More Easily Kept Illusions, The: The Poetry of Al Purdy

97 Pages·2006·0.47 MB·English

by  Al Purdy

The More Easily Kept Illusions
ThePoetryofAl Purdy
Selected
with an
introduction by
Robert Budde
and an
afterword by
Russell Morton Brown
We acknowledge the support ofthe Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing pro-
gram.We acknowledge the financial support ofthe Government ofCanada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Purdy,Al,1918–2000
The more easily kept illusions :the poetry ofAl Purdy / selected,with an introduc-
tion by Robert Budde ;and an afterword by Russell Morton Brown.
(Laurier poetry series)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn-13:978-0-88920-490-4
isbn-10:0-88920-490-x
i.Robert Budde,1966– ii.Title. iii.Series.
ps8531.u8a6 2006 c811'.54 c2006-901442-6
© 2006Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo,Ontario,Canada n2l 3c5
www.wlupress.wlu.ca.
Cover image:Robert Harwood.Feather,2005.Colour photo.
Cover and text design by P.J.Woodland.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material
used in this text,and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately.Any errors and
omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
This book is printed on 100%post-consumer recycled paper.
Printed in Canada
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5777.
Table of Contents
Foreword,Neil Besner / v
Biographical Note / vi
Introduction,Robert Budde / vii
Mind Process re a Faucet / 1
Remains ofan Indian Village / 3
Winter Walking / 5
Hockey Players / 7
Home-Made Beer / 10
Eskimo Graveyard / 12
Trees at the Arctic Circle / 15
Tent Rings / 17
When I Sat Down to Play the Piano / 19
At the Quinte Hotel / 22
Love at Roblin Lake / 24
Interruption / 25
Wilderness Gothic / 27
Lament for the Dorsets / 29
Joint Account / 32
Depression in Namu,BC / 33
Eastbound from Vancouver / 34
The Horseman ofAgawa / 36
Flat Tire in the Desert / 39
Inside the Mill / 41
Deprivations / 42
Alive or Not / 44
Rodeo / 46
iii
On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems / 48
After Rain / 50
The Nurselog / 52
A Typical Day in Winnipeg / 54
In the Early Cretaceous / 57
Purely Internal Music / 60
Orchestra / 62
Red Leaves / 64
Orchestra / 65
Earle Birney in Hospital / 67
Untitled / 69
For Her in Sunlight / 70
Afterword:As the dream holds the real,Russell Morton Brown / 73
Acknowledgements / 79
iv / Contents
Foreword
At the beginning ofthe twenty-first century,poetry in Canada—writing and
publishing it,reading and thinking about it—finds itselfin a strangely con-
flicted place.We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new
work,and there is still a small audience for poetry;but increasingly,poetry
is becoming a vulnerable art,for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.
But there are things to be done:we need more real engagement with our
poets.There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in class-
rooms,in the public arena,in the media—and there needs to be more,and
more different kinds ofpublications,that make the wide range ofour con-
temporary poetry more widely available.
The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University
Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger reader-
ship that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves.Like our fiction
writers,our poets are much celebrated abroad;they should just as properly
be better known at home.
Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herselfa poet) to select thirty-
five poems from across a poet’s career;write an engaging,accessible introduc-
tion;and have the poet write an afterword.In this way,we think that the usual
practice ofteaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology
will be much improved upon;and readers in and out ofclassrooms will have
more useful,engaging,and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work.
Readers might also come to see more readily,we hope,the connections
among,as well as the distances between,the life and the work.
It was the ending ofan Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the
epigraph for The Diviners:“but they had their being once/and left a place
to stand on.”Our poets still do,and they are leaving many places to stand on.
We hope that this series will help,variously,to show how and why this is so.
—Neil Besner
General Editor
v
Biographical Note
Al Purdy is one ofCanada’s best-known and most-loved poets.His cantan-
kerous persona roamed the country for over four decades,delighting and
shocking audiences with his candour and humour.He published thirty-three
books ofpoetry in his familiarly ribald,down-to-earth voice and with his
vivid representations ofdistinctively Canadian experiences and landscapes.
