Posted on the Al Purdy A-frame page today by David Fraser. Thank you, David.

Making friends with Al Purdy
Scraping sideways through factory door frames, Vancouver to St. Johns
Ass in a sling peregrinations of an afflicted writer with
his bride, the binding spine and glue that bound the Purdy book
holding the pages together, as he chased twenty years of bad verse.
A penance of preparation before words like jewels fell from his sky
Then a sparkling bloom of eloquence
Alongside mattress factory lunchroom language.
Together they dreamed and gleaned the famed A Frame, into existence
Ameliasburgh Ontario, Omphalos of Canadian Poetry
Where all were welcome
Writers, publishers, painters and pool players.
Booksellers and broadcasters, they came:
Nonchalant Ondantje shirtless, Atwood, Lane.
Birney, Bowering and Lawrence
Arguing prosody, while drinking heaven.
But I am not among them
Standing mostly outside the gates of All the Annettes.
Poems ( in large letters )
As I try to make friends with Al Purdy
unofficial poet laureate of Canada
my silver bowl of
comprehension immediately oxidizes
Linearity is decapitated,
My mind descending
into this drunken Dali world of words
at an all-night party
copulating remorselessly
epicene with epicene
in a bawdy piscine pool
and Belshazzar is in there somewhere.
Quantum poetry
where positively charged expectations
collide with sub-coherent particles of thought.
Whereupon,
“Pithecanthropus erectus round
the kitchen midden peers
disguised as Homo Sapiens he
asserts his own supremacy
with registered cows and A.I.D.
worships new fertility gods
delicious ground Cantharides
assures a profit from a loss. ”
Purdy, excerpt from ” Rural henhouse 1962 ”
Swaggering to Andromeda
with thirty-nine volumes, over fifty six years.
A life of labyrinths.
By David E. Fraser October 2022