by Howard White
Al Purdy’s poetry makes me laugh, cry, sigh and feel totally exasperated. His poetry reflects Canada as it was, is and, likely, always will be.
Christine Smart is a poet with two books of poetry published by Hedgerow Press: The White Crow and Decked and Dancing, which won the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poet Award in 2007. She is the artistic director for the Salt Spring Poetry Open Mic. She has lived and worked on Salt Spring Island since 1989.
In the early eighties, I read Al Purdy’s poetry when I returned home after five years in Scotland. He captured the Canadian landscape from coast to coast and lauded the vast diversity and complexity of this land. “Say the Names” is one of my favourites as well as “Arctic Rhododendrons.”
I met Al Purdy in person when he read at the Erotic poetry festival on Salt Spring Island in the nineties. A tall gangly man with a gruff voice, he wrote of love with depth and detail. He struck me as a “no bullshit” kind of writer. Afterwards, the poets gathered at Brian Brett’s farm to discuss poetics and party. Al could seem a bit crusty but I saw through that exterior and enjoyed his warmth and magnanimity. He made me feel as though my words mattered.
Then one time, I had the honour of reading poetry as the opening act when he did a full reading at the Open Space Gallery in Victoria. I loved his voice and his confidence with language.
Karen Solie is the author of Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon and The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out. A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, was published in the UK in 2013. A new collection, The Caiplie Caves, is due out in 2019. Born in Moose Jaw, she grew up in rural Saskatchewan, and now lives in Toronto.
Glen Sorestad’s poetry has been published widely throughout North America and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in over sixty anthologies and have been translated into eight languages. His most recent books of poetry include Hazards of Eden: Poems from the Southwest (Lamar University Press, 2015) and Water and Rock (with Jim Harris; Lea County Museum Press, 2017).
Al Purdy’s poetry has been an influence on my own poems ever since I first read his Cariboo Horses volume. Purdy’s distinctive mix of narrative, conversational and lyrical within his poems was especially appealing to me, along with his humour and his sometimes acerbic or sardonic wit. His passion for Canada and his keen attention to historical detail also appealed to me and influenced my writing.
Lynn Tait is a Toronto-born award-winning poet/photographer, residing in Sarnia, Ontario. She has published poetry in more than ninety anthologies, including Vallum, Contemporary Verse 2, Freefall and the Literary Review of Canada, and in a chapbook entitled Breaking Away. Her photography and digital art have graced the covers of seven poetry books.
I lived in CFB Trenton from 1965 until the early seventies. A field, woods, and sand quarry behind my house were my playgrounds. Both Prince Edward and Hastings counties are well known for their land and rock formations, some quite rare. I have been a rock collector ever since. When I travelled back with my husband and young son, I was surprised by what had remained the same after more than twenty years, so the Purdy Festival was a great time to get reacquainted with the land in this century.
I started writing stories the year I arrived in Trenton, and poetry soon after. On a Saturday afternoon in Times Square, downtown Trenton’s popular restaurant hangout for teens, Al Purdy was sitting in one of the booths. He did not look happy, or well, as he stared into his coffee. I decided to leave him alone.
Rob Taylor is the author of the poetry collections “Oh Not So Great”: Poems from the Depression Project (Leaf Press, 2017), The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). The News was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2014 he was named one of the inaugural writers-in-residence at the Al Purdy A-frame, and in 2015 he received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for the Literary Arts, as an emerging artist. He lives with his wife and son in Vancouver, where he helps coordinate Vancouver’s Dead Poets Reading Series.
Al Purdy was the first contemporary Canadian poet I found on my own and read deeply, coming to his writing just after his death in 2000. His poems, and his personal history, made me believe it was possible that a Canadian kid with no immediately discernible talent could eventually make it if he worked hard enough. So I’ve worked, reading Al along the way, my writing going where it’s needed to go, but also swinging back in its orbit toward Al from time to time (including, oddly, being called “the next Al Purdy” in the National Post). I’ve now lived in the A-frame and gotten to know Eurithe (as fine a person as they come! I’m sure Al didn’t deserve her), and my general feeling of indebtedness to the man, his determination, his lopsided house and his poems has only grown. I memorized Al’s poem “Untitled” many years ago, and still recite it when I need to remind myself that at the centre of my life, as it was with Al, “there is a loveliness / my heart knows.”
Russell Thornton is the author of The Hundred Lives, shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize; and Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain, shortlisted for the 2013 Governor General’s Award for poetry, the 2014 Raymond Souster Award, and the 2014 Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. His newest collection is The Broken Face (Harbour, 2018).
Like the work of all real poets (real poets in my opinion anyway), Al Purdy’s poems emit messages that find their ways into the brain folds of other people (and who can estimate how many other people?) and stay there and work their ongoing effects. Those “small purple surprises in the river’s white racket”; that fox on the highway, with his “tail a flat red poker,” his “feet red hammers hammering” and his “plans of the utmost importance”; that ice beginning to form, “tiny oblong crystals” that “seem to come from nowhere”; that momentary look in the eyes of his lifelong companion “an echo of the first tenderness”—to cite a few that often come into my own head—are examples from what is a long, long list of the conjurations he put together in his innumerable one- to two-page assemblages of words. Purdy’s messages keep arriving, decades after the 1918–2000 individual is no longer around (well, no longer around in the ways we regularly acknowledge anyway); they keep sounding for me his visions of being human—and keep magically colouring the glass of Canadian poetry.
