Life & Wisdom Quote by Al Purdy

There is a kind of sly humility baked into Purdy’s offhand timeline: thirteen. Not five, not “as long as I can remember,” not the mythic child-prodigy origin story poets sometimes slip into to certify their calling. Thirteen is awkward, ordinary, a hinge age when the self feels both newly invented and painfully exposed. By choosing it, Purdy signals that writing wasn’t a halo that descended; it was a practice he picked up in adolescence, like a habit that stuck because it answered a pressure he couldn’t yet name.

The line also works as a quiet demystification of Canadian literary identity, which Purdy helped roughen and localize. It rejects the idea of poetry as rarefied inheritance and replaces it with something closer to workmanlike persistence. Purdy’s persona often leaned plainspoken, even gravelly; this sentence is a tiny manifesto for that stance. The poetry comes from starting early, yes, but also from starting unglamorously - from a teenager’s need to test language against experience.

Context matters: Purdy’s career unfolded in a mid-century Canada still anxious about cultural legitimacy, still measuring itself against British and American canons. “I started writing” at thirteen reads like a pre-credential, but it’s also an anti-credential - a way of saying: I got here the long way, through time, through drafts, through living. The subtext is endurance. The intent is to make artistry feel earned rather than ordained.