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An Appreciation of P.K. Page
By Rosemary Sullivan
On January 17th, P.K. Page died at her home in Victoria, B.C., at the age of 93. She had phoned me the day before, and among the many things we talked about, including the future, she remarked: "I have had my life."; She said it with satisfaction and a graceful resignation. It's hard to exaggerate the loss to Canadian poetry. Her calibre of poet comes along only rarely.
To write of P.K. Page is like trying to capture air with a net full of holes. She was a complete original. She was the last of that great generation of Canadian poets who laid the foundations for modern Canadian poetry, beginning with A.M. Kline and moving through to Al Purdy and P.K. Page.
P.K. published over 35 books. Her last two, Cullen and The Sky Tree, were released in November, on the eve of her 93rd birthday. She published the first part of Cullen 40 years ago, and continued to visit him over the years. The sequence ends with "Cullen in the Afterlife."; He is a kind of alter-ego, humorous, contrary, and profound. The poem is seamless, as if written in one go, though P.K. wrote the section "Cullen at Fifty"; only last September. It captures the astonishingly breathless pace of a single life as it speeds by.
P.K. was born in Swanage, England. When she was two years old, the family moved to Canada. Her father had joined the First Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I and was by then an officer. P.K. lived in multiple Canadian geographies. She spent her childhood in Calgary. In her autobiographical sequence Hand Luggage, she writes of the thrill of riding horseback over the prairies. As she approached her twenties, the family moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, where she attended business school and wrote the draft of her novel The Sun and the Moon. She moved alone to Montreal to turn herself into a writer, working as a file clerk, the tedium of which she caught in her famous poem "The Stenographers."; She was soon invited into the circle of Preview poets. In 1946, she moved to Ottawa to work as a scriptwriter for the NFB and there met and married her husband Arthur Irwin. They spent over a decade outside Canada before finally settling in Victoria, BC, where P.K. became a creative catalyst for those around her. I first met her there in 1974.
In those interim years P.K. had followed her husband in his diplomatic career, first as High Commissioner to Australia, Ambassador to Brazil and then to Mexico and Guatemala. But P.K. was no ordinary Ambassador's wife. In Brazil, not speaking Portuguese and suddenly without words, she turned to painting. She had studied art under Charles Selinger in New York. She painted everything: the embassy residence, the furniture, the stairwells, her pet marmoset, the flora and fauna; the paintings dance with Brazilian reds, greens and golden yellows. She followed Brazilian literary life, meeting Jorge Amado and reading the works of Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
"If Brazil was day,"; she wrote in retrospect, "then Mexico was night. All the images of darkness hovered for me in the Mexican sunlight. If Brazil was a change of place, Mexico was a change of time. One was very close to the old gods here.... The great temples rose all around me. Temples to the Sun. Temples to the Moon.";
In Mexico she turned the Ambassadorial residence on Montes Carpatos into a centre for artists. Rufino Tamayo and José Luis Cuevas visited, joining her lexicon of loved painters that included Paul Klee and David Milne. But the artist and writer Leonora Carrington had the deepest impact. One night Carrington showed up at the Embassy. "She was tall and lean and beautiful,"; P.K. told me, "I always used to say she could slip through a crack in the door, as if she had one finger and one toe less than the rest of us, her physical self was so narrow."; Sitting on a couch in the embassy living room, Carrington looked terminally bored.
In her anxiety to engage her, P.K. found herself recounting a strange experience from her childhood. She and her mother had been looking out the living room window of their home when they suddenly found themselves staring into the eyes of a creature who was watching them from the adjacent house. "It looked,"; she explained, "like current descriptions of aliens: round dark eyes like disks, pointed chin, narrow with languorous hair, soft like a baby's, as if it were under water almost."; The creature was not threatening, but it frightened her. Her mother, who had clearly also seen it, quietly closed the blinds.
Leonora Carrington approached and said: "It sounds totally true; it has verisimilitude."; She immediately invited P.K. to her studio. Carrington, Page, and Carrington's fellow exile, Remedios Varo, became friends and collaborators in art. P.K. recalled how she would drive them all around Mexico City, negotiating the gloriettas where the traffic merged from eight different directions, as they hunted for gold leaf and pigment. Carrington taught P.K. to make her own egg-tempera. They shared many things, but I like to think what bonded them most was their sense of humour and mischief. P.K. loved to kick up her heels with abandon.
I mention this childhood anecdote because it is vintage P.K.. Neither a cynic nor credulous, she believed, as one of her favourite poets D.H. Lawrence put it, that "we are a mystery to which the mind can gain little access."; This made her a searcher, open to hypotheses about being. She loved the antic profundity of what she called "informational dreams."; She often amused me by recounting her dreams. In one, she walked into a field at the centre of which was a gigantic egg. A voice said: "You can't be beaten unless you're broken. Unless you're broken you can't be whole."; She laughed: "It's the cosmic omelette."; The insight of the dream, she said, was that we have to be raw, open to suffering, if we are to learn anything.
