“…..How to capture self here,
to spin and weave each new story
on the ancient fabric of soil and
sun.”
Yvonne
Blomer, What Tapestry, Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page
I confess, I never had a close relationship with P.K. Page, but I danced, like one of the dancers in her own sketches, in her periphery. When she was alive and living in Sidney, B.C., I was too young and shy to approach, too foolish feeling to ask a question or send a poem. This is just the way things go sometimes, there’s no point in beating myself up about it now, but I would have loved to have sat with her and talked poetry, or to have sent her a handful of poems. She perhaps would have seen in those early poems the influence of her own work and that of Patrick Lane’s.
Before diving even deeper into P.K. I want to, for a moment, speak to the legacy of poetry and the written word. This rises out of a class I’m currently teaching on Japanese form and aesthetic. In the class, I aim to stay close to the original Japanese writers of haibun and haiku and with my students we are diving into history, culture, women’s lives through Sei Shonagon and wandering poet’s lives through Matsuo Basho. It is a wonderous form of travel to delve into the poetry of another place and time. I believe this is also part of the invitation of the anthology Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page. I don’t want to be a walking advertisement, but I do want us to remember that Canada too has a long oral and written tradition from Indigenous story tellers to the writers of today and P.K. is one of those key writers. In fact her book And Once More Saw the Stars is a woven conversation with Philip Stratford using the Japanese form of renga. Here, Barbara Colebrook Peace and I are intertwining our voices to connect them to P.K.’s and the many voices in Hologram.
If you are younger than me, and not from the west coast of Canada, you might not even know who P.K. Page is. I understand that poetry does not have a shelf life, like a bunch of bananas do (Basho is Japanese for Banana tree, funnily enough), but I also understand that we live in the “now” and that young poets are looking to what is new, edgy, perhaps political, identity-focused, important as in American or world poetry for their inspiration. They aren’t necessarily looking in their own garden, city or coastal community. But I’d like to invite all us readers of poetry to find P.K. Page again or for the first time, to allow her to be one of the poets we might turn to, like W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson or Ondaatje and Atwood. She was a great writer and mentor; she was an enthusiast when it came to life and poetry, and she was a master of form.
With my own recent dive back into P.K.’s work through my work as editor for Hologram I have reread her poems, read the poems that have been written because of her and the attachments and memories that so many writers in Canada have to her. Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page offers a slice of Canadian poetry history through P.K. and the poets who write from her poems. It shows how, like mycelium, poets are deeply rooted and connected to each other, to the poets of the past and to the younger poets of the future.
Contributor, Barbara Colebrook Peace and I had a brief conversation when she came to my house to pick up her copies of Hologram. During that conversation she shared other memories of her connections to P.K.
*
“Our feet barely
touched the earth, and memory
Earased at birth,
but gradually reassembling
Coalesced and
formed a whole, as single birds
Gathering for
migration form a flock.”
--P.K. Page, “Presences”
Barbara writes:
Reading this anthology, I find myself remembering times with P.K. Page— like the time before I had met her in person, and before I took up writing poetry. I was in my mid- thirties, a volunteer with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s “Gallery in Schools” programme. Among the works of art we took into the schools, was a beautiful etching by P.K. Irwin called “Ship—Nocturnal.” Though I didn’t know her, I knew she lived in Victoria, and I phoned her to ask about it.
“Oh Yes, I remember that piece very well. It started from a mistake!” she said. She went on to tell me the story of how she set out to make an etching, with no particular idea of what the subject might be. At the beginning, she accidentally made an ink blot. That ink blot — by the reverse process of etching — became a silvery star. Over what? Over an otherworldly, dreamlike, ghostly ship, with the night sky appearing through the ship’s outline.
When I visited the schools, I told this story to the children: a work of art can begin from a mistake! They loved it and were inspired. This story has given me some confidence in my own mistakes. Later, for instance, when I was working on a poem called “Jesus in the Nursing Home,” our cat jumped up on my computer keyboard and strode across it. The accidental result became Jesus stammering: “PpppPaa, / he says, Ppppp Aaaa…” I treasure this memory of PK before I knew her. Like the silver ship of her etching, it has an otherworldly quality which speaks to me this morning of her presence in one of the infinite, cosmic dimensions she wrote about.
Another memory dates to a time when Linda Rogers invited me to co-edit a book of essays about PK’s work. A group of poets was sitting round the table at lunch and PK asked simply, “Describe your ideal house.” It was fascinating to hear the variety of answers. When it came to my turn, I described a house with big windows, high on a hill where the light and dark came and went continually, where there were shadows, and where there was only a little furniture but an abundance of space. PK was the last to speak, and as I recall, her “ideal house” was similar to mine, which gave me a lovely sense of a bond with her.
I feel that I will never come to the end of my discoveries of PK. I am personally very grateful for the way the anthology’s offerings connect with my own memories and bring PK’s living presence before me in new ways.
*
I find such delight as I read Barbara’s memories here in the link between her visual art and her poetry, in the lesson of the mistake become a silver bursting star and in how that inspired students and Barbara herself. I probably overstate how much poetry to me is a conversation with the self that then becomes public and want to add to that idea that the poem becomes public, but so does the conversation, and it becomes collective too. So, as an editor of this new anthology, my wish is for the conversations of these poems and memories, as well as P.K.’s poems and art to ignite more conversations, art and poetry.
Barbara and my conversation continues as we dip back into the book, or our books by P.K. and then pick up pen and dip into our own new poems. As Barbara recently wrote to me, “I too am very fond of And Once More Saw the Stars and I like the correspondence between the two poets just as much as I like the poems. I remember Philip says, somewhere in there, how much he’s enjoying working with P.K. and ‘it’s just like dancing with you,’ which fits with what you say at the beginning of this article!”
Thank you P.K. Page, Barbara Colebrook Peace, DC Reid (co-editor and creator of this project) and all the academics and poets in Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page!
Yvonne Blomer and Barbara Colebrook Peace
Yvonne Blomer’s The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) explores grief, love and climate change. She has edited five anthologies, most recently: Hologram: Homage to PK Page. She is the past poet laureate of Victoria, BC, and was 2022-23 Arc Poetry Magazine poet-in-residence. Yvonne teaches on Zoom and lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. Forthcoming this fall is Death of Persephone: A Murder with Caitlin Press. Yvonne also has a call out for poems on ice https://caitlinpress.com/Blog/Call-for-Submissions-ICE.
Barbara Colebrook Peace is the author of two poetry books, Kyrie and Duet for Wings and Earth, both published by Sono Nis Press, and the co-editor of P.K. Page: Essays on Her Works published by Guernica. She has read her poetry on CBC, and taken part in various literary festivals and concerts. She was delighted to learn recently that one of her poems was translated into Chinese! She lives in Victoria B.C.
