During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes the reader riding the rails through the Depression-era West, continues to Labrador to search for two lost Inuit hunters, and covers an astonishing variety of points between. Part II, The Writing Life, offers distinctive personal takes on the work of Charles Bukowski, Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Peter Trower, Bliss Carman and Rudyard Kipling, as well as touching personal memoirs of friends such as Milton Acorn, Malcolm Lowry and Earle Birney. Part III reviews poets from from Raymond Souster to bill bissett, and ends with a tribute to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Even in Purdy's sidetrips to the Galapagos Islands and the former Soviet Union, the spirit that permeates Starting from Ameliasburgh is passionately Canadian. "There is a tireless runner in my blood," Purdy writes, "that encircles the borderlands of Canada through the night hours, and sleeps when day arrives. Then my mind awakes and the race continues... This is what I was and what I became...The map of my country, the carography of myself." Whether describing Newfoundland fishermen cod-jigging for the body of a comrade killed by a whale, or Milton Acorn "ranting untranslatable PEI lobster jargon," or Roderick Haig-Brown "writing his first book longhand in school scribblers, while devil's club thorns pop out of his arms and shoulders," Purdy's prose crackles with the vitality of a mind that is never at rest.
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Save the Al Purdy A-Frame Campaign
The Canadian League of Poets has declared a
National Al Purdy Day!
Al Purdy was born December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario and died at Sidney, BC, April 21, 2000. Raised in Trenton, Ontario, he lived throughout Canada as he developed his reputation as one of Canada's greatest writers. His collections included two winners of the Governor General's Award, Cariboo Horses (1965) and Collected Poems (1986)
and other classics such as Poems for All the Annettes, In Search of Owen Roblin and Piling Blood. Later in life, he travelled widely with his wife Eurithe and settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario and Sidney, BC. In addition to his thirty-three books of poetry, he published a novel, an autobiography and nine collections of essays and correspondence. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987. His ashes are buried in Ameliasburg at the end of Purdy Lane.
The Canadian League of Poets has declared a
National Al Purdy Day!
Al Purdy was born December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario and died at Sidney, BC, April 21, 2000. Raised in Trenton, Ontario, he lived throughout Canada as he developed his reputation as one of Canada's greatest writers. His collections included two winners of the Governor General's Award, Cariboo Horses (1965) and Collected Poems (1986)
and other classics such as Poems for All the Annettes, In Search of Owen Roblin and Piling Blood. Later in life, he travelled widely with his wife Eurithe and settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario and Sidney, BC. In addition to his thirty-three books of poetry, he published a novel, an autobiography and nine collections of essays and correspondence. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987. His ashes are buried in Ameliasburg at the end of Purdy Lane.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE CARTOGRAPHY OF MYSELF
IN EARLY SUMMER, 1965, I WAS COASTING ALONG in a Nordair DC8, bound for Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island. It was about 4 a.m. and most of the other passengers were asleep, but I was peering from the window watching the small reflection of our aeroplane skimming over the blue water and floating ice of Frobisher Bay, several thousand feet down. Low hills on either side of us were patched with snow, like Jersey cows. The water was so blue that the colour looked phony; the sun had been up for about an hour.
