Background

Al Purdy was born on December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario, Canada, to a farmer and his wife, Alfred and Eleanor Purdy. His father died when Al was three, and Purdy was brought up by his mother and a whiskey-drinking grandfather in Trenton, Ontario.

Education

Purdy attended Albert College in Belleville and Trenton Collegiate Institute (both in Ontario). Purdy dropped out of high school at age 17 and rode the rails as an itinerant laborer in Vancouver.

Career

As a teenager during the Great Depression, Purdy rode the rails across Canada. In the Second World War, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. After the war, Purdy held a number of jobs until the 1960s, when he was able to support himself through writing, editing, and radio work.

Eventually, he settled in Ameliasburgh, the small Loyalist community celebrated in his poems. By the early 1960s, Purdy was able to support himself by freelance writing, poetry reading and periods as writer-in-residence at various colleges. He was a restless traveler throughout Canada (including the High Arctic) and around the world, and all these journeys were reflected in his writing.

Like other writers who lived by their craft, Purdy worked in a variety of genres: radio and TV plays, book reviewing, travel writing, magazine features. He edited anthologies, particularly of younger poets, and also a collection of essays entitled The New Romans (1968), which revealed his deep Canadian nationalism. But poetry was Purdy's primary mode.

The evolution of Purdy’s verse shows a progression from the conservatively traditional lyrics of his first collection, The Enchanted Echo (1944), to the open, colloquial and contemporary style of his later years, which began to emerge in his fourth collection, The Crafte So Long to Lerne (1959).

Important factors in Purdy's poetic liberation from his early dependence on moribund romantic models were the humor and the anger he began to introduce, a characteristic style and form with relaxed, loping lines and a gruff, garrulous and engaging poetic persona. Purdy was at the heart of the 1960s movements that set Canadian poets wandering the country, reading their poems to large audiences. There is no doubt that this experience helped him to develop a poetry more closely related to oral speech patterns than his 1940s apprentice poems.

The influence of readings on his work is one aspect of the close contact between experience and writing in Purdy's work. He was described as a "versifying journalist," and some of his books are in fact poetic accounts of journeys, such as North of Summer (1967), based on a trip to the Arctic, and Hiroshima Poems (1972), on a visit to Japan.

Many of the poems contained in such books were written during Purdy’s journeys as if entries in a diary. In them, the interval between experience and creation is brief, which leads to the unevenness of tone, though the best of Purdy's travel poems are superb examples of their kind.

Purdy traveled in time as well as in space. His poems reveal the generalist erudition that is acquired by a self-taught man with a passion for reading, and he sought especially to bring into poetry a sense of Canada's past, of the rapid pattern of change that has made much of Canada acquire the quality of age in so brief a history. Few Canadian poets have evoked our past as effectively as Purdy in poems such as The Runner, The Country North of Belleville, My Grandfather's Country, The Battlefield of Batoche and the long verse cycle for radio that he wrote about the Loyalist heritage, In Search of Owen Roblin (1974).

Among the most successful of Purdy's many volumes are Poems for All the Annettes (1962), The Cariboo Horses (1965), which won him the Governor General's Award, Sex & Death (1973), which won him the A.J.M. Smith Award, The Stone Bird (1981) and Piling's Blood (1984).

There are two important selections of his verse, Being Alive (1978) and Bursting into Song (1982), which between them contain all his memorable poems except those in The Stone Bird. Collected Poems, 1956-1986 (1986) received a Governor General's Award. A definitive collected book of poems was published in 2000, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. Purdy's oral presentation of his poems, essential for a full understanding of his work, is preserved in the CBC recording, Al Purdy's Ontario and in the McClelland & Stewart Audio Encore cassette edition of his collected poetry. In 1993, Purdy published his autobiography, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, and a new collection of poems, Naked With Summer in Your Mouth.

A collection of reviews, essays, travel pieces, and anecdotes, Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy, was published in 1995; most of the pieces are about Canada and Canadian authors. His introspective and melancholic work To Paris Never Again (1997) contains poems about death and lost friends, as well as a short memoir recounting his development and experiences as a poet.

Achievements

• 

  One of Canada’s best known and most beloved poets, Purdy wrote more than 30 books of rangy, colloquial, free-verse poetry that frequently took Canada, its people, and its history as themes.
  
  Purdy was one of Canada's most celebrated poets. He won the 1966 Governor General's Award for The Cariboo Horses and received the same honors again in 1986 for Collected Poems, 1956-1986. Appointed to the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987, Purdy was memorialized with a statue in Toronto’s Queen’s Park in 2008.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Poems for All the Annettes

    (Originally published by Contact Press in 1962, then later...)

