UNIT - I

1. LISTENING TO MYSELF

A. W Purdy

1.1 Warmer

What do you feel when you look at photographs of yourself as a

child?

What according to you is nostalgia:

Why is it not possible for us to recapture our past?

1.2 Meet the Author A. W. PURDY (1918 2000)

Modernist poet Al Purdy (Alfred Wellington Purdy) was one of a

Alden Nowlan
group of important Canadian poets like Milton Acorn,
and Patrick Lane who had little formal education and whose roots
were in Canada's working - class culture. An Officer of the Order of
Canada and two time winner of the Governor General's Award, Al
Purdy was a product of the post - war period of Economic Depressir
and massive unemployment. Like other writers who lived by the.

craft, Purdyworked in a variety of genres: radio and TV plays, book

edited anthologies,
reviewing, travel writing, magazine features. He
collection of essays
particularly of younger poets, and also a
entitled The New Romans (1968), which revealed his deep Canadian
nationalism.
Canadian
Furdy was atthe heart of the 1960s movements that set
audiences.
POets wandering the country, reading their poems large by a selr
to
s poems reveal the generalist erudition that is acquired
and he sought especially
m a n with a passion for reading, the rapid patterm or
g into of Canada's past, of
poetry a sense
in
Canada acquire the quality of age
ange that has made much of
E.J. Pratt and others
0brief a history. Pocts like AL Purdy, Klein, loss ofidentity, loss
that this modern style could not convey that
home they experienceu
Sense of place and belonging and loss of that
created an idiom of poetry
4
rapidly changing world, They
 Mosaics
10
of rootlessness and lack of order.
expressed the sense

Among the most successful of Purdy's many volumes are Poems for
The Cariboo Horses (1965), which won hinm
All the Annettes (1962),
Sex & Death (1973), which won him
the Governor General>s Award,
Stone Bird (1981) and Piling»s Blood
the A.J.M. Smith Award, The
(1984). A definitive collected book of poems was published in 2000.

Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of AlPurdy.

The poem "Listening To Myself" belongs to the post- war period
which expresses a longing to return to the old pastoral life of early
Canadians, There is a despair and dissatisfaction at the mad rush of
modernity coupled with the dismay at the increasing infuence of the
fast paced American way of life and its consumerism. Al Purdy
through his poetic persona wishes for the simpler though harsher
times because it was then that Canadians truly belonged to the land.

1.3 The Poem at a Glance

The poem prescribed for study is from his collection, Beyond

Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. The poem is about
the search for Canadian identity, and is to he read in the context
of Canadians becoming cosmopolitan in
their life styles. The poet
uses Canadian history as a means to recover or record a sense of
identity, He realises that Canada has changed and that Canadian
poetry/ literature is the only means to preserve a lost way of life, a
distinct Canadian identity. The poet speaks through the persona of
thepioneer axeman, the earliest explorer or settler in Canad- who
hacked through wilderness, survived unfamiliar and harsh
in,
weathered extreme climates to create a place and a country.
1.4 The Text

see myself staggering through deep snow

lugging blocks of wood yesterday
an old man
almost falling from bodily weakness
look down on myself from above
unen front and both sides
white hairwrinkled face and
hands
 Listening to Myself
11
it's really not very surprising
that love spoken by my voice
should be when I am listening
ridiculous
yet there it is
a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow

the loss of love

that comes to mean more
than the love itself
and how explain that?
a still pool in the forest
that has ceased to reflect anything
except the past
remains a sort of half-love
that is akin to kindness
and I am angry remembering
remembering the song of flesh
to flesh and bone to bone
the loss is better

Read to Understand

Staggering - to move unsteadily

Lugging pulling or carrying something with great effort

Stumbling -to almost fall while walking
Ceased stopped
Akin - like

1.5 Read to
interpret
Canadian poetry written from the 1940s reflects a definite break
rom conventional rules, Written in free verse, these poems show no
mal structure, metre or rhyme. The images are sharp and distinctly
anadian. Al Purdy in this poem expresses the disconnect he reeIs
OW
through the yearning of his poetic personas. Predominant