Far beneath the noisy DC8, ice floes reeled away south. Black-and-white Arctic hills surrounded us. This was the first time I had been to the Arctic, and I was so excited that I could hardly sit still. In Cuba, England, France, and other countries I'd felt like a stranger; but here, I'd never left home. And I thought what an odd feeling it was in a region that most people think is desolate and alien. But I felt that the Arctic was just a northern extension of southern Canada. Baffin Island:
A club-shaped word
a land most unlike Cathay or Paradise
but a place the birds return to
a name I've remembered since childhood
in the first books I read -
('The Turning Point")
I have this same feeling of enjoyment, of being at home, all over Canada. Maybe part of the reason comes from an earlier feeling of being trapped forever in the town of Trenton, Ontario, when I was a child; then the tremendous sense of release when I escaped, riding the freight trains west during the Depression. Also, I take a double view of history, for then and now merge somewhat in my mind. Winnipeg is also Fort Garry and Seven Oaks. Adolphustown, not far from where I live in Prince Edward County, is the spot where the United Empire Loyalists landed nearly 200 years ago. The restored fortress of Louisbourg in Cape Breton makes me feel like a living ghost, especially when looking at the tombstone of Captain Israel Newton who died there, a member of the colonial army from New England. And driving along Toronto's Don Valley Parkway, I think of the old Indian trails that take the same route under black asphalt. In cities everywhere, grass tries to push aside the concrete barriers of sidewalks.
I think especially of people in connection with places. Working on a highway near Penticton, British Columbia, with a fellow wanderer named Jim, shovelling gravel atop boiling tar: a speeding car ignored warning signs and nearly killed us; the big road foreman blistered that driver's hide until his face turned dull red.
And walking through the Okanagan Valley with my friend, picking cherries from orchards for food, sleeping wherever we could: sometimes in vacant sheds, and once buried in the pungent shavings of a sawmill. Then going to work for two weeks on a mountain farm, for a man whose naine sounded like "Skimmerhorn." I got five dollars for those two weeks, cutting down trees with Jim and splitting them with wedges. At night, we listened to John McCormack sing 'The Far Away Bells Are Ringing" on a wind-up phonograph. Jim stayed behind to work for a stake, but I gave up and rode the freights west to Vancouver. I never saw him again.
One of my favourite Canadian places is the area around Hazelton and Woodcock on the big bend of the Skeena River in British Columbia. I was stationed at Woodcock in 1943, helping to build a landing field as part of the defences for an expected japanese invasion. Snow-covered mountains surrounded the barracks sheds, with the Skeena River racing down the green valley on its way to Prince Rupert. Sometimes there were eagles, circling overhead nearly as high as the sun. And on weekend passes, airmen from the base would hop freight trains to Hazelton or Smithers to drink beer and terrorize pleasurably the local female population.
In 1960 I went back to the big bend of the Skeena to do some writing about the Tsimshian Indians around Hazelton and Kispiox. I was driving a '48 Pontiac that coughed its way up and down. the mountain roads, threatening to expire at any minute. But I managed to reach Kispiox on the Indian reservation, with its carved house fronts and rotting totem poles. The place seemed entirely deserted, so I drove past the village and down to the Kispiox River. Standing in the shallows, wearing hip waders and baseball caps, were some twenty American fishermen with station wagons parked nearby.
There are other places stored on my mind's memory tapes. Places where I feel comfortable, at home: the battlefield at Batoche, in Saskatchewan, where I camped in a trailer; the highline tracks of the CPR near Field, BC, where I'd walked after a cop kicked me off a freight at Golden, then became a CPR labourer on a landslide blocking passage east for forty-eight hours, then rode in legal luxury to Calgary on a work train. And once there was a mile-long Arctic island, my home for three weeks of summer: I lay with my ear flat against the monstrous stone silence of the island, listening to the deep core of the world - silence unending and elemental, leaked from a billion-year period before and after the season of man.
I think back to all the places I've been, the people I've met and the things I've done. Having written and edited some twenty books, I hope to write a dozen more - to follow all the unknown roads I have not explored, until they branch off and become other roads in my mind . . .
There is a map in my head that I've carried there ever since I left school, and I connect it, oddly, with Leo Tolstoy. He wrote a short story called "How Much Land Does a Man Need," in which a man was given title, free and clear, to as much land as he could encircle on foot between sunup and sundown. The man was too greedy for land, tried to walk around too much of it, and died of exhaustion just before the sun went down.