His poems deal with intimate human emotions across a variety ofsituations
ranging from personal insecurity to human history.His most famous books
includeThe Cariboo Horses(1965),North ofSummer (1967),Sex & Death
(1973),and Piling Blood(1984).Two major collections ofhis work have been
published:The Collected Poems ofAl Purdy(1986) andBeyond Remembering:
The Collected Poems ofAl Purdy(2000).
Purdy also wrote radio and television plays for the cbc,served as writer-
in-residence at a number ofCanadian universities,and edited several antho-
logies ofpoetry.Purdy won the Canadian Authors Association Award,two
Governor General’s Awards (for The Cariboo Horsesand The Collected Poems
ofAl Purdy) and the Voice ofthe Land Award,an award created by the League
ofCanadian Poets specifically to honour Purdy.He was appointed to the
Order ofCanada in 1982and to the Order ofOntario in 1987.Al Purdy died
in Sidney,BC,on April 21,2000.
vi
Introduction
Although Al Purdy needs no introduction,he deserves one.He’s your favour-
ite uncle,the one that shocks your parents and teaches you how to smoke.
He’s that guy at the bar you go to listen to over a beer because he always says
something outrageous or profound.He’s just a guy,the one on the street with
bad hair and teeth,and he’s a legend,a poet that Canada will never forget.
Ifyou already know his poetry,you’ve got all you need.This selection will
intrigue you because ofmy choices for inclusion and exclusion—undoubtedly
there will be squawks and exclamations ofchagrin at some elided gem or
missed masterpiece.Ofcourse I’ve missed some,I admit it.But tell me this
is not a good read.
Ifyou don’t know his work,ifthis is your first taste ofthe Purdy elixir,
then this selection will give you a clear and representative window into the art
and thought ofthis great Canadian poet.He has been variously described as
“Canada’s greatest poet”(Dennis Lee),“The Voice ofthe Land”(League of
Canadian Poets),“the world’s most Canadian poet”(George Bowering),and
“The Last Canadian Poet”(Sam Solecki).Purdy’s writing career spanned over
fifty years;he published over thirty books ofpoetry,a novel,two volumes of
memoirs,and four books ofcorrespondence.His final collection ofpoetry,
the monumental Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems ofAl Purdy,was
released posthumously in the fall of2000.He is,no matter what,a great
Canadian poet;other monikers I can do without.
This collection is about Purdy the man and Purdy’s poems.Rarely in letters
has such a distinction been so meaningless.Purdy the persona,the shambling,
roughhouse,and prophetic figure,speaks a shambling,roughhouse,and
prophetic poem.His life,his travels,his loves,his home all appear in his
poems as starkly as ifhe is telling his life story.I tend away from biography
when I read,but Purdy grabs me and says there it was,“Love at Roblin Lake”!
It is hard not to hear the poet’s fidgeting behind the poem;his leaps offaith
and understanding,his successes and failures to navigate the world around
him.When I read Al Purdy poems I say,“Hi,Al.”And he says “Hi”back.
Purdy was born in 1918,in Wooler,Ontario.As a teenager during the Great
Depression,Purdy rode the rails across Canada.The 1940s saw his marriage to
vii
Eurithe Parkhurst and six years ofdubious service in the rcaf.These facts
alone might make him quintessentially Canadian.In his autobiography,Purdy
charts a difficult time before poetry took over:a troubled marriage,failed
businesses,cross-country travels,tough work in factories,and ending up in
poverty at their self-built home on Roblin Lake near Ameliasburgh,Ontario.
This hard luck continued until the early 1960s,during Purdy’sforties,when
he was able to support himselfas a writer,editor,and poet.Later in life,they
divided their time between North Saanich,British Columbia,and Roblin
Lake.Writing allowed Purdy to survive and his debt to writing is paid back
in thoughtful humility and courageous humanity.
A Purdy Poetics
He published his first collection ofpoetry,The Enchanted Echo,in 1944.It
was,in his words,“atrocious.”He was right to be embarrassed.He desperately
sought out copies later in order to destroy them all.I am sure many writers
can relate.
