Atwood, pictured above with Al Purdy, around the time of their meeting. Poetry in this country, or any other, is notoriously non-profit. After the war and marrying Urith, his lifetime companion, Purdy took a variety of jobs to support his poetry habit, including a five-year stint in Vancouver in the early '50s at a mattress factory. I can't quite imagine if he had announced to his buddies at the mattress factory that he was a poet, I'm not sure what they would have thought. That was really the nerve centre of English language poetry in Canada, at that point.
Poetry chooses people, as much people choose to be poets.
That's Purdy's take. He never consciously decided to be a poet. He describes himself, in one of the footnotes to one of his publications, as an eternal amateur. Purdy and his wife, Urith, during the Second World War. Poetry chooses people, as much people choose to be poets.