Al Purdy
Al Purdy
Alfred Wellington Purdy, OC OOntwas a 20th-century Canadian free verse poet. Purdy's writing career spanned fifty-six years. His works include thirty-nine books of poetry; a novel; two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence, in addition to his posthumous works. He has been called the nation's "unofficial poet laureate" and "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in the life of a culture."...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 December 1918
CountryCanada
I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.
I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world.
I don't think I do have a soul.
At a certain age you're always uncertain how other people will take you.
A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.
And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.
Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.
I started writing when I was about thirteen.
In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.