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Al Purdy A-Frame
Site ProfileSo we built a house, my wife and I
our house at a backwater puddle of a lake
near Ameliasburg, ON.
—Al Purdy "In Search of Owen Roblin"
Al Purdy (December 30, 1918 - April 21, 2000), considered one of Canada’s greatest poets and dubbed “The Voice of the Land," published 33 books of poetry, a novel, an autobiography, and nine collections of essays and correspondence. After his death, Toronto’s Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and the City of Toronto unveiled the Al Purdy memorial statue in the east side of Toronto’s Queen’s Park. But when friends, family, peers and fans of Purdy's great works think of a point on the map that perhaps most embodies his memory, they think of an A-frame in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, the place where Purdy live with his wife Eurithe, and wrote some of his greatest works.
Purdy's best work showcased ordinary life, humour and intellect, no doubt on hand while Purdy, Eurithe and Eurithe's father began construction of the A-frame in 1957 on a 100 feet wide by 265 long lot along the south shore of Roblin Lake, "a teacup of water nearly two miles long," using available materials of "used lumber, concrete blocks, studdings, beaverboard and the like." Among the cottage's ingredients are limestone from an 1840 Regency house, historic stone from the Roblin gristmill site, more stone from Norris Whitney’s barnyard and the Point Anne quarry near Kingston. The A-frame is as symbolic in its ties to the Canadian landscape as it is to Canadian culture. And it was during this time that Purdy wrote The Cariboo Horses, which would result in Purdy's first Governor's General Award in 1965.
The A-frame became a meeting place for poets and poetry lovers, journalists, booksellers, academics and students. Guests of the A-frame include Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, George Bowering, Lynn Crosbie, Dennis Lee, Steven Heighton, Patrick Lane, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland, John Newlove, Anna Porter, Elizabeth Smart and many, many more.
"We didn’t have a single book to our names; we were studying or teaching . . . And Al and Eurithe simply invited us in. And why? Because we were poets! Not well-known writers or newspaper celebrities . . . These visits became central to our lives. We weren't there for gossip, certainly not to discuss royalties and publishers. We were there to talk about poetry. Read poems aloud. Argue over them. Complain about prosody. . . . All this changed our lives. It allowed us to take poetry seriously. This happened with and to numerous other young poets all over the country, right until the last days of Al Purdy's life. He wasn't just a 'sensitive' man, he was a generous man." —Michael Ondaatje
In an effort to preserve Purdy's A-frame, Jean Baird (wife of poet George Bowering) and Purdy's publisher Howard White of Harbour Publishing, founded the A-frame Trust in hope of raising $1 million to purchase the property and maintain the house for development as a poet-in-residence program. To further the cause, in October 2009, The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology was published by Harbour Publishing, edited by Paul Vermeersch, with introduction by Dennis Lee. The book consists of contributions by those who visited the Purdys during the fifty years they occupied the property, along with writings by Al Purdy in which the property is mentioned.
"[The A-frame is] not just a shack in the woods," says Jean Baird. "It has been a pilgrimage place for decades for young writers—for all writers." Acolytes who never knew Purdy or drank his wild-grape wine out of old whiskey bottles still leave totems on his nearby grave, according to Baird. "If the emails I get are any indication, the back roads of Prince Edward County are full of lost poets, looking for the A-frame."
(from "Saving the House Al Built" by Kevin Van Paassen, Globe and Mail)
Go here to learn more about this historic literary landmark.
Landmark curated by Julie Wilson. Wilson is the literary voyeur behind Seen Reading, The Madam at Book Madam & Associates, and the author of Truly, Madly, Deadly: The Unofficial True Blood Companion (under the pen name Becca Wilcott).
Author ProfileAlfred Wellington (Al) Purdy was born December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario and died at Sidney, BC, April 21, 2000. Raised in Trenton, he dropped out of high school and went to Vancouver. During WWII he served in the Canadian air force. With no formal education, Purdy traveled across the country supporting himself as a labourer, a subject matter that appears often in his writings.
In 1964, Purdy won his first Governor General's Award for his collection The Cariboo Horses, a good fortune that allowed him to write full-time, taking up residents with his wife Eurithe in both Ameliasburg, Ontario and Sidney, BC.
Over his career, Purdy published 33 books of poetry, the novel A Splinter in the Heart (1999), an autobiography, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea (1993) and nine collections of essays and correspondence. In 1986, Purdy won his second Governor General's Award for Collected Poems. In 1983, Purdy was appointed to the Order of Canada followed by the Order of Ontario in 1987.
On May 20, 2008, a statue of the poet Al Purdy was unveiled in Queen's Park.
