The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

Al Purdy, Sam Solecki, and Canadian Tradition

Al Purdy, Sam Solecki, and Canadian Tradition TRACY WARE N The Last Canadian Poet: An Essay on Al Purdy, Sam Solecki brings his wide knowledge of Modern poetry to bear on "Purdy's songof myself—The Collected Poems as a single poem" (105-106) and includes a polemical attack on contemporary Canadian criticism. Unusual in both his ambition and his achievement, Solecki shows some typical Canadian critical biases, especially in his ambivalence towards nationalism and Canadian literary history. Throughout the book, Solecki tries to keep two claims separate: on the one hand, "a book about Purdy as a poet is worth writing only if one thinks that he has produced a body of first-rate work that is important aspoetry before it is important for any other reason" (xiii); on the other hand, Purdy is "the major or central poet of our experience" (10), a Canadian Whitman or Milosz (11). Solecki is adept at arguing for both aesthetic and ideological merit, and in either case he finds himself at odds with contemporary values. "Whatever the virtues of postcolonial theory," he argues, "one of its obvious lacunae is a theory of literary or aesthetic value. If a text is an interplay of the aesthetic and the cognitive, postcolonial theory tends to privilege the latter over the former often to the point that the aesthetic disappears, absorbed within or redefined as the ideological-political" 227 I 228 | TRACY WARE (35)-1 What bothers him about the neglect of such poets as Margaret Avison, Irving Layton, and Purdy is that "[t]hey are being ignored or dropped either because their poetics are no longer fashionable . . . or because they are ideologically suspect and do not write on the preferred topics" (xi).It is difficult to distinguish aesthetics from ideology, however, when Solecki's main premise is that "it is equally important to a reading of Purdy's work and its place in Canadian culture to recognize that a phase of Canadian culture and economic and political nationalism, in the broadest sense, has also come to a close at roughly the same time" (xi).Since the changes that he laments make it possible to read such writers as Purdy "historically" (xi),a historicist approach might be a way out of the impasse, but the quotation marks around "historically" signal his reluctance to take it. We can get a good sense of Solecki's position if we compare his book to a contemporary article by Mark Silverberg. "As the search for a singular Canadian identity becomes less meaningful," Silverberg writes, "it is up to the next generation of criticsto move beyond the gesturesof Canadianization and to find new ways to account for [Purdy's] value" (247). Byarguing that in "Song of the Impermanent Husband" "Purdy's buffoonery is actually a form of mimicry that satirizes while it enacts certain social constructions of masculinity" (237), he finds a new way to account for Purdy's value, although Solecki might argue that such selfmockery is hardly antithetical to Purdy's nationalism.2 On other matters , Silverberg is less compelling. Noting that Louis K. MacKendrick's "selected bibliography in 1991 lists forty secondary sources," he responds, "My suspicion is that, even without reviews, this number might be doubled" (248n4). The implication is that Purdy is canonical, and therefore,for Silverberg as for Robert Lecker,whom he follows on the matter, suspect. By contrast, Solecki finds that "canonization has been coextensive with neglect": "With the exception of the Purdy issue 1. Similarly,Harvey M. Teres argues, "The bane of the dominant modes ofpostwar American criticism may verywellhavebeen their obsessiveexclusion ofhistoryand politics, but the bane of dominant and subordinate modes alike has been their shared inability to combinepoliticaland aestheticintelligence" (248). 2. "It's not clear to me why poems with a nationalor nationalisttheme ororientation cannotsimultaneously be 'dynamic, randomand questioning' [Davey 238], the defining termsof valuein the Bowering-Davey poetics;the oppositionstrikes me as a factitious one, designed primarily to allow them to claim Purdy for their ownview of a post-national North Americanpoetic . . . " (Last xiii). Similarly,StanDragland argues that "This is actually what it is to be Anglo-Canadian, inhibited from fully living the moment.We've made an art of pokingfun at the famous Canadian diffidence " (94). Al Purely, baiu Solccki and Canadian Tradition \ 229 in Essays on Canadian Writing (Summer 1993) . . . there has not been a single article about Purdy—or Irving Layton, to broaden the sample...