I’m impatient and funny about poetry. I like writing poems, sometimes, but reading poetry is an entirely different matter. For some reason, poetry has the ability to bug the fuck out of me like nothing else. I can’t explain it, but there you are. This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate poetry, because I really, really do, it just means that the number of poems I like can probably only be counted on two hands and the number of poems I love, just one. Which means every time I fall in love with a poem it surprises the hell out of me.

Which is a kind of enjoyable feeling. It will probably become less enjoyable as I grow older and my heart gets weaker and people have to whip out the paddles to revive me, but.

So what I’m getting at is that Al Purdy’s At the Quinte hotel surprised the hell out of me. We’re talkin’ immediate love. It’s so dry and thoughtful and funny and complex and melancholy and layered that just like that it’s definitely become one of my favourite poems of all time.

It was ALSO made into an incredibly awesome short film. So if you’ve got 5:18 of free time, this is probably what you need to spend it on.

Sigh.

And now I am going to use this paragraph to express the shame I feel at probably being the last Canadian on earth not to know this poem: [shame].