P.K. read widely-you went to her for a bibliography, whether it was Robert Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness, or Rafi Zabor's I, Wabenzi. With Doris Lessing, who was a friend, she shared a deep interest in Sufism, and could quote the humorous tales of the 13th century Mulla Nasrudin. I remember visiting once, only to find myself led off to a downtown studio where a group of people were sitting on the floor practicing Edward de Bono's lateral thinking. When something new came along, she investigated.
She was a wonderful painter and was looking forward to a new project: an exhibition of her work at the McMichael Gallery planned for 2012. Zailig Pollock had already organized a P.K. Page evening at Trent University, where there is a room dedicated to P.K. and Arthur Irwin. After a performance of her poems set to music, the audience walked into a gallery full of her gold leaf suns and phantom moons.
But poetry was her passion. She touched something primordial when the poems found her. She had such astonishing verbal wit. "What is the difference,"; she once asked, "between 'there' and 'here' except for a wayward and wandering 't'? A poem was essentially a ceremony of language that required rhythm and restraint. She loved the old forms: sestinas, glossas, rhymed pentameter, and could write within their formal boundaries with a fluidity that is wonderful to hear. Two of her later books, Hologram and Coal and Roses are glossas, complex plays on four lines drawn from the poets with whom she had been engaging in mental conversations over the decades. By special resolution of the United Nations in 2001, her glossa, "Planet Earth,"; was read simultaneously in New York, the Antarctic, and Mount Everest to celebrate the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry.
Over the last little while, P.K. suffered several brief bouts of amnesia. On at least two occasions, after attending an event at which people noted that she was animated and engaged, when she got home she did not remember having gone out. "What are we,"; she remarked to me with her usual detached curiosity, "if the body can carry on when the being, the mind, is totally elsewhere?"; The publisher Louise Dennys was going to put her in touch with Oliver Sacks, who was working on a book about writers and cerebral events. But P.K. left early-privately and gracefully, on her own terms. A while ago, I wrote to her telling her that I and her long-time friend, Arlene Lampert, were worried and wanted to visit. She wrote me back: "Thank you for the dreams and for your willingness to come at the drop of a tear, if I start breaking up-which I am doing, of course, but undramatically and slowly. Quite weird, the end of life. Never knowing if you are going to waken up dead. Unknown territory.";
A "Celebration of P.K. Page"; is being planned by her family, to be held in March or early April at Hart House, The University of Toronto.
-- March 2010
On January 17th, P.K. Page died at her home in Victoria, B.C., at the age of 93. She had phoned me the day before, and among the many things we talked about, including the future, she remarked: "I have had my life."; She said it with satisfaction and a graceful resignation. It's hard to exaggerate the loss to Canadian poetry. Her calibre of poet comes along only rarely.
To write of P.K. Page is like trying to capture air with a net full of holes. She was a complete original. She was the last of that great generation of Canadian poets who laid the foundations for modern Canadian poetry, beginning with A.M. Kline and moving through to Al Purdy and P.K. Page.
P.K. published over 35 books. Her last two, Cullen and The Sky Tree, were released in November, on the eve of her 93rd birthday. She published the first part of Cullen 40 years ago, and continued to visit him over the years. The sequence ends with "Cullen in the Afterlife."; He is a kind of alter-ego, humorous, contrary, and profound. The poem is seamless, as if written in one go, though P.K. wrote the section "Cullen at Fifty"; only last September. It captures the astonishingly breathless pace of a single life as it speeds by.
P.K. was born in Swanage, England. When she was two years old, the family moved to Canada. Her father had joined the First Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I and was by then an officer. P.K. lived in multiple Canadian geographies. She spent her childhood in Calgary. In her autobiographical sequence Hand Luggage, she writes of the thrill of riding horseback over the prairies. As she approached her twenties, the family moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, where she attended business school and wrote the draft of her novel The Sun and the Moon. She moved alone to Montreal to turn herself into a writer, working as a file clerk, the tedium of which she caught in her famous poem "The Stenographers."; She was soon invited into the circle of Preview poets. In 1946, she moved to Ottawa to work as a scriptwriter for the NFB and there met and married her husband Arthur Irwin. They spent over a decade outside Canada before finally settling in Victoria, BC, where P.K. became a creative catalyst for those around her. I first met her there in 1974.
