach. But what I need to write about here is another aspect of my stay. I grappled with the books on the A-frame shelves; there were many white, anthropological perspectives on Indigenous and tribal cultures, the sort of studies that are almost zoological in tone. At the same time, when I walked the county roads, I was often struck by how the landscape resembled parts of the Netherlands, where I grew up. As an immigrant writer of mixed race, I found the place was in conversation with several parts of me. Someone in my background could have written the books in question, and someone else could have been their subject. Someone would have known how to farm the sandy ground. The poem “Ancestor vs. Ancestor” is an A-frame poem because the voice is aligned with those who wrote the books, or at least with their antecedents. In this chance to speak again, they seem to both explain and disown their actions.
Magie Dominic, Newfoundland writer and artist, lives in New York. She is the author of the memoirs The Queen of Peace Room and Street Angel. Her writing has been published in multiple periodicals. Her art has been exhibited at the United Nations and in several cities, including Toronto and New York.
Al Purdy’s unique ability to give a personality, a human face, to weather, trees and the elements, to all aspects of the environment and geography, is both an inspiration to me as a writer, and a source of great joy to me as a reader.
The geographical location for Purdy’s “Trees at the Arctic Circle,” and his voice in the poem, inspired me to write “Standing on a Newfoundland Cliff.”
The geographical settings for both poems address nature, geography and survival and adaptation to unique environments.
To me, Purdy’s poem, “Trees at the Arctic Circle,” addresses “the symbolic elements of the self in nature and in the environment. This is an aspect I have approached in my writing and continue to approach.
The trees in “Trees at the Arctic Circle” are diametrically opposite to the tuckamore trees in “Standing on a Newfoundland Cliff” but both species of trees, both personalities, are unquestionable survivors.
Dymphny Dronyk works as a mediator for Alberta Justice and is a translator, editor and writing coach. Her collection Contrary Infatuations (Frontenac House, 2007) was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. She is the publisher of several bestselling anthologies at House of Blue Skies.
I discovered Al’s poetry as a young teen, living in a cabin off the grid in the Kootenays. There was something so earthy, and evocative, and playful about his work that I imagined that he would understand my quirky, marginalized existence. I banged out poems on a crooked old typewriter, where every lowercase e was a half line above the other letters, and dreamed that one day I too would be a poet. His poems made me believe that I could write about my life, as it was, and that was a gift like no other.
Candace Fertile teaches at Camosun College in Victoria, BC.
Purdy’s poetry runs the gamut of emotions, just as his language includes everything from the vulgar to the erudite. In particular I love his ability to be funny and serious, often in the same poem as he does in “At the Quinte Hotel.”
Katherine L. Gordon is a rural Ontario poet, publisher, judge, editor and reviewer, working to promote the voices of Canadian poets around the world. She has many books, chapbooks, anthologies and collaborations with fine contemporaries whose work inspires her. Her poems have received awards and been translated internationally. Latest book: Piping at the End of Days (Valley Press, 2017).
Richard M. Grove, otherwise known to friends as Tai, lives in Presqu’ile Provincial Park, Ontario, where he and his wife run a B&B, and where he also runs Hidden Brook Press. He is a poet, prose writer, publisher, photographer, painter, president. His many titles of poetry, prose and memoir can be found on Amazon.
Like many, I corresponded with Al Purdy by letter. I once mailed him one of my poems where I gave him credit for three lines from one of his poems that I had incorporated into my poem. His reply letter to me was humorous, as he often was: “Nice poem, at least it has three good lines.” He and I laughed about this when I reminded him over a coffee in Toronto. The first time that I met him was at a reading where I presented a stack of books for him to sign for me. As I presented the stack of books I said, “This stack is proof that I am a big fan.” His reply was, “There are a few titles missing from that stack.”
I have always been impressed with Al Purdy’s poems, so much so that I, as president of the Canada Cuba Literary Alliance, nominated him posthumously as the Canadian Ambassador for the CCLA. This idea was endorsed by his wife, Eurithe. The CCLA is proud to include one of his poems in every issue of The Ambassador.
Phil Hall’s most recent books are Conjugation (BookThug, 2016), Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall—A Selected Collage (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015) and—with Erin Moure—The Interrupted (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2017). He has won the Governor General’s Award (2011) and Ontario’s Trillium Award (2012). He has twice been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the director of the Page Lectures at Queen’s University.
Rolf Harvey has a book of New and Selected due to be published in the latter half of 2019. “But I don’t feel enthusiastic or even grateful now that I am seventy,” he said. “I do feel good that my life’s works, including years of work as a film designer, are somehow being recognized by a university’s archives.”
There are so many stories and times I had living down there in Ameliasburgh. In fact, I spent so much time down there when I was a bum, a broken man, and they gave me family. I used to take the train down and stay at Eurithe’s mother’s house to eat a butter tart or two (she used to make them for me when she heard I was getting off the train and walking over to her house). I’d sit there
with tea and butter tarts waiting for Eurithe or Al to come to pick me up and travel out to the A-frame.
Anyway, I have stories and memories still from how she and he took care of me when I was a broken man. I lived down there off and on for years and so I got to know him and her much better, I think, than graduate students.
Steven Heighton received the 2016 Governor General’s Award for poetry for The Waking Comes Late (Anansi). He was also a finalist in 1995 for The Ecstasy of Skeptics (Anansi). His poetry and stories have received five National Magazine Awards and have appeared in London Review of Books, Poetry (Chicago), Tin House, Brick, Zoetrope, Best American Poetry, The Walrus, Best English Stories, TLR and five editions of Best Canadian Poetry. He has also published novels, short story collections and two books of essays, and he reviews fiction for The New York Times Book Review.
David Helwig and Al Purdy first met in Kingston, Ontario, one summer afternoon in 1968. Over the next thirty years they both wrote and published a lot of poetry and prose, and they visited frequently. They last met at the Purdy house in Ameliasburgh shortly before Al and Eurithe made their final trip west.
Cornelia Hoogland’s seventh book, Trailer Park Elegy (Harbour, 2017), is an elegiac long poem. Woods Wolf Girl was a finalist for the 2012 ReLit Award for Poetry. Sea Level was shortlisted for the 2012 CBC Nonfiction Prize, and Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway was shortlisted for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize. www.corneliahoogland.com.
I never met Al Purdy, but feel I know something of the man and poet through his many books of poetry, his correspondence with Margaret Laurence—a book I treasure—as well as Paul Vermeersch’s The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology (Harbour, 2009). I came to my own poetry late, and missed making friendships with my poetry foremothers and forefathers. To remedy this as best I can, I both study and write poems about the older poets in my literary family. I feel I meet Al through Roblin Lake on which he lived much of his life, and in a handful of his poems, such as “Prince Edward County” where he writes: “Animals having no human speech / have not provided names / but named it with their bodies / and the long-ago pine forests / named it with their bodies / and the masts of sailing ships / around the century’s turn / named it to the sea / and a bird one springtime / named it bobolink bobolink.” This stanza looks outward, beyond Al Purdy and human immediacy, to the larger world. I picture him gazing aimlessly over the lake, just sitting there, looking. If it wasn’t Al’s poem I’d be tempted to say it’s spiritual, so great its reach.