Yvonne Blomer and Barbara Colebrook Peace : Imagined and Real Conversations with P.K. Page

 

 

“…..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. 

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“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.

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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.

 

 

Kim Fahner : The Last Show on Earth, by Yvonne Blomer

The Last Show on Earth, Yvonne Blomer
Caitlin Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

Yvonne Blomer’s most recent book of poems, The Last Show on Earth, is a love letter to the world in a time of climate crisis. It’s also a love letter to her husband and son, and to her mother and father. So many of the poems in this collection are rooted in the particularity of a person’s life, but then the always present climate crisis hovers as the poet draws a clear parallel between what is cherished, and what is so often lost. Will we, Blomer asks the reader, recognize what something is worth before we risk losing it, or are we just too selfish and ignorant to see its true value before it disappears, before we ruin it?   

In “Water and weeds,” Blomer writes: “If we are happy, let it bowl us over./If we are lost, let’s find the shore.” Even when things fall apart, she seems to suggest, we can be hopeful enough to look for the shore. So, this is not a depressing book of climate crisis eco poetry. Instead, it’s a call to wake up and take notice of the awful state of things, but to also choose to make a conscious difference in one’s own life, to begin to change the world from the most immediate place—the place where you can make a difference by choosing to control your own actions. This could perhaps be overwhelming, as a notion, but Blomer balances the warnings with the love that ribbons itself so tangibly and beautifully through her poems.

C.S. Lewis said, in A Grief Observed, that the pain of grief is equal to the pain of the love you have for a person who’s gone from your life. That pain is the same if it’s a person, a species of bird, or a planet, in so many ways. In the poems honouring her mother, Blomer captures the time spent together before her mother died. Anyone who has lost their mother will relate to these poems, ones of gratitude and heartbreak. In the poignant poem, “Now my mom is in a home,” Blomer writes about anticipatory grief—after calling her father at home—“I don’t want to wait for the answer machine,//which is my mother’s voice from years ago,/her fluid liquid voice.” She writes about how voice reveals a person’s spirit: “What is voice but your mother’s song?” By the end of the poem, her mother being bathed by a nurse, the poet writes of her mother’s “soft laugh, my mother-tongue song.” How much is said in this poem, of how we love our mothers, and how we feel the pain of their fading, and then their departure.

“This ocean is a room for the dying, Tahlequah” is an ekphrastic poem inspired by a Robert Bateman painting, as well as by J35, the orca that was named Tahlequah. The orca mother carried her stillborn calf for seventeen days in the waters of the Pacific, off the coast of British Columbia. In writing this poem, Blomer draws parallels between the cycles of life and death, between her own son and mother. As the poet’s mother is dying, her son “breaches and surfs/on the grass outside my mother’s window./Inside we bend over her.” Here is the generational passage of time, when an elderly mother departs while a son is still young and growing.

The poet’s honouring of the orca mother—and her own mother—is about learning to surrender, to trust the process of letting go of someone you love. The hardest lesson is clearly conveyed in Blomer’s poem as she writes: “Tell me about your song. Tell me how long you will hold on.” This is also the place of wanting someone not to suffer, of knowing you must surrender them to what is about to happen, but of also wanting to keep them close. It is a poem about death and how we, as humans, can learn from other creatures, how to love and then let go.

In opposition to death is love, is the potently lively nature of physical desire and sex. In “Petit Chapeau, Cabernet Sauvignon,” the poet reflects on the desire to escape the demands of everyday life. “I’m so fed up. Let’s run away together like we once did/though we didn’t know it at the time.” She writes: “Drink me. Put on that dark grey fedora, I’ll pull my hair long./Let’s finish the bottle and eat the glasses.” Everything here is spontaneous and filled with longing. “Where are you?” the voice of the speaker asks, searching, and then answering: “Setting up the chess board again, while I redden/my queen, ready her.” Then, in “How to stay married,” Blomer considers what keeps a married couple together, how love can shift over time, but can also gather one to the other in a strong way. Three lovely echoing lines ripple through the poem: “Still, he leans into you when he passes,” “Still, you wait for him to join you on the deck,” and “Still, sun-blinded,/you find each other’s eyes.” Love is something that is often reflected in simple happenings, things that are not bright and showy, but are instead deeply rooted and steady.

The constant bell tolling in The Last Show on Earth, though, is rung by the poet’s concern for the natural world, for the damage that’s been done and that continues to be done by humankind. Blomer gives all living things importance by naming them specifically. There are references to dogs, watersheds, snakes, trees, quail, bears, moose, ptarmigan, whales (humpbacks and orcas), elephants, monkeys, lemurs, sea lions, rufous hummingbirds, frogs, pelicans, ravens, ducks, damselflies, bats, caribou, butterflies, tomatoes, rain-soaked children, first loves, crows, and wolves. The various inanimate objects in the book—like wet socks, river rocks, Victoria’s city streets and harbour, plastic, and even hammocks—are also important because they serve as a juxtaposition or contrast to the natural world.  

In “Simultaneity,” the two sorts of objects collide as the poet writes: “Plastic has entered the salmon,/the stream/and the sea, the grizzly bear too and the gulls.” In the second last poem in the book, “Our one blue bowl,” Blomer praises “this broken world, the blue within it.” All of it, including “The water, orca, salmon, seaweed, and wrack,/the crow and gull, the chip bag and butt,/the boat debris,” is part of a whole, whether we like it or not. We cannot excise the awful parts but instead need to be more mindful of what damage they do the natural world, and how we can make a difference by changing the ways in which we live our small, temporal lives.

In the final poem, a bittersweet love poem to her son titled “Reading Rilke on my son’s fifteenth birthday,” the poet writes of hope, of love, against the crush of human selfishness that is prominent in the world today. She goes from the larger despair that the world offer us, praising the beauty of her son: “the blue eyes, the dimpled smile, the crooked spine,/the swayed back,/the loud laugh, the voice finding itself” and “the resilience of the boy, the boy, the boy,/and his father, and his mother, all all—” The Last Show on Earth teaches us, clearly and emphatically, to look for the beauty of the natural world, to recognize that it should be fiercely protected for future generations. Too, the poems teach us that the connections we make to one another are also to be valued. If we value each other, we should also value the environment and natural world just as deeply.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent book is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019) and her new book, Emptying the Ocean, will be published by Frontenac House in Fall 2022. She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com