But I have as much land as I need right now. There is a tireless runner in my blood that encircles the borderlands of Canada through the night hours, and sleeps when day arrives. Then my mind awakes and the race continues. West
with the long and lamentably undefended American border; north along the jagged British Columbia coast to the whale-coloured Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Islands; south in past Baffin and Newfoundland to the Maritimes and sea
lands of the Grand Banks. This is the map of myself, what I was and what I became. It is a cartography of feeling and sensibility: and I think the man who is not affected at all by this map of himself that is his country of origin, that man is emotionally crippled.
My own country seems to me not aggressive, nor in search of war or conquest of any kind. It is exploring the broken calm of its domestic affairs. Slowly it investigates its own somewhat backward technology, and sets up committees on how not to do what for whom. My country is trying to resolve the internal contradictions of the Indian and French-Canadian nations it contains. In rather bewildered and stupid fashion it stares myopically at the United States, unable to, assess the danger to the south - a danger that continually changes in economic character, and finally confronts us from within our own borders.
This is the map of my country, the cartography of myself.
(1977)
IRVING LAYTON:
Balls for a One-Armed Juggler
QUESTION: IS IT POSSIBLE TO SITUATE IRVING LAYTON anywhere in the general "tradition" of Canadian poetry?
ANSWER: I don't think so, in spite of the fact that he's here. There has never been anyone quite like Layton - for good or bad - in Canadian poetry. He's the sport and anomaly of tradition
Q: Layton bas been called an innovator and a meticulous craftsman. Is this true?
A: He is not an innovator - unless you consider that his subject matter and language are innovation. Which in a sense I do. But given the tradition of preaching Christ-like sensualists and moralists such as Nietzsche, Lawrence and Shaw - then Layton is a fine craftsman. And this is relevant in an odd way. It allows Layton to swing expertly and acrobatically around the fixed trapeze of his own and other men's certainties.
Q.: To what poets or group of present day writers has he most affinity?
A: Leaving out the dead men for whom Layton professes admiration, one has to point to the Americans whom Layton affects to despise, such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, etc. - the Beats. But Layton has a singing magnificence in his earlier work which I find absent from theirs.
Q: There is preoccupation with physical violence and cruelty in many Layton poems. What does this indicate?
A: That he is a moralist. The reader may generally draw a conclusion or point a moral with Layton's poems of animal death and human violence.
Q: How good is he?
A: The best in the country.
There is much to be said for the idea that Layton is his own mythology. He stalks through most of the poems in Balls for a One-Armed Juggler much larger than life-size, far more angry than it's possible to sustain in the living flesh and bone of the human mind. So that his poems are frozen anger, solidified passion--set rigidly into forms which do not allow this anger to dissipate away into sleep or lessen into human anti-climax.
Of course there are modulations and degrees of printed emotion. There are also rare flashes of the characteristic early lyricism, which now seems to be fading away in the poet's impassioned middle age. Label this excerpt pity:
for I loved you from the first
who know what they do not know,
seeing in your death a tragic portent
for all of us who crawl and die
under the wheeling disappearing stars;
("Elegy for Marilyn Monroe")
Humour in Layton is liable to be savage as an executioner laughing at his victims. The philosophic moments are hardly ever calm, but generally vital:
Yet vitality proves nothing except that
something is alive
So is a pole-cat; so is a water-rat
("On Rereading the Beats")
I don't think I've ever met a human being with such impressive qualities of being right all the time as... (Excerpt )
IN EARLY SUMMER, 1965, I WAS COASTING ALONG in a Nordair DC8, bound for Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island. It was about 4 a.m. and most of the other passengers were asleep, but I was peering from the window watching the small reflection of our aeroplane skimming over the blue water and floating ice of Frobisher Bay, several thousand feet down. Low hills on either side of us were patched with snow, like Jersey cows. The water was so blue that the colour looked phony; the sun had been up for about an hour.
