I like to picture Al reading my first book at Roblin Lake. Because there is a similarity to offset our differences. Our breakthrough books were published by Contact Press, the first really important poetry publisher to emerge in the years after the Second World War. It was a small press in the best form, a producer of plain and attractive objects that were also the first significant poetry books by the next wave of Canadian poets, a wave that followed pretty calm waters, one might say. Its founders and first editors were Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, and Raymond Souster, with Souster doing the majority of the work.
Contact Press would release volumes by Milton Acorn, Margaret Atwood, D. G. Jones, John Newlove, Frank Davey, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Alden Nowlan, among others. Al Purdy, if he knew, may have had to overlook the fact that the press was named in honour of an earlier magazine created by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon. Al’s famous friend Milton Acorn would spend later years bemoaning the influence of the American Black Mountain Poets, and perhaps regret that he had dedicated his Contact Press book to one of them.
In 1962, Contact Press published Al’s Poems for All the Annettes, and in the small world of Canadian literature the forty-three-year-old Purdy was all at once the hot new item. Or at least that’s the way I looked at it from my borrowed chair out on the West Coast, where I was the oldest of the editors who had started Tish, the contentious poetry newsletter, a year earlier. I knew that Al was not exactly the sort of thing we’d found in the New York and San Francisco magazines we were reading, and there was a danger that the Irving Layton bluff might have rubbed off on him during his days in Montreal’s poetry kitchen. But Poems for All the Annettes showed me a composer no longer willing to assemble quatrains of end rime and other imperial restraints. His poems were starting to scatter across the pages, a little obviously maybe, but at least as if they were trying to enact perception rather than glorifying personality the way Layton did. At least that’s how this twenty-six-year-old on the coast saw it:
And I can’t make it beMy friends the Tish poets warned me. They said to look out for bluster. They noticed a little bluster in me and warned against it, even if it was supposed to be a kind of hip bluster. I said we need friends in the East. They said the East doesn’t get it. I used all the influence I could exert at the University of British Columbia, where I was supposed to be a graduate student, and got Al his first reading there. I wrote pieces for the campus newspaper about the hottest new thing in Canadian literature. I reviewed Poems for All the Annettes in Tish and The Ubyssey. By the time Al showed up, we had become friends through the mail. One of my heroes from The New American Poetry was teaching at UBC that year. He got drunk at a party and tried to sock me. He was concerned that, what with all this Purdy business, I hadn’t accurately or bravely listened to my proper muse.
what it isn’t by saying,
or take the shape of a word’s being.
Annettes really was a breakthrough book for Al. Pretty soon, he was a McClelland & Stewart poet (back when that meant something) and publishing cloth-bound books that won him readers and prizes and a place in the pantheon alongside Irving Layton and Earle Birney. Now he could stop relying on writing tedious radio plays and gather a big Canada Council grant, and this is where he made the smart move that would steer him toward fame as Canada’s two-fisted and sure-hearted protonational poet. In the ’60s, Canadian writers and painters were spending their Canada Council grants in sunny Spain or Greece. Not Purdy. He hitched a ride to Canada’s eastern Arctic.
The result was a semi-coffee-table book called North of Summer, with oil sketches by A. Y. Jackson, among Canada’s most famous living artists. Jack McClelland told me that he’d told Jackson that Purdy’s poems would be there as company for the paintings, and had told Al that Jackson’s paintings were there to illustrate his book of poems. Whichever it was, here was a book to please anyone, catching the wave of centenary patriotism while offering humorous and dramatic vignettes of life in a place that could be nothing other than Canadian. Purdy’s Pangnirtung had trumped Layton’s Attica and Birney’s Machu Picchu.
I liked North of Summer because it was not a hodgepodge, because it was written and edited as a book, a series of poems written as parts of a larger attention. In Canada, collections of occasional verse were the norm. Louis Dudek and James Reaney were the only major poets who conceived books as verse sequences. I looked forward to more such excursions by my non-mentor.
But while slightly younger poets like Phyllis Webb and Roy Kiyooka were starting to write sequences and serial poems, Purdy became the wild grape wine bard, creating a persona that would make him popular outside the cloistered world of CanLit. He turned out a large number of good poems, many of them set in beer parlours and in his sylvan bedroom, many others along the trails of his exotic travels, from Moscow to the Galapagos Islands. No longer would we see and thus hear a curious intelligence searching for form, but rather a learned and confident rascal who found it natural to offer observations and authority in a fully persuasive Canadian vernacular. The poems filled a page or two with lines strung just this side of musical prose, and people, as they say, ate them up.
I enjoyed buying and reading every book as it appeared from McClelland & Stewart and then from Howard White’s fine Harbour Publishing, which would eventually publish Purdy’s huge collected poems and now the A-Frame Anthology. I also appreciated Al’s sending me signed copies of the odd ephemeral publications he did so many of in his last decades. But by now I knew that Al Purdy and I were old-time friends, not co-religionists in verse. Fine — once that was out of the way, we could bluster into each other’s lives, a couple of guys who knew what most people were missing.
An adjective often applied to Al Purdy was “raw-boned.” When it came from a delicate aesthete or a well-cooked academic, it might seem a little condescending. On the other hand, it apparently gave a legion of self-declared “people’s poets” licence to declare Al their bardic father without finding it necessary to do a fiftieth of the reading he did.