Peter Trower (1930–2017) was raised in BC coast mill towns, attended the Vancouver School of Art, and worked logging for twenty-two years. He published fourteen collections of poems and five books of prose. Al Purdy wrote the introduction to Trower’s Ragged Horizons (McClelland & Stewart, 1978) and also to Trower’s The Slidingback Hills (Oberon, 1986). In the latter, Purdy calls Trower the poet laureate of BC. “Trower unites nostalgia and the present tense in very nearly the same sentence,” Purdy says. “A kind of nostalgia for now?” After listing several jobs Trower held over the years, Purdy says: “Trower’s life was a lot like mine, with the difference that I was married and had a wife with notable gyroscopic abilities.”
Grace Vermeer lives in Sarnia, Ontario. Her poems have won a number of awards, including the Lillian Kroll Prize in creative writing (Western University), the Monica Ladell Award (Scarborough Arts) and Honourable Mention in Vallum.
I was a newcomer to Al Purdy’s poems. I admit I came with a chip on my shoulder, I’d met a few people close to Purdy who had stories—the walking wounded. However, when I started reading his work, I was quickly disarmed by his humanity, the images pulled me in. I couldn’t refuse the human I found inside the poems. He was doing what poets do, stalking his shadow, trying to understand his own life, the places, the people, the land.
If anything, the natural tone of his voice is teaching me to loosen up my writing, not edit so heavily, maybe don’t kill off the roughness, maybe let some of the humanity just be. The last poems I wrote before I became very ill with Lyme disease were loose and long. It was a new style for me. When I came back to writing, my brain had changed, my poems got tighter and smaller. I like a well-crafted poem and there are several favourites I’ve found among Purdy’s, but there is also somethin
g beautiful about his process of moving through a poem, following the images, letting it take you toward the epiphany, whatever wants to be found.
John Watson has won several major poetry prizes. He has published more than forty books in Australia. Many are chapbooks, small enough to hold in one hand without relinquishing the screen in the other—surely a recommendation. He represented Australia at the International Poetry Festival at Trois Rivières in Quebec in 2012. He lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, but has travelled many times to Canada; indeed, one of his small books is titled O Canada. In Canada he has always noted the total disjunction between Australian and Canadian verse—in reception and availability.
Tom Wayman’s recent books include collections of poetry, Helpless Angels (Thistledown, 2017); short fiction, The Shadows We Mistake for Love (Douglas & McIntyre, 2015); and essays, If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free: Literature and Social Change (Guernica Editions, 2018). In 2015 Wayman was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on Commercial Drive marking his contribution to the city’s literary heritage. Since 1989 he has lived in southeastern BC’s Selkirk Mountains, near Nelson. www.tomwayman.com.
Howard White is a writer, editor and publisher who published many of Al Purdy’s books including his last one, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. He has written some thirteen books of his own including three collections of poetry, The Men There Were Then (Arsenal, 1983), Ghost in the Gears (Harbour, 1993) and A Mysterious Humming Noise (Anvil, 2019). He lives in Pender Harbour, BC, where he co-founded Harbour Publishing and now serves as publisher of Douglas & McIntyre. He also serves on the board of the Al Purdy A-Frame Association, where he helped preserve the former Al and Eurithe Purdy home in Ameliasburgh and establish it as a residence for emerging writers.
Al Purdy was the first poet I ever encountered in the flesh and it completely changed my thinking. Up till that time I thought poetry was something handed down from on high and expressed in exalted language like Keats or at best, Dylan Thomas, but Purdy made me realize it could also be written about a junked ’48 Pontiac by a slouchy, toothpick-chewing Ontario hoser. And still raise the hair on the back of your neck. This was at a noon-hour reading at UBC c. 1966. I met him a few years later at the Cecil Hotel in Vancouver in company with the poet Peter Trower and the painter/poet/musician/boatbuilder Curt Lang. I drank more than I was used to, then Purdy generously invited us all to dinner where he was staying, which turned out to be the west-end apartment of the even more famous poet Earle Birney. Birney was away and Purdy began to have second thoughts about descending on Birney’s crusty wife, Esther, with a bunch of hungry drunks, so we stopped on Robson and bought an armload of steaks, along with a bunch more beer. Esther took it better than we had any reason to expect and even assumed the cooking duties when it became clear Al was at risk of setting the building on fire. She obviously had acquired some experience at wrangling drunken poets over the years. I was tickled out of my skin to be in on such famous doings but tried not to show it, thinking this must be everyday stuff for the big-timers. I was amused to find Al later recounting the evening with great gusto and exaggeration, as if it had been memorable for him as well. We kept in touch after that and following one of his acrimonious blowups with McClelland & Stewart he asked if I would publish his autobiography, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea. We did that, followed by a collection of prose writings and his last three books of poetry. Coming to know the subtle mind and sensitive soul sheltered within the raucous Purdy exterior has been one of the great rewards of my years in the book trade.
