Al Purdy

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

Herausgeber: Solecki, Sam

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The definitive Al Purdy selected. Finalist for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2006!

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Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
• UK
• Seitenzahl: 152
• Erscheinungstermin: Januar 1996
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 224mm x 152mm x 5mm
• Gewicht: 227g
• ISBN-13: 9781550171488
• ISBN-10: 1550171488
• Artikelnr.: 22128290

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

The Dead Poet (from The Stone Bird, 1981)
Poems for All the Annettes (1962)
Spring Song
Remains of an Indian Village
At the Quinte Hotel
House Guest
The Cariboo Horses (1965)
The Cariboo Horses
Song of the Impermanent Husband
Necropsy of Love
Hockey Players
Home-Made Beer
One Rural Winter
Winter at Roblin Lake
Roblin's Mills
The Country North of Belleville
Fidel Castro in Revolutionary Square
Transient
North of Summer (1967)
Trees at the Arctic Circle
Arctic Rhododendrons
Still Life in a Tent
When I Sat Down to Play the Piano
What Do the Birds Think?
The Country of the Young
Dead Seal
Wild Grape Wine (1968)
The Winemaker's Beat-Étude
Hombre
Watching Trains
Dark Landscape
The Drunk Tank
Sergeant Jackson
Roblin's Mills (2)
About Being a Member of Our Armed Forces
Lament for the Dorsets
Wildemess Gothie
The Runners
Over the Hills in the Rain, My Dear
Detail
Love in a Burning Building (1970)
Married Mans Song
Sex and Death (1973)
Dead March for Sergeant MacLeod
The Horseman of Agawa
The Beavers of Renfrew
For Robert Kennedy
Sundance at Dusk (1976)
The Hunting Camp
Pre-School
Alive or Not Inside the Mill
A Handful of Earth (1977)
The Death Mask
A Handful of Earth
Prince Edward County
The Stone Bird (1981)
Journey to the Sea
May 23, 1980
Red Fox on Highway 500
Shot Glass Made From a Bull's Hom
Bestiary
In the Garden
Moonspell
Birdwatching at the Equator
Piling Blood (1984)
Piling Blood
In the Beginning was the Word
Adam and No Eve
In the Early Cretaceous
Museum Piece
Voltaire
Collected Poems (1986)
Elegy for a Grandfather
The Smell of Rotten. Eggs
The Woman on the Shore (1990)
The Prison Lines at Leningrad
Quetzal Birds
The Others
In the Desert
On the Flood Plain
Seasons
Naked with Summer in Your Mouth (1994)
Glacier Spell
Procne into Robin
On Being Human
Afterword
AFTERWORD BY AL PURDY
[Once, on Baffin Island,] I was curled up in a sleeping bag, feeling lost
at the world's edge, bereft of family and friends. As the tide went out,
icebergs were left stranded on the beach. With the water's support removed,
they collapsed on themselves with a crash whose echoes kept repeating
themselves. A dog would howl, and others join in, a bedlam chorus. Old
Squaw ducks moaned about how awful life was, an OUW-OUW-OUW dirge for the
living. And all these sounds repeated themselves, as if some mad god were
howling from distant mountains.
Somewhere in my head a poem began. One of the lines was about those ducks,
the loneliness and defeat the birds signified: "I think, to the other side
of that sound": I think to a place where uncertainty and loneliness are
ended, to a happier time. But, I say to myself now, think again: I was
never really happier than when I was lying in a sleeping bag on an Arctic
island, listening to those noisy ducks at the top of the world and writing
a poem. ("To See the Shore: A Preface," The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, p.
xvi [ 1986])
Poetry. What is it for, what does it do, what is the use of it? In Canada,
poetry reflects and foreshadows both country and people. It is the voice of
reason, the voice of humanity, the voice that says "I am me." It allows us
to know each other; like the CBC, it connects with all parts of the
country. It says the little village of Ameliasburgh in Ontario has some
relevance to, say, Granville Ferry in Nova Scotia. Above all, poetry says
you are us and we are citizens of here and now, this space, this air, and
this time. ("Disconnections," Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 49 [Summer
1993], p. 187)
I started to write at age twelve or thirteen, partly through interest in
other people's writing (Bliss Carman, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K.
Chesterton, for example), but probably the largest reason was my own ego. I
wanted attention. I think that is the principal reason for many youthful
activities. ("Disconnections," Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 49 [Summer
1993], p. 213)
One question about poems has always puzzled me: why do I write them? At
first the reason was sheer ego, I wanted attention . . . But that original
reason for writing has been succeeded by others, among them a raging desire
