Britain has Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the Yukon has the Robert Service cabin, Florida the Robert Frost cottage, Woodstock Ontario the John McCrae House, Amsterdam the Anne Frank House, Prince Edward Island its house of Green Gables, and Ameliasburg Ontario now the Al Purdy A-Frame. This past spring the ‘save Al Purdy’s A-frame project’ announced that its four-year fund-raising campaign – to which Leonard Cohen donated $10K – had succeeded in purchasing the cabin from Purdy’s widow Eurithe, and now plans to raise yet more money to renovate the property to house a writer-in-residence and receive visits. It has rebuilt the outhouse. It is rebuilding the front deck. It is rebuilding a later but no longer existing structure to serve as a gatehouse. There are rumours it will soon find empty vintage wine bottles for the garden and a 1948 Pontiac for the driveway. That it will begin holding annual dinners across the country at which pipers usher in a barbecued Cariboo horse and all assembled recite “The Song of the Impermanent Husband.”

OK, I have mixed feelings about the project. Purdy is a remarkable example of a self-educated poet, as Bowering’s 1970s monograph documents, and an encouragement to any young writer to persist no matter how weak one’s early poems. The A-frame is said to have been hammered together mostly by him and his wife, Eurithe. Purdy is the author of numerous remarkable lyrical responses to Canadian places and people. He could also, alas, find humour in misogyny and romance in racism, as well as in the often unrequited labour of eastern Ontario’s U.E.L. settlers. He’s been called by critic Sam Solecki “the last Canadian poet” – i.e. the last to be able to assume that being male, white,
beer-loving and British-descended was the Canadian mainstream. But Solecki could be wrong.

The question of why save his A-frame is also the question of why preserve any building because of its literary associations. In a way such preservation is anti-literary – an act that draws people’s attention to things other than words. Proponents argue that Wordsworth’s house in the Lake District leads one back to his poems – which in a few cases it likely does. But for most visiting a literary house is a way of being literary without having to read – an architectural version of a Readers Digest condensed book for a similarly bourgeois audience. Or it’s an event with

Or,
Recessional Sonnet Concerning Cost-cutting Poetries

To cut costs Canadian poets
have used fewer letters in words (B. Bissett)
smaller letters (b. bissett), fewer
vowels  (C. Bok), fewer changes
in pitch (M. Atwood), fewer words
taken from dictionaries (A. Karasick), fewer letterspaces
and smaller letters (bpNichol). They have re-cycled found lines
or sentences (L. Robertson, J.R. Colombo),
or once-abandoned poems (D. Marlatt)
or have re-used and re-used earlier concepts
(I. Layton, R. Souster, A. Purdy inter alios).
Some have used their own alphabets (P. Coupey, bpNichol)
or even made their poems go bare (P. Webb).

FD