Far beneath the noisy DC8, ice floes reeled away south. Black-and-white Arctic hills surrounded us. This was the first time I had been to the Arctic, and I was so excited that I could hardly sit still. In Cuba, England, France, and other countries I'd felt like a stranger; but here, I'd never left home. And I thought what an odd feeling it was in a region that most people think is desolate and alien. But I felt that the Arctic was just a northern extension of southern Canada. Baffin Island:
A club-shaped word
a land most unlike Cathay or Paradise
but a place the birds return to
a name I've remembered since childhood
in the first books I read -
('The Turning Point")
I have this same feeling of enjoyment, of being at home, all over Canada. Maybe part of the reason comes from an earlier feeling of being trapped forever in the town of Trenton, Ontario, when I was a child; then the tremendous sense of release when I escaped, riding the freight trains west during the Depression. Also, I take a double view of history, for then and now merge somewhat in my mind. Winnipeg is also Fort Garry and Seven Oaks. Adolphustown, not far from where I live in Prince Edward County, is the spot where the United Empire Loyalists landed nearly 200 years ago. The restored fortress of Louisbourg in Cape Breton makes me feel like a living ghost, especially when looking at the tombstone of Captain Israel Newton who died there, a member of the colonial army from New England. And driving along Toronto's Don Valley Parkway, I think of the old Indian trails that take the same route under black asphalt. In cities everywhere, grass tries to push aside the concrete barriers of sidewalks.
I think especially of people in connection with places. Working on a highway near Penticton, British Columbia, with a fellow wanderer named Jim, shovelling gravel atop boiling tar: a speeding car ignored warning signs and nearly killed us; the big road foreman blistered that driver's hide until his face turned dull red.
And walking through the Okanagan Valley with my friend, picking cherries from orchards for food, sleeping wherever we could: sometimes in vacant sheds, and once buried in the pungent shavings of a sawmill. Then going to work for two weeks on a mountain farm, for a man whose naine sounded like "Skimmerhorn." I got five dollars for those two weeks, cutting down trees with Jim and splitting them with wedges. At night, we listened to John McCormack sing 'The Far Away Bells Are Ringing" on a wind-up phonograph. Jim stayed behind to work for a stake, but I gave up and rode the freights west to Vancouver. I never saw him again.
One of my favourite Canadian places is the area around Hazelton and Woodcock on the big bend of the Skeena River in British Columbia. I was stationed at Woodcock in 1943, helping to build a landing field as part of the defences for an expected japanese invasion. Snow-covered mountains surrounded the barracks sheds, with the Skeena River racing down the green valley on its way to Prince Rupert. Sometimes there were eagles, circling overhead nearly as high as the sun. And on weekend passes, airmen from the base would hop freight trains to Hazelton or Smithers to drink beer and terrorize pleasurably the local female population.
In 1960 I went back to the big bend of the Skeena to do some writing about the Tsimshian Indians around Hazelton and Kispiox. I was driving a '48 Pontiac that coughed its way up and down. the mountain roads, threatening to expire at any minute. But I managed to reach Kispiox on the Indian reservation, with its carved house fronts and rotting totem poles. The place seemed entirely deserted, so I drove past the village and down to the Kispiox River. Standing in the shallows, wearing hip waders and baseball caps, were some twenty American fishermen with station wagons parked nearby.
There are other places stored on my mind's memory tapes. Places where I feel comfortable, at home: the battlefield at Batoche, in Saskatchewan, where I camped in a trailer; the highline tracks of the CPR near Field, BC, where I'd walked after a cop kicked me off a freight at Golden, then became a CPR labourer on a landslide blocking passage east for forty-eight hours, then rode in legal luxury to Calgary on a work train. And once there was a mile-long Arctic island, my home for three weeks of summer: I lay with my ear flat against the monstrous stone silence of the island, listening to the deep core of the world - silence unending and elemental, leaked from a billion-year period before and after the season of man.
I think back to all the places I've been, the people I've met and the things I've done. Having written and edited some twenty books, I hope to write a dozen more - to follow all the unknown roads I have not explored, until they branch off and become other roads in my mind . . .