Ian Williams is the author of Personals, a finalist for the Griffin Prize; Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Award; and You Know Who You Are. His first novel, Reproduction, is forthcoming in 2019. www.ianwilliams.ca.
David Zieroth has published several books, most recently the bridge from day to night (Harbour, 2018). He lives in North Vancouver, BC
When I was first learning to write poems, I came across Al Purdy. What I heard in his poems was a voice that was sometimes public, sometimes private, sometimes both. Yes, the images and insights were there, but it was the particular voice that I connected with, one that was sometimes melancholic but also affable and wry. I was grateful to have heard him. And grateful again when he published my poems in his anthology Storm Warning.
Acknowledgements and Credits
Thank you to all the extraordinary individuals who went out of their way to make this anthology happen. Thanks, of course, to the poets who submitted their work; to Eurithe Purdy, whose collection of tribute poems made a strong foundation for this project; to Tom Wayman, who took on the tough task of making the initial selection; to Kitty at Brick Books, who came to the rescue when Phil Hall’s whereabouts prevented him from accessing his own poems; to Bruce Cockburn and his manager Bernie Finkelstein for permission to reprint “3 Al Purdys”; and to all the publishers who gave permission to reprint poems to which they hold rights.
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Acorn, Milton. “Knowing I Live in a Dark Age” from Jawbreakers, Contact Press, 1963. “Poem for Al Purdy” from The Uncollected Acorn: Poems 1950–1986, Deneau, 1987. “Problem” from The Brain’s Target, Ryerson Press, 1960.
Birney, Earle. “In Purdy’s Ameliasburg” from Selected Poems (1940–1966), McClelland & Stewart, 1966, and One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems, Harbour Publishing, 2006.
Bowering, George. “At the Cecil Hotel” from The World, I Guess, New Star Books, 2015. “The Country North of Summer” from Some End, New Star Books, 2018.
Braid, Kate. “Say the Names” from Turning Left to the Ladies, Palimpsest Press, 2009.
Cockburn, Bruce. “3 Al Purdys” from Bone on Bone, True North Records, 2017.
Currie, Robert. “Once in 1965” from And Left a Place to Stand On: Poems and Essays on Al Purdy, Hidden Brook Press, 2009, and The Days Run Away, Coteau Books, 2015.
Hall, Phil. “Essay on Legend” from Essay on Legend, Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2014, and Conjugation, Book*hug, 2016. “An Oak Hunch: Essay on Purdy” from An Oak Hunch, Brick Books, 2005.
Helwig, David. “Al on the Island” from This Human Day, Oberon Press, 2000. “Asleep at Queen’s Park” from Keeping Late Hours, Oberon Press, 2015.
Hutchman, Laurence. “Al Purdy’s Place” from Personal Encounters, Black Moss Press, 2014.
Lane, Patrick. “For Al Purdy” from Last Water Song, Harbour Publishing, 2007, and The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane, Harbour Publishing, 2011.
Lee, Dennis. “Tell the Ones You Love” from Heart Residence: Collected Poems 1967–2017, House of Anansi Press, 2017.
Lee, John B. “The Unveiling” from Dressed in Dead Uncles, Black Moss Press, 2010.
Meyer, Bruce. “Al Purdy: Voice” from The Madness of the Planets, Black Moss Press, 2015.
Musgrave, Susan. “Al Purdy Took a Bus to the Town Where Herodotus Was Born” and “Thirty-Two Uses for Al Purdy’s Ashes” from Origami Dove, McClelland & Stewart, 2011.
Oughton, John. “Long Reach: Thanksgiving, 2000” from Time Slip, Guernica Editions, 2010.
Richardson, Autumn. “The Oracle,” “Chrysalids” and “When the Deities Are Tended, Morning Comes” from An Almost-Gone Radiance, Corbel Stone Press, 2018.
Scott, F.R. “This Inn Is Free” from The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology, Harbour Publishing, 2009, with the permission of William Toye, literary executor of the estate of F.R. Scott.
Sorestad, Glen. “Cactus Cathedral” from And Left a Place to Stand On: Poems and Essays on Al Purdy, Hidden Brook Press, 2009.
Tait, Lynn. “Challenging the Law of Superimposition” from That Not Forgotten, Hidden Brook Press, 2012.
Trower, Peter. “The Last Spar-Tree on Elphinstone Mountain” from Between the Sky and the Splinters, Harbour Publishing, 1974; Bush Poems, Harbour Publishing, 1978; and Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys: Selected Poems 1969–2004, Harbour Publishing, 2004.
Wayman, Tom. “In Memory of A.W. Purdy” from My Father’s C
up, Harbour Publishing, 2002. “Purdy’s Crocuses” from Free Time, Macmillan of Canada, 1977.