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| P.K. Page |
All across the country, poets are mourning the loss of the poet, novelist, artist and librettist P.K. (Patricia Kathleen) Page, who died on January 14, 2010 in her B.C. home at the age of 93.
During the course of her lifetime and career, Page received numerous honours including the Governor General's Award for Literature, the Order of Canada and the B.C. Lieutenant Governor's Award. Some of her works of art hang in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario. For a while, in the 1940s, she lived in Montreal and she, along with writers such as F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and Leonard Cohen, is credited with being a dominant force in efforts to move Canadian poetry once and for all into the modernist era.
When I first heard the news of her passing, I remembered how serendipity had brought us together once, back in April of 2000. I had received a phone call from my publisher, Karen Haughian, informing me that CBC-Radio was interested in having me to participate in a special on-air celebration of National Poetry Month. The hour-long interview with Michael Enright would also feature the then Ottawa-based poet, Stephanie Bolster, and the award-winning grand dame of letters, P.K. Page. I was flattered and overwhelmed at once. Having authored a mere two slim volumes, what could I possibly contribute to the poetic discussion? Would I bring anything new to the table? Karen convinced me that I could handle it.
From our respective studios – P.K. in Victoria, Michael in Toronto, Stephanie in Ottawa, and me, in Montreal— our cross-country panel meandered into poetic terrain for almost an entire hour! (How often does that happen on the CBC these days?) We shared thoughts on the poets who influenced us (P.K. mentioned ‘Kubla Khan’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and how we first fell in love with poetry. P.K. was eloquent, witty, generous, and insightful. But most of all, she was gracious. By the end of the interview, she left me with the feeling that as a friend in the art, we shared a bond.
A year or so later, I sent her an e-mail. As I recall, I wrote something moderately apologetic about the business of emailing her out of the blue and that I hoped she didn’t mind. Did she remember me? I wondered. I didn’t hear anything back for some time, and then one day, I got a postcard from her with some sage advice: Always be bold. So I took her advice. I got bold. I asked whether she might blurb a new manuscript I had completed called Snow Formations. And she agreed.
In the fall of 2005, I was in Victoria on a reading tour. I emailed her that I was in town and asked whether she had time for a telephone call. She went one better than that; she kindly invited me over for a chat and a glass of something stronger than tea. Unfortunately, our timing was off, and I never did make it to her place.
Some months later, she was invited to McGill University to do a solo reading. Glancing around the crowded room, I caught the eye of Stephanie Bolster and wondered whether she, too, was thinking about our radio panel.
Spry as ever, P.K. delivered a brilliant performance that night, and it made me happy to be a writer in the city that she once called home.
After Rain
by P.K. Page
The snails have made a garden of green lace:
broderie anglaise from the cabbages,
chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils—
I see already that I lift the blind
upon a woman's wardrobe of the mind.
Such female whimsy floats about me like
a kind of tulle, a flimsy mesh,
while feet in gum boots pace the rectangles—
garden abstracted, geometry awash—
an unknown theorem argued in green ink,
dropped in the bath.
Euclid in glorious chlorophyl, half drunk.
I none too sober slipping in the mud
where rigged with guys of rain
the clothes-reel gauche
as the rangey skeleton of some
gaunt delicate spidery mute
is pitched as if
listening;
while hung from one thin rib
a silver web—
its infant, skeletal, diminutive,
now sagged with sequins, pulled ellipsoid,
glistening.
I suffer shame in all these images.
The garden is primeval, Giovanni
in soggy denim squelches by my hub
over his ruin,
shakes a doleful head.
But he so beautiful and diademmed,
his long Italian hands so wrung with rain
I find his ache exists beyond my rim
and almost weep to see a broken man
made subject to my whim.
O choir him, birds, and lethim come to rest
Within this beauty as one rests in love,
till pears upon the bough
encrusted with
small snails as pale as pearls
hang golden in
a heart that knows tears are a part of love.
And choir me too to keep my heart a size
larger than seeing, unseduced by each
bright glimpse of beauty striking like a bell,
so that the whole may toll,
its meaning shine
clear of the myriad images that still—
do what I will—encumber its pure line.
[1956] 1967