Purdy’s poetics was created in the 1960s with the books Poems for All the
Annettes,The Cariboo Horses,and North ofSummer.These are arguably
Purdy’s best books and the poems in them are the most anthologized and
studied.It is true that part ofthe acclaim these books received came from
their overtly “Canadian”subject matter—something that was rare in the mid-
century poetic landscape.The poems were firmly located in British Columbia,
in the Canadian arctic,and in Ontario.The tension that had been created
between the poets who clung to British models and those who were beginning
to import poetics from the United States (via the Black Mountain poets and
Beats,for example) were submarined by Purdy,who ascribed to neither and
performed a distinctive poetic nationalism.Clara Thomas,in Our Nature—
Our Voices: A Guidebook to English-Canadian Literature,summarizes this
sentiment:“To hear him read is to hear the country speak.”Tom Marshall,in
Harsh and Lovely Land,calls Purdy “the first truly native poet”(90).You can
see how this begins to verge on absurdity.Ofcourse,all this is not true;Purdy
was not the first or last anything,but the originality ofthis speaking position
did perk up the country’s ears and helped shape the next generation ofpoets.
The consensus (Solecki,Davey,Deahl,Bowering) is that Purdy’s poetics
developed out ofhis relationship with a group ofwriters at McGill in
Montreal (chiefamong them being Milton Acorn and Irving Layton) and
his growth ofa distinctive “speaking”poetics—the sense in his poems that
he is musing out loud to an audience.So you had Purdy coming out ofa
generation ofwriters that included Acorn,Layton,Earle Birney,A.M.Klein,
Margaret Laurence,Dorothy Livesay,Miriam Waddington,Louis Dudek,
viii / Introduction
and Raymond Souster,with Purdy being the most “conversational”ofthe lot.
This list might comprise Canadian literary modernism.Robert Kroetsch
argues that Canadian modernism never happened,but I would argue it did,
in these writers (and others like Richler and Davies),and furthermore,that
Canadian postmodernism has barely nudged aside this dominant tradition.
Most ofthe poetry published in 2005still looks and sounds similar to a Purdy
or Cohen poem.I put pressure on this because I think it partly explains the
critical silence around Purdy;scholarly activity in the sixties and seventies was
still looking back to the first-generation “confederation poets”while scholars
ofthe eighties and nineties were hot on the trail ofKroetschian postmodern-
ism.There was a radical disjunction between the poetry and the scholarship
on poetry.What the scholars were hearing was different from what poetry
audiences were hearing.
Purdy had a profound connection to audiences—I suppose all successful
poets must—that was built from recognition not mystification.His booming
voice,his tall awkward frame,and his ease and freedom in front ofaudiences
created poetry readers.I had the honour ofintroducing Purdy at a reading
in Winnipeg in 1998and was terrified at the prospect ofsetting my puny,
squeaky voice next to those giant Purdy pipes.When he spoke,he was the
most “authentic”performer I had ever seen.He just talked—sometimes bril-
liantly,sometimes incoherently—and the poems rolled out ofthat conver-
sation he had with the audience.Charles Bukowski called Purdy’s poems
“decent strong human stuffwithout fakery.”Proclaimed a “People’s Poet,”
Al Purdy was a mythic presence whose rude and unruly conduct gained him
a reputation across the country.People loved it:a poet who’s not afraid to say
“I don’t give a shit.”The pretension ofpoetry,rightly or wrongly,excludes
many readers,and a guy,just a guy,thinking on the world carefully but not
obfuscating (by using words like “obfuscating”),collected a loyal audience
and opened doors for the self-educated Purdy.
The Learned Hick
To select poems from Al Purdy’s published works is an act ofcriticism;the
poems I have chosen here are a clear indication ofthe aspects ofhis work
that I value.I hope you will too.I have attempted to represent Purdy’s poems
across the decades and through his many books,contrary to the tendency in
critical approaches to Purdy,which concentrate on his 1960s books and ignore
the larger tones and trends in his work.
What I find most intriguing in Purdy’s work is the tension between his
comic,larger-than-life,self-effacing persona and his introspective,philosoph-
ical views on history and time.The learned hick.The comedic philosopher.
Introduction / ix