The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction

by P.K. Page

P.K. Page is best known as one of Canada's finest poets, but over the course of her career she has also written a number of essays – meditations – on her life and work, on the nature of art and the imagination, and on Canadian works of literature, painting, and film that have had special significance for her. As lovers of her poetry would hope and expect, these essays are beautiful, intelligent, moving, and delightfully quirky. The Filled Pen brings together the most important of these essays, including two previously A Writer's Life and Fairy Tales, Folk The Language of the Imagination. . Zailig Pollock, Page scholar and professor of English at Trent University, has edited and annotated this collection for admirers of Page's work, general readers, and academics alike. The essays, which cover a period of approximately forty years, reflect Page's enduring concerns as a verbal and visual artist with the power of art and the imagination to transcend the barriers that limit our perceptions of the world and our sympathies with our fellow human beings. Page is more interested in posing questions than imposing answers; and fascinated as she is by a wide range of ideas, from ancient mysticism to modern neurophysiology, it is images, endlessly evocative and suggestive, that matter to her most. Her comments on A.M. Klein from "A Sense of Angels", one of the most moving and perceptive tributes by one poet to another, apply very much to the P.K. Page we see in The Filled Pen : "For all his interest in the immediate world ... for all his acceptance of ideological and psychological theory, he seemed to reach beyond both to a larger reality."

Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Patricia Kathleen Page, CC, OBC, FRSC, commonly known as P. K. Page, was a Canadian poet. She was born in Swanage, Dorset, England and moved with her family to Canada in 1919. She spent the last years of her life in Victoria, British Columbia. P.K. Page was an author of many published books of poetry, fiction, travel diaries, essays and children's books. Her poems were translated into other languages. By special resolution of the United Nations, in 2001 her poem Planet Earth was read simultaneously in New York, the Antarctic and the South Pacific to celebrate the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

She was also known as a visual artist, having exhibited her work at a number of venues in and out of Canada. Her works are in permanent collections of National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For we can live now, love:
a million in us breathe,
moving as we would move
and qualifying death

in lands our own and theirs
with simple hands as these
a walk as like as hers
and words as like as his.

They, in us, free our love,
make archways of our mouths,
tear off the patent gloves
and atrophy our myths.

As ten, as twenty, now,
we break from single thought
and rid of being two,
receive them and walk out.
- Love Poem (pg. 10)

It is rare to encounter a poet who is so unassuming, and yet to profound; who is so devoid of pretension, and yet so talented. P. K. Page is all of this and more.

It must have been a revelation, in Canada of 1946, when Page's first collection, As Ten As Twenty, was published. This at a time when poets like Louis Dudek were still fighting for