for some kind of personal excellence, whose validity would endure against
time. And yet that is a paradox, since I think a poem's validity belongs,
principally, to its own particular moment of creation. Therefore, all are a
series of moments emerging from their own time. At least they emerge as
their own kind of truth, if the impulses that created them were valid in
the first place. (A Handful of Earth, p. [8] 119771)
As a writer, I've always felt like an eternal amateur. Even after writing
poems all my life, I'm never entirely confident that the next poem will
find its way into being. And then I find myself writing one, without
knowing exactly how I got there. ("To See the Shore: A Preface," The
Collected Poems of Al Purdy, p. xviii [ 19861)
To my mind, what a poem ought to do is cause the reader to feel and think,
balanced on nearly the same moment as myself when I wrote it. And I'd
prefer to be understood with a minimum of mental strain by people as
intelligent or more so than myself. I'd like them to hear the poem aloud
when they read it on the page, which some people can do with poems they
like.
Ideally, I'd like to say a thing so well that if the reader encounters a
passage in a poem of mine which has much the same rhythm and ordinariness
as this prose passage he or she is reading now: that that passage would
suddenly glow like coloured glass in a black and white world. Which is
probably a hopeless ambition. (Bursting into Song, p. 11 [1982])
[Poems] are my umbilical cord with the world and with other people, a
two-way cord. They connect with sources I'm not even aware of, and if I
were the poems would be impossible. What was it Yeats said about poems
being "a quarrel with one's self"? Probably true, with inner arguments
resolved or not in poems. (A Handful of Earth, p. [81 [1977])
[In my love poems] it isn't just the euphoric dreams of lovers I want to
evoke, it's the ridiculosity inherent in the whole comic disease. And the
mordant happiness of despair as well. Pain and its red blot in the brain,
sorrow that things end, fade into little rags of memory that haunt us in
their absence. (How wonderful to be made of stone and endure forever!
Except, in some mysterious way, that which has existed truly once does last
forever.) ("On Being Romantic," Love in a Burning Building, p. [10] [1970])
Well, what does the reader want from a poem? ... Primarily, I suppose, to
be entertained. And that involves tuning in on some emotion or feeling or
discovery that is larger and more permanent than he is. Some flashing
insight that adds a new perspective to living. Values also. And that is a
great deal. Most of the time it's asking far too much. ("Leonard Cohen: A
Personal Look," Starting from Ameliasburgh, p. 197 [1965, 19951)
Re intent, I prefer Earle Birney's opinion ... that whatever meaning or
levels of meaning the reader "extracts" from the work, this meaning is
legitimate and valid. Because (my own comment as well as Birney's) there is
something in a writer's head which causes him or her to incorporate
meanings and possible interpretations he (or she) doesn't even know are
there. ("Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie," Starting from
Ameliasburgh, pp. 239-40 [ 1971, 1995])
Rhyme and metre are not outdated, and I'm sure Pound must have suspected
that. Both have lasted a thousand years, and will last many more .... I
quite often use rhyme myself, and metre as well, trying to vary and conceal
it within poems where it isn't expected and seems accidental if you do
notice it. But I generally let a poem go where it seems to want to go, then
touch it here and there deliberately, add metre say, or remove metre, add
or remove a rhyme if too close to another rhyme. Perhaps it's not quite as
artless as you seem to think? (Letter to George Johnston, 10 Aug. 1980)
Your mention of the "circular route" is also appropriate, since many poems
I write are circular, that is coming back to some remark at the beginning
in order to - not become self-contained - do what? I don't always. know
without looking at a particular poem: perhaps because our own lives seem to
me circular in many ways, in that we never escape our own past and are
always affected by it, and a poem's past is our own in minuscule. (Letter
to George Galt, 25 Dec. 1978)
I dislike the strong implication that to employ natural speech idioms is
the best or only way to write poetry. There seem to me to be a million ways
to write a poem. To exclude any of them is to make academic strictures on
what poems are and should be. ("Charles Bukowski's It Catches My Heart in
its Hands," Starting from Ameliasburgh, p. 190 [1964, 19951)
I snapped out of that lost soul condition in the air force during the war
years; and found new prosodic mentors in Vancouver in 1950. Dylan Thomas,
of course, was the foremost of these.
