The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

Song and Silence in Al Purdy's Family Elegies

Song and Silence in Al Purdy's Family Elegies JEREMY LALONDE N HIS HISTORY OF THE English elegy, Peter Sacks asserts the centrality of issues of "poetic inheritance" (37) within the genre. He traces this generic interest back to ancient funeral rituals in which mourning and inheritance were closely related: The heir apparent must demonstrate a greater strength or proximity to the dead than any rival may claim, but he must also wrest hisinheritance from the dead. More than a mere ingestion, some act of alterationor surpassal must be made, some device whereby the legacy may be seen to have entered a new successor.(37) Sacks' first two examples, Moschus's "Lament for Bion" and W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats,"certainly belong within this tradition —as do John Milton's "Lycidas," Percy Shelley's "Adonais," and Algernon Swinburne's "Ave Atque Vale" (Sacks devotes a chapter to each of these three poems). While issues of poetic inheritance are clearest when the elegiac subject (the deceased, in other words) is a poet, Sacks ably demonstrates how elegiac conventions are themselves a kind of poetic inheritance. In this latter sense, issues of poetic inheritance are generally present in any elegy that manifests an awarenessof its generic precursors. 173 I 1/4 | JEREMY LALONDE When Sacks discusses poetic inheritance of the first type (in which the deceased directlycontributes to the elegist's poetic development), it is always in the context of an elegy written for another poet. This focus carries with it the assumption that an elegist can only garner a poetic inheritance from another poet. In chapters 6, 7, and 8 of Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani illustrates how American family elegies engage with issues of poetic inheritance, even when the deceased is not a poet. In some cases, Ramazaniargues, it is impossible for the elegist to wrest a viable form of poetic inheritance from the deceased, whose legacy must be confronted and overcome (as is the case in the parental elegies of Robert Lowell, John Berryman,Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich). In the parental elegies of Amy Clampitt, Ramazani discerns "a more pliant, more traditionalist poetics for the genre by comparison with . . . earlier parental elegies'7 (333). Clampitt's parental elegies have a wider range than those of her predecessors and reveal both the inheritances and the resistances that have defined her poeticcareer. When Al Purdy muses about "how or why I write poems" (YA 445), it is frequently within the context of a family elegy. Like Clampitt's, Purdy's family elegies dramatize narratives of affiliation and resistance. However, in Purdy's case, this range is only visible when one views his family elegies as a group; within individual elegies, affiliation and resistance are often treated as mutually exclusive strategies. One can plot each of Purdy's family elegies on a continuum that runs from the affirmation of ancestral song (i.e., "The Dead Poet") to the refutation of ancestral silence (i.e., "Evergreen Cemetery").1 In his elegies for his silent ancestors, Purdy dramatizes melancholic mourning—that is, "mourning that is unresolved, violent, and ambivalent" (Ramazani4). Although unresolved, violent, and ambivalent mourning frequently overlap, one type of mourning always seems to stand out in eachof Purdy's elegies for his silent ancestors. These elegies are typically written in a low, confessionalstyle and sacrifice aesthetic sophistication for the sake of expressive force. At the other end of the continuum are Purdy's decidedly traditional elegies for his singing ancestors, which i. By"song" I refer to what might otherwise be termed "proto-poetic attributes/' Conversely, I use "silence" to denote "anti-poetic attributes." On a separatenote, I would like to acknowledgethat my discussion of Purdy's poeticcontinuum and my reading of "The Dead Poet" are indebted to Stan Dragland's essay "Al Purdy's Poetry: Openings." Dragland positions "The Dead Poet" at one "end of the Purdy Spectrum" (18) and "Home-Made Beer" at the other; he argues that the former poem "is tightly woven of the various materialsPurdy has used to make his poetry as a whole"(45). Song and Silence in Al Purdi/'s Family Elegies 175 are normally written in a high lyric style and culminatein the apotheosis of the deceased. 'The Dead Poet" offers an ideal starting point for my discussion of Purdy's family elegies: in one way or another, the question posed at...