Malcolm Lowry Dérive: The Vancouver Sun published this photo, attributed to no one, most likely in Mexico somewhere... perhaps within the region of Cuernavaca. But back to Al Purdy who spent some time with Vancouver photographer and artist Curt Lang, and Malcolm on the tide swept shores of Dollarton.
Al Purdy was recognized by Bukowski as the one hip, beat poet in Canada. In the photo above he reminds us of William Burroughs in pose and manner. A great northern still life from the front of his own shack, a quite famous and still standing artist residency in Ameliasburgh. Purdy writes of Lowry:
"On our second visit to the beach shack, the dead man went swimming in Burrard Inlet, his face red and barrel chest bobbing around in the cold water like pieces of coloured driftwood. Later, it seemed completely natural that my friend and I, Lowry and his wife, drank Bols gin, which sometimes replaced coffee and tea in that household.
It grew darker then. Across black water silver candles of the oil refinery lit in the early evening, the same ones Lowry called, ironically, "the loveliest of oil refineries," He and my friend sang songs outside, while I sat at Lowry's typewriter and copied his poems by lamplight, feeling very literary and virtuous.
They were odd, doom-laden poems, very regular and formal, maybe even Elizabethan-sounding, death implicit in all of them. But in each poem, generally at the end, a line or two would silently go "boom": a phrase incandescent-
No Kraken shall depart till bade by name,
No peace but that must pay full toll to hell.
Then the rough-tender voices of my friends, the literary drunks, floated through the window to join i my mind the many-tentacled Kraken: "Away, away, away you rolling river."
- from Al Purdy in Starting from Ameliasburgh
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