There is a map in my head that I've carried there ever since I left school, and I connect it, oddly, with Leo Tolstoy. He wrote a short story called "How Much Land Does a Man Need," in which a man was given title, free and clear, to as much land as he could encircle on foot between sunup and sundown. The man was too greedy for land, tried to walk around too much of it, and died of exhaustion just before the sun went down.
But I have as much land as I need right now. There is a tireless runner in my blood that encircles the borderlands of Canada through the night hours, and sleeps when day arrives. Then my mind awakes and the race continues. West
with the long and lamentably undefended American border; north along the jagged British Columbia coast to the whale-coloured Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Islands; south in past Baffin and Newfoundland to the Maritimes and sea
lands of the Grand Banks. This is the map of myself, what I was and what I became. It is a cartography of feeling and sensibility: and I think the man who is not affected at all by this map of himself that is his country of origin, that man is emotionally crippled.
My own country seems to me not aggressive, nor in search of war or conquest of any kind. It is exploring the broken calm of its domestic affairs. Slowly it investigates its own somewhat backward technology, and sets up committees on how not to do what for whom. My country is trying to resolve the internal contradictions of the Indian and French-Canadian nations it contains. In rather bewildered and stupid fashion it stares myopically at the United States, unable to, assess the danger to the south - a danger that continually changes in economic character, and finally confronts us from within our own borders.
This is the map of my country, the cartography of myself.
(1977)
IRVING LAYTON:
Balls for a One-Armed Juggler
QUESTION: IS IT POSSIBLE TO SITUATE IRVING LAYTON anywhere in the general "tradition" of Canadian poetry?
ANSWER: I don't think so, in spite of the fact that he's here. There has never been anyone quite like Layton - for good or bad - in Canadian poetry. He's the sport and anomaly of tradition
Q: Layton bas been called an innovator and a meticulous craftsman. Is this true?
A: He is not an innovator - unless you consider that his subject matter and language are innovation. Which in a sense I do. But given the tradition of preaching Christ-like sensualists and moralists such as Nietzsche, Lawrence and Shaw - then Layton is a fine craftsman. And this is relevant in an odd way. It allows Layton to swing expertly and acrobatically around the fixed trapeze of his own and other men's certainties.
Q.: To what poets or group of present day writers has he most affinity?
A: Leaving out the dead men for whom Layton professes admiration, one has to point to the Americans whom Layton affects to despise, such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, etc. - the Beats. But Layton has a singing magnificence in his earlier work which I find absent from theirs.
Q: There is preoccupation with physical violence and cruelty in many Layton poems. What does this indicate?
A: That he is a moralist. The reader may generally draw a conclusion or point a moral with Layton's poems of animal death and human violence.
Q: How good is he?
A: The best in the country.
There is much to be said for the idea that Layton is his own mythology. He stalks through most of the poems in Balls for a One-Armed Juggler much larger than life-size, far more angry than it's possible to sustain in the living flesh and bone of the human mind. So that his poems are frozen anger, solidified passion--set rigidly into forms which do not allow this anger to dissipate away into sleep or lessen into human anti-climax.
Of course there are modulations and degrees of printed emotion. There are also rare flashes of the characteristic early lyricism, which now seems to be fading away in the poet's impassioned middle age. Label this excerpt pity:
for I loved you from the first
who know what they do not know,
seeing in your death a tragic portent
for all of us who crawl and die
under the wheeling disappearing stars;
("Elegy for Marilyn Monroe")
Humour in Layton is liable to be savage as an executioner laughing at his victims. The philosophic moments are hardly ever calm, but generally vital:
Yet vitality proves nothing except that
something is alive
So is a pole-cat; so is a water-rat
("On Rereading the Beats")
I don't think I've ever met a human being with such impressive qualities of being right all the time as... (Excerpt )
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