I learned much from Layton in Montreal during my stint there in 1956 and
later. And then I think I was overwhelmed by my own discoveries of new
writers. It was wonderful to roll and tumble in the loose and magnificent
rhythms of Yeats, the stem and sometimes puzzling disciplines of Auden, and
most of all to be fascinated and enthralled by Lawrence. I don't say
Lawrence is the best of those three, but he's the writer I learned most
from, and whose own life was equally fascinating to me. (Reaching for the
Beaufort Sea, pp. 286-7 [1993])
Lawrence learned much from Walt Whitman, and I can see how and why he could
do so. Yet Whitman's work seems to me nearly mindless cliche by comparison
to Lawrence's, despite Randall Jarrell's panegyric. (I want to like a poet
because of his or her effect on me now, not for past influence on poetry in
general.) Lawrence was drawn by Whitman's tone, his openness of line, his
running on and on wherever thought would take him. Whitman refused to be
dictated to by other men's thinking, by traditions of prosody, by the
pretentious notion that if one was writing a poem one must say what a poem
was supposed to say, must scan and rhyme.
Lawrence knew that a poem could say anything. The Is and Ts could dance
together on paper, the As and Ls could fly to the moon without wings. Words
anchored his thought to paper so that the mind became corporeal and yet
weightless. So that he wrote his life in his poems, and toward the end of
his life he wrote his death. When a poet - myself in this case - is
influenced enough by Lawrence, then he escapes all influence, including
Lawrence. After DHL, all other influences merge seamlessly into your own
work. You learn still, you always learn, but never again are you under a
slavish obligation to another writer. ("Disconnections," Essays on Canadian
Writing, No. 49, [Summer 19931 p. 216.)
In my lifetime, there have been many other writers whose work I've admired
and absorbed. They are constantly nudging me somewhere in my unconscious
mind. If I had to name two of the most important influences, D.H. Lawrence
and Irving Layton would qualify. As examples, not tutors. And perhaps
Milton Acorn gets in there somewhere as well; I learned from him both how
to write and how not to write. (Very few people can teach you opposite
things at the same time.) I think I've learned from everyone I've read, on
some level, though I've digested their writing in ways that make it
impossible for me to recognize it in my own work. All of us who write are
indebted to everyone else who writes for our enthusiasms and craft (or
sullen art). ("To See the Shore: A Preface," The Collected Poems of Al
Purdy, p. xviii 119 86])
Northrop Frye's dictum that poems are created from poems seems to me
partially true, in the sense that if other people's poems hadn't been
written you couldn't have written your own. In that sense, what each of us
writes balances and juggles the whole history of literature, and we are for
that moment "the midland navel-stone" of earth. (A Handful of Earth, p. [81
[1977])
... you always choose and place poems [in a book] in such a way that they
set each other off to advantage, opposites in mood or subject together or
likes together. At least you hope they set each other off to advantage. (
Bursting into Song, p. 10 [1982])
I read reviews to find out what's wrong with my writing; I read them for
flattery and for truth, two opposite things. I regard myself as an odd kind
of mainstream poet, and much closer to the style of mainstream American
writers than British. And "mainstream" may be regarded here, in my case, as
eccentric-conventional . . . Paradoxically, while I write
more like Canadian and US poets in style and diction, I like the slightly
older British poets much better than the American ones. (Reaching for the
Beaufort Sea, p. 283 [1993])
Travelling has almost been a way of life for this poet, especially in the
last few years. Strange landscapes and foreign climes have produced a
feeling of renewal, the earth itself has given me a sense of history, the
stimulus of the original events carrying over in time and entering my own
brain. ("To See the Shore: A Preface," The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, p.
xv [1986])
And as a passing comment, there are few things I find more irritating about
my own country than this so-called "search for an identity," an identity
which I've never doubted having in the first place.
The environment, the land, the people, and the flux of history have made us
what we are; these have existed since Canada's beginning, along with a
capacity for slow evolvement into something else that goes on and on. And
perhaps I would also include pride. Their total is all that any nation may
possess. I think it is enough. ("Introduction," The New Romans, p. iii
[1969])