From Paul Vermeersch's Open Book essay on the ceremony, "Al Purdy: The Voice of the Land":
Al Purdy, the man widely regarded as Canada's first true national poet, died in April, National Poetry Month, in the year 2000. In a way, his death marked the end of a century in which the Canadian cultural identity – under pressure from separatist tensions, two world wars, the rapid development of the mass media and the sensation of being a young nation adrift between older colonial powers and our newer imperialist neighbour – experienced its most profound growing pains. No other poet was as resolute in addressing those pains as Alfred Wellington Purdy. He did so not only by writing about the issues head-on, but also by listening to the people around him, by writing a poetry rooted in the daily life of the people and places of the Canada he knew and loved, from sea to sea to sea. He was writing poems that were relevant to Canadians, and, for over forty years, Canadians listened.
Read the full essay here.
Learn more about Al Purdy here.
Book ProfileThe Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology by Al Purdy, edited by Paul Vermeersch
ISBN 13: 978-1-55017-502-8
ISBN 10: 1-55017-502-5
Price: $26.95
Paperback
8 x 8 - 160 pp - November 2009
From the Publisher:
A celebration of the most unlikely, outrageous and important gathering place in modern Canadian writing, with contributions from Dennis Lee, Eurithe Purdy, F.R. Scott, George Galt, Joe Rosenblatt, Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, D.G Jones, Sid Marty, Steven Heighton, Howard White, David McFadden, David Helwig, Janet Lunn, Paul Vermeersch, Michael Ondaatje and others.
This is a book with a mission. On one level it is a celebration of the great Canadian poet Al Purdy by eminent writers who were his contemporaries. It is also part of a campaign to preserve the place that was the centre of Purdy's writing universe—his home, a lakeside A-frame cottage in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where he and his wife Eurithe lived for 43 years. The cottage was one of the most important crossroads on Canada's literary map, a kind of tribal mustering place for notable Canadian writers from the 1950s to the 1990s including Margaret Laurence, Milton Acorn, Patrick Lane, Tom Marshall, Scott Symons, R. G. Everson, H. R. Percy, Lynn Crosbie, Michael Holmes, Maggie Helwig and a host of others. This book collects anecdotes, reminiscences, and poems by a roll call of Canadian writers about memorable days and nights spent at the A-frame, along with a selection of Purdy's own writing showing the depth of his feeling for the place where he put down his roots.
Eurithe Purdy says Al was always his most productive at the A-frame. "Despite the caviar receptions and gold accolades, he always returned to this jury-rigged little A-frame tacked to a low-slung, leaning bungalow. The whole edifice, he observed, 'bent a little in the wind and dreamt of the trees it came from.' Here, he could observe all his poetry's recurring themes: love, death, ego, 'the glories of copulation.'" Proceeds from The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology will go towards preserving the Purdy home as a retreat for future generations of Canadian writers.
Excerpt:
From "A Permanent Emergency" by Al Purdy
The house was still a skeleton without flesh in the autumn of 1957: flesh being insulation, siding, paint and other amenities. An old cookstove in the A-frame living room supplied heat. We had scrounged coal oil lamps for light (there was no electricity). Three of those lamps, clustered together, if you read a book, meant your eyes wouldn’t fall out of your head. But they were a smoky dangerous fire hazard right out of the nineteenth century. When winter came like a lion, tiger and tyrannosaurus combined, the lake we used for water became armored with ice—ice three-foot-plus thick in March.
I chopped through it with an axe all that first winter. In March, you had to chop a four or five-foot circle in the ice, narrowing at the bottom to produce a huge funnel, from which water leaped upward in a reverse cataract at the final downward blow. I’d be sweating profusely as the work proceeded in fairly mild winter weather, discarding pieces of clothing one by one. At the end I’d often be stripped down to shorts. Mrs. Eley, observing me from her kitchen window, said I was "Mr. Tarzan." This flattered me inordinately.
The surface of our lives was tolerable,bearable, even enjoyable and producing occasional laughter at times. We were healthy, all three of us were, and a damn good thing too. Our original Montreal grubstake of some twelve hundred bucks had melted away, leaving a few measly dollars hoarded against emergencies. But ours was a permanent emergency.
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Please join us at the Belleville Public Library - 254 Pinnacle Street in Belleville, Ontario - on Wednesday October 13th from 6 - 8 pm in the John M. Parrott Art Gallery on our third floor, for an evening of fun, friendship and Al Purdy poetry in support of the Al Purdy A-Frame Trust, with Jean Baird, George Bowering, and other guests.
Admission will be free but you will have the chance to support the Trust by purchasing the "Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology", or a raffle ticket to win some wonderful and valuable prizes. Raffle tickets are currently available at Books & Company in Picton, Greenley's Bookstore (www.greenleysbookstore.com) in Belleville or at the Belleville Public Library - at $5.00 each or 3 for $10.00. Greenley's will also be selling copies of the A-frame Anthology.
This will be a joint reading, and information session about the A-frame project with the opportunity for the community to ask questions.
For more information please contact Information Services at the Belleville Public Library (613) 968-6731 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (613) 968-6731 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, (613) 968-6731 (x2237).