In those interim years P.K. had followed her husband in his diplomatic career, first as High Commissioner to Australia, Ambassador to Brazil and then to Mexico and Guatemala. But P.K. was no ordinary Ambassador's wife. In Brazil, not speaking Portuguese and suddenly without words, she turned to painting. She had studied art under Charles Selinger in New York. She painted everything: the embassy residence, the furniture, the stairwells, her pet marmoset, the flora and fauna; the paintings dance with Brazilian reds, greens and golden yellows. She followed Brazilian literary life, meeting Jorge Amado and reading the works of Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
"If Brazil was day,"; she wrote in retrospect, "then Mexico was night. All the images of darkness hovered for me in the Mexican sunlight. If Brazil was a change of place, Mexico was a change of time. One was very close to the old gods here.... The great temples rose all around me. Temples to the Sun. Temples to the Moon.";
In Mexico she turned the Ambassadorial residence on Montes Carpatos into a centre for artists. Rufino Tamayo and José Luis Cuevas visited, joining her lexicon of loved painters that included Paul Klee and David Milne. But the artist and writer Leonora Carrington had the deepest impact. One night Carrington showed up at the Embassy. "She was tall and lean and beautiful,"; P.K. told me, "I always used to say she could slip through a crack in the door, as if she had one finger and one toe less than the rest of us, her physical self was so narrow."; Sitting on a couch in the embassy living room, Carrington looked terminally bored.
In her anxiety to engage her, P.K. found herself recounting a strange experience from her childhood. She and her mother had been looking out the living room window of their home when they suddenly found themselves staring into the eyes of a creature who was watching them from the adjacent house. "It looked,"; she explained, "like current descriptions of aliens: round dark eyes like disks, pointed chin, narrow with languorous hair, soft like a baby's, as if it were under water almost."; The creature was not threatening, but it frightened her. Her mother, who had clearly also seen it, quietly closed the blinds.
Leonora Carrington approached and said: "It sounds totally true; it has verisimilitude."; She immediately invited P.K. to her studio. Carrington, Page, and Carrington's fellow exile, Remedios Varo, became friends and collaborators in art. P.K. recalled how she would drive them all around Mexico City, negotiating the gloriettas where the traffic merged from eight different directions, as they hunted for gold leaf and pigment. Carrington taught P.K. to make her own egg-tempera. They shared many things, but I like to think what bonded them most was their sense of humour and mischief. P.K. loved to kick up her heels with abandon.
I mention this childhood anecdote because it is vintage P.K.. Neither a cynic nor credulous, she believed, as one of her favourite poets D.H. Lawrence put it, that "we are a mystery to which the mind can gain little access."; This made her a searcher, open to hypotheses about being. She loved the antic profundity of what she called "informational dreams."; She often amused me by recounting her dreams. In one, she walked into a field at the centre of which was a gigantic egg. A voice said: "You can't be beaten unless you're broken. Unless you're broken you can't be whole."; She laughed: "It's the cosmic omelette."; The insight of the dream, she said, was that we have to be raw, open to suffering, if we are to learn anything.
P.K. read widely-you went to her for a bibliography, whether it was Robert Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness, or Rafi Zabor's I, Wabenzi. With Doris Lessing, who was a friend, she shared a deep interest in Sufism, and could quote the humorous tales of the 13th century Mulla Nasrudin. I remember visiting once, only to find myself led off to a downtown studio where a group of people were sitting on the floor practicing Edward de Bono's lateral thinking. When something new came along, she investigated.
She was a wonderful painter and was looking forward to a new project: an exhibition of her work at the McMichael Gallery planned for 2012. Zailig Pollock had already organized a P.K. Page evening at Trent University, where there is a room dedicated to P.K. and Arthur Irwin. After a performance of her poems set to music, the audience walked into a gallery full of her gold leaf suns and phantom moons.
But poetry was her passion. She touched something primordial when the poems found her. She had such astonishing verbal wit. "What is the difference,"; she once asked, "between 'there' and 'here' except for a wayward and wandering 't'? A poem was essentially a ceremony of language that required rhythm and restraint. She loved the old forms: sestinas, glossas, rhymed pentameter, and could write within their formal boundaries with a fluidity that is wonderful to hear. Two of her later books, Hologram and Coal and Roses are glossas, complex plays on four lines drawn from the poets with whom she had been engaging in mental conversations over the decades. By special resolution of the United Nations in 2001, her glossa, "Planet Earth,"; was read simultaneously in New York, the Antarctic, and Mount Everest to celebrate the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry.
Over the last little while, P.K. suffered several brief bouts of amnesia. On at least two occasions, after attending an event at which people noted that she was animated and engaged, when she got home she did not remember having gone out. "What are we,"; she remarked to me with her usual detached curiosity, "if the body can carry on when the being, the mind, is totally elsewhere?"; The publisher Louise Dennys was going to put her in touch with Oliver Sacks, who was working on a book about writers and cerebral events. But P.K. left early-privately and gracefully, on her own terms. A while ago, I wrote to her telling her that I and her long-time friend, Arlene Lampert, were worried and wanted to visit. She wrote me back: "Thank you for the dreams and for your willingness to come at the drop of a tear, if I start breaking up-which I am doing, of course, but undramatically and slowly. Quite weird, the end of life. Never knowing if you are going to waken up dead. Unknown territory.";
A "Celebration of P.K. Page"; is being planned by her family, to be held in March or early April at Hart House, The University of Toronto.
-- March 2010
Submitted on March 17, 2010 in By David.
