When Al Purdy got up for his turn and peered down at us, the crown of his head almost grazed the bank of fluorescent tubes on the ceiling, or so it seemed to us—or seems to me now. In a big, barging voice he prefaced his reading by asking what we had thought of Birney’s performance. Nobody spoke. Purdy’s high, sunned forehead was stamped with a scowl and his shaded glasses made it hard to decode his expression or even to know exactly where he was looking. After some moments of laden silence I put up my hand and offered that I’d liked the reading, but had hoped Birney would also read from David, his famous long poem. Purdy stared at me with an unamused grin. A few long moments more and he said, “Yeah, sure, nice old man like that comes here to read, what else are you going to say.”

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me. We sat at a table by a west-facing wall of glass in a restaurant on Queen’s Quay. Evening sunlight suffused the room, which had a view (I am trying to remember—this was in May of 2000) of a pier, a swath of water, a very wide parking lot or series of lots and, across that expanse, the building where we would be reading.

At first the sound was like a raw stropping
of steel on steel although we had little
such heavy stuff along...

A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.