For decades, I have been asking myself the question, what is it about Al Purdy and me? I was the first person to write a book about Al Purdy. I have published several long articles about him, a number of memoirs, lots of poems, and reviews of at least half of his books. I made him a character in a novel, for heaven’s sake. I arranged for appearances by Purdy at four universities. I carried on a correspondence with him for almost forty years. We did tandem readings at universities, libraries, and art galleries. We got our pictures taken together more often than Wayne and Shuster.

Now that my wife has started a campaign to save Al and Eurithe Purdy’s bucolic A-frame house in eastern Ontario, I find myself spending every day with the late poet. And I wonder how come.

Because what did Alfred Wellington Purdy and George Harry Bowering have in common? He came from a kind of rural area near the centre of the universe, and I grew up in a desert valley way out near the western edge. When it came time to approach poetry and the writing of same, our differences were not simply a matter of age. Al was seventeen years older than I, but my mentor Robert Duncan was only eight days younger than Al.

The divergence shows up in the names of the precedent poets we took to mentioning. Al referred to the Brits G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, whereas I cited the American figures William Carlos Williams and H.D. Did this mean that our sensibilities were British versus American? Not at all. I think we all agree that Al was about as Canadian as you can get in the public eye, in the same way that his favourite singer, Stan Rogers, was. Singer and poet both reached for the Beaufort Sea, as robust Ontario Canadians will do.

Purdy is famous for his depiction of the place so strenuously celebrated in the recent Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology: little Roblin Lake and the scant village of Ameliasburgh, old United Empire Loyalist land in Prince Edward County. You see those proper nouns? When the tall, big-elbowed poet celebrates a region, he hauls the whole of his country with him. One of his last major poems, “Say the Names,” strides across that country, naming its historical and mythological places, with the undisguised intent of celebrating a whole country, an abstraction to be made tangible to the expansive Canadian mind. In that poem, he insists that you speak the musical names aloud, including those from my home, Osoyoos and Similkameen.

From the beginning of my serious poetry life, I, too, have been interested in place. Here, though, is our difference on this matter. Purdy loves his place and gathers it to his self, so much so that he will be identified with it, become in time our most famous Canadian poet. I, on the other hand, have been tentative in verse, Purdy’s opposite in that regard, maybe, finding any connection with my place via my physical senses, perceiving my Okanagan ground and my body with the same procedure.

Al will say, “I am a screen thru which the world passes.”

I will say, “The white wolf hides in the snow.”

Oh, how we argued in our letters, or I argued while Al disputed, refuted, pronounced, and expounded. Al was from United Empire Loyalist country, don’t forget, and it was despite my association with such American poets as Robert Creeley and Charles Olson that he had to appreciate me. For UEL Al, the war that the Americans called a revolution was not over nor forgiven. He liked John Newlove, too. I wonder whether he forgave Newlove for carrying Wallace Stevens’ collected poems wherever he went. Maybe Stevens the insurance company employee was closer to Canadian than was Olson the Democratic Party apparatchik.

Everyone who shares a history with Al Purdy knows that he loved to provoke some kind of disagreement. He would play the devil’s advocate long after the Devil had dispensed with his services. In my head at this moment, I can hear his distinctive sea lion voice offering me the opportunity to beg a question I had no intention to beg: “Wouldn’t you say that Dorothy Sunshine’s later poetry was really newspaper prose because of her broken love affair with a Jewish Lithuanian air cadet girl?” No, Al. Not really newspaper prose, one would maintain, and there’d be that grin with a toothpick in it, on a face also concerned with tilting back and accepting a glug out of a stubby of whatever beer was most economical at the time.

But you know, while all this game playing was going on, one was spending an afternoon and evening enjoying oneself, the company one had fallen among, and the things one found out one knew at last. Do you see? So one would eventually get out on the 401 highway, glowing a bit, and would the poet and his wife be left alone in those woods? No, Al Purdy was a famous collector of books, and he read them, too, during those cold nights when he and the missus sat and saw themselves reflected in the lakeshore window set into the abode they’d built out of second-hand lumber because they had to.