I BEGAN TO READ Al Purdy’s poetry about the same time it changed from being odd and ungainly to being remarkable — in the early 1960s. I was just into my twenties, writing a lot of poetry but not liking much of it; like most young poets then, I wanted to be published by Contact Press — a highly respected, poet-run co-operative — and I read everything they issued; and thus I read Al Purdy’s Poems for All the Annettes in 1962, when it first came out.
I was somewhat frightened by it, and did not fully understand what he was doing. This was a new sort of voice for me, an overpowering one, and a little too much like being backed into the corner of a seedy bar by a large, insistent, untidy drunk, who is waxing by turns both sentimental and obscene. For a young male poet of those days, this kind of energy and this approach — casual, slangy, subversive of recent poetic convention — could be liberating and inspirational, and some found in him an ersatz father figure. But for a young female poet — well, this was not the sort of father figure it would be altogether steadying to have.
Then, in 1965, The Cariboo Horses — Purdy’s breakthrough book — came out, and I found that the drunk in the bar was also a major storyteller and mythmaker, though still wearing his offhand and rather shabby disguise. This was poetry for the spoken voice par excellence — not an obviously rhetorical voice but an anecdotal one, the voice of the Canadian vernacular. Yet not only that either, for no sooner had Purdy set up his own limits than he’d either transcend or subvert them. He was always questioning, always probing, and among those things that he questioned and probed were himself and his own poetic methods. In a Purdy poem, high diction can meet the scrawl on the washroom wall, and, as in a collision between matter and antimatter, both explode.
It would be folly to attempt to sum up Purdy’s poetic universe: like Walt Whitman’s it’s too vast for a précis. What interested him could be anything, but above all the wonder that anything at all can be interesting. He was always turning banality inside out. For me, he was, above all, an explorer — pushing into nameless areas of landscape, articulating the inarticulate, poking around in dusty corners of memory and discovering treasure there, digging up the bones and shards of a forgotten ancestral past. When he wasn’t capering about and joking and scratching his head over the idiocy and pain and delight of being alive, he was composing lyric elegies for what was no longer alive, but had been — and, through his words, still is. For underneath that flapping overcoat and that tie with a mermaid on it and that pretence of shambling awkwardness — yes, it was a pretence, but only partly, for among other things Purdy was doing a true impersonation of himself — there was a skilful master conjurer. Listen to the voice, and watch the hands at work: just hands, a bit grubby too, not doing anything remarkable, and you can’t see how it’s done, but suddenly, where a second ago there was only a broken vase, there’s a fistful of brilliant flowers.