    1962
  • The Man Who Outlived Himself

    (The Man Who Outlived Himself is an engaging rassle with s...)

    1999
  • To Paris Never Again

    (To Paris Never Again is Purdy's first collection of new w...)

    1997
  • Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996

    (A selection of poems by the man described by the Globe & ...)

    1996
  • The Enchanted Echo 1944
  • Emu, Remember! 1956
  • The Blur in Between 1962
  • The Cariboo Horses 1965
  • North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island 1967
  • Wild grape wine 1968
  • Love in a Burning Building 1970
  • Hiroshima Poems 1972
  • Selected poems 1972
  • On the Bearpaw Sea 1973
  • Sex and Death 1974
  • In Search of Owen Roblin 1974
  • Sundance at dusk 1976
  • A Handful of Earth 1977
  • At Marsport Drugstore 1977
  • No other country 1977
  • Moths in the Iron Curtain 1977
  • No Second Spring 1978
  • Being Alive: Poems 1958-78 1978
  • Stone Bird 1981
  • Bursting into Song: An Al Purdy Omnibus. 1982
  • Birdwatching at the Equator: The Galapagos Islands poems 1982
  • Morning and Its Summer: A Memoir 1983
  • Piling Blood 1984
  • The Collected Poems of Al Purdy 1986
  • The Woman on the Shore 1990
  • Naked with Summer in Your Mouth Poems 1994
  • Bukowski Purdy Letters: A Decade of Dialogue, 1964-1974 1984
  • The Purdy-Woodcock Letters: Selected Correspondence, 1964-1984 1988

Religion

Purdy's mother devoted her life to going to church and bringing her son up in a religious environment. Purdy said that the last time he prayed was in his teenage years when he got lost in the woods. When he was asked if he still prays, he stated: "Christ, I'll never make it! I haven't prayed since that time. I doubt if I ever will again. I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense."

Views

Quotations: "I don't think I do have a soul."

"For me, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, or for flowers or beast or bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly and perfectly alive."

"At a certain age, you're always uncertain how other people will take you"

"I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world."

"For me, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, or for flowers or beast or bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly and perfectly alive."

Personality

In 1933, Purdy sold his first poem to his high-school magazine, Spotlight, earning $1. Purdy recalled in his autobiography Reaching for the Beaufort Sea (1993), that as a young poet he was something of an anomaly. "There were no writers. All across the streets of my hometown, there was silence. Everyone sold groceries, or they sold dry goods and hardware, they sold coal and lumber. Their words were about buying and selling and making money; and sometimes, when they were young, love. But writers? There were none."

Purdy dropped out of school after completing Grade 10. Seeking adventure, he hid in boxcars and rode the rails west to British Columbia before returning to Ontario.

The rustic A-frame house Purdy and his wife Eurithe Purdy built-in 1957 on the south side of Roblin Lake, near Ameliasburgh in Prince Edward County, Ontario, was visited by a procession of Canadian literary royalty - Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee, Patrick Lane, and many others. By 2009, however, nine years after Purdy’s death, it became clear that his wife would have to sell the house, and it was assumed that most buyers would tear it down and rebuild. Given the importance of the house in the evolution of Canadian literature, Jean Baird and Howard White, Purdy’s long-time publisher, formed the Al Purdy A-Frame Association in an effort to raise sufficient funds to purchase and rebuild the house. Among the many writers to step up was Leonard Cohen, who donated $10,000. As of 2014, Purdy’s beloved A-frame houses a writer-in-residence program designed by poets David Helwig, Steven Heighton, Karen Solie and Rob Budde.

Physical Characteristics: In 1999, Purdy was diagnosed with cancer after doctors discovered a tumor on his lung. He continued to write poetry until three months before his death on April 21, 2000.

Quotes from others about the person

• "I don't know of any good living poets. But there's this tough son of a bitch up in Canada that walks the line." - Charles Bukowski
  
  "Al, a man who had the looks and manner of a brawler, wanted to be a poet. And what is great is that he was a bad poet for a long time and that didn't stop him. That's where the heroism comes in." - Michael Ondaatje

Interests

• gardening

• Writers

  Milton Acorn

• Sport & Clubs

  Hockey

Connections

In 1941, Purdy married Eurithe Parkhurst. Their son Alfred Alexander Jim Purdy was born in 1945.

Father:

Alfred Purdy

Mother:

Eleanor Purdy

Spouse:

Eurithe Parkhurst

Son:

Alfred Alexander Jim Purdy

Friend:

Charles Bukowski

Friend:

George Woodcock

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001