Gadzookians share their Al Purdy love in honour of the statue of him that’s going up in Queen’s Park next week
By Andrea Ledwell
“The only poem of his that I remember ended with the words ‘frig it!’” says my friend Ruth.
She can't remember the poem's title but the reading took place during the Milton Acorn Festival at a reading in a tent at Victoria Park in Charlottetown.
“I do remember laughing so hard that tears were running down my cheeks...yeah, the man was very funny!”
I have searched over the last couple of days for the ‘frig it’ poem but haven’t had any luck.
When I heard that they are putting a statue of him up in Queen’s Park next week, I was curious to know which poems of his were favourites.
Those of us who were around Charlottetown during the heady days of the annual Milton Acorn Festival were fortunate to hear lots from Al Purdy, a mainstay of the annual summer festival held on the Island. He and Acorn were close friends.
Festival frequenter, Leo Cheverie, shares his favourite Al Purdy anecdote: Purdy and his wife had Milton stay at their place when he ran out of money. Purdy said, “when Milton decided to sell his carpenter tools to help finance being a full-time writer, I was appalled. ‘Why Milt’, I said, ‘even a great writer like me can't make a living at it.’ Milton eyed me speculatively. ‘Maybe you should buy the tools.’”
Regular Gadzooks contributor and poet, Iza Bryniarska selected “Maybe Fish as her favourite:
“...this poem is so gorgeously, subtly frustrating, but in an absurd way...yes, this one's my favourite, from the ones I've read in any case.”
Gadzooks’ editor and poet Rod Weatherbie selected “Song of The Impermanent Husband”
Lisa Young wrote in to say, “I don't have a favourite purdy....damn.”
Perhaps she should have said, “Frig it”!
Maybe Fish
Never to touch
the beloved
in any sense whatever:
merely hover
like green gold
watering cans
and squirt milt
down a hole
scraped in the ground
Divided always
by thick transparent
glass while looking
at each other
often sort of
goggling
thru dim green windows
of a weed-grown victorian mansion
where someone
someone from another era
has just slowly closed the door
of the master bedroom
and the deer in the wall
tapestry yearn for each other
for century after century
divided by centimetres
of ancient cloth
- and there is something decidedly
comic about it
especially
if you're not a deer
But oh my dear
never to touch
the beloved
never
never
Song of The Impermanent Husband
Oh I would
I would in a minute
if the cusswords and bitter anger couldn't-
if the either/or quarrel didn't-
and the fat around my middle wasn't-
if I was younger if
I wasn't so damn sure
I couldn't find another maddening bitch
like you holding on for dear life to
all the different parts of me for
twenty or twenty
thousand years
I'd leave in the night like
a disgraced caviar salesman
descend the moonlight
stairs to Halifax
( uh---no---not Halifax)
well then Toronto
ah
I guess not Toronto either/or
rain-soaked Vancouver down
down
down
the dark stairs to
the South Seas' sunlit milky reefs and
the jungle's green
unending bank account with
all the brown girls being brown
as they can be and all
the one-piece behinds stretched tight tonight
in small sarongs gawd not to be touched tho Oh
beautiful as an angel's ass
-without the genitals
And me
in Paris like a smudged Canadian postcard and
(dear me)
all the importuning white and lily girls
of rue Pigalle
and stroll
the sodden London streets and
find a sullen foggy woman who
enjoyed my old colonial ways and send
a post card back to you about my faithfulness and
talk about the lovely beastly English weather
I'd be the slimiest most uxorious wife deserter
my shrunk amoeba self absurd inside
a saffron girl's geography and
hating me between magnetic nipples
but
fooling no one
in all the sad and much emancipated world
Why then I'll stay
at least for tea for
all the brownness is too brown and
and all the whiteness too damn white
and I'm afraid
afraid of being
any other woman's man
who might be me
afraid
The unctuous and uneasy self I glimpse
sometimes might lose my faint and yapping cry
for being anything
was never quite what I intended
And you you
bitch no irritating
questions re love and permanence only
an unrolling lifetime here
between your rocking thighs
and the semblance of motion