Parenting & Family Quote by Al Purdy

There is a whole autobiography tucked into the shrug of "sort of". Al Purdy could have written "I was a desperate kid" and let the drama stand; instead he installs a softener that makes the desperation feel more credible, more Canadian, and more psychologically exact. "In my own mind" signals the real subject: not childhood as it looked from the outside, but childhood as an interior weather system. Purdy is flagging that the desperation might not have been visible, or even legible, to anyone else. It was private, self-authored, maybe even self-amplified.

The line also carries Purdy's signature anti-heroic posture. He was a poet who made a career out of not sounding like a "Poet" - working-class textures, blunt humor, emotional candor that refuses sentimentality. Calling himself a "kid" keeps the scene small and unglamorous; it resists the myth of the tormented genius and replaces it with something more human: a young person improvising an identity under pressure.

Context matters here. Purdy came up in a Canada that didn't always know what to do with ambition, especially literary ambition, outside major cities and institutions. The subtext is hunger - for language, for legitimacy, for escape - and the uneasy awareness that such hunger can look like misbehavior or failure. That quiet qualifier, "sort of", is doing double duty: it protects him from self-pity while admitting the ache that powered the work. The desperation isn't a pose; it's the engine he learned to write from.