The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

'I couldn't write it like that anyway': Al Purdy's Hiroshima Poems

"I couldn't write it likethat anyway" Al Purdy's Hiroshima Poems JOEL BAETZ N A LETTER TO MARGARET LAURENCE dated 27 August 1970, Al Purdy describes his high hopes for his upcoming trip to Japan. "I have all sorts of plans and projects in mind/7 Purdy writes, including a visit to Hiroshima. What about that one, eh? There are some places that breed poems, as I was sure of writing the Indian rock painting poem. Hiroshima is the same and there would be several poems there, a real mother lode. Now go ahead and tell me one shouldn't look for poems . . . . There's a fairly good argument for that sort of thinking, except that the things that enable you to write poems are what interests you . . . .(MLAP 182) But that "mother lode" of poems—"bomb poems, human poems" as he would later call them (YA 180)—never materialized. In a letter dated 24 May 1971, addressed to George Woodcock and sent from Japan, Purdy's former enthusiasm is replaced by an acknowledgement of poetic defeat or, at the very least, frustration: 9i I 92 I JOEL BAETZ Fve wandered around Hiroshima, being alternate baffled by the language and physically tired by effort Fve written six [poems] here, and started four more, all of which failed. I take that last to be a signal that Fve written enough here. So Fm leaving. (YA 179) These two brief excerpts are, in a way, opposing endpoints on a continuum that measures Purdy's changing attitude towards Japan as a site for poetic inspiration. With its colloquial phrasing and obvious earnestness , the former excerpt is playful, energetic, and, above all, optimistic that future "looking" for poems will be rewarded by their immanent discovery. Bycontrast, the latter,with its clipped sentences and emphasis on exhaustion and confusion, is restrained, serious, and disappointed that the surfeit of poems he longed for, that he was certain would emerge, never arrived. While the differences in the attitude and ideas of these excerpts are easy to spot, the similarities are just as important, even if less conspicuous . Despite their striking contrast, these two brief excerpts give voice to a single equation: that Hiroshima, that site of Second World War destruction, is valuable insomuch as it is a site for artistic creation. Hiroshima's usefulness is determined only by the degree to which it can be used as raw material for poems. Or as Purdy puts it, "[A]m I interested in what I see apart from poems or not? I am interested in what provides poems, but certainly only from that angle" (YA179). The conflation of the site of war and a site of art is emblematic of Purdy's concerns throughout his Hiroshima Poems. Published first as a cycle of six poems in Saturday Night in 1971, then as a chapbook of eight poems in 1972, and finally as an appendix to Sex &Death in 1973, these "bomb poems" position art as both a traumaticecho of war and a badfaith expression of a necessary wartime morality.1 But above all else, in these poems war's aftermath is imagined as an artistic event. Art appears frequently and variously in these poems—as a vehicle for moral judgement, as the performanceof communal strength, as a form of public mourning, as a register of death and an expression of hope and redemption—but each appearance is concerned with its necessity and failure. In ways that are surprising in light of his reputation and output, these belated poems about Hiroshima help us see Purdy's poetry as something more than a national voice that speaks only of the i. The cycle of poems published in Saturday Night includes six of the eight poems that turn up in the chapbook and Sex & Death. "From the Foreign Visitors' Book'7 and "Remembering Hiroshima" do not appear in the Saturday Night series. Only slight differences exist between the two or threeversionsof each poem. "I couldn't write it like that anyway" \ 93 land, its current residents, and their ancestors.And in the most general way, they invite us to see Purdy as one of the most frequently overlooked figures in Canadian literaryhistory: a war poet. The fact that Purdy wrote about the war is not all that surprising. After all, the earliest moments of his poetic career coincide with his service in the RCAF. Butwhat is remarkable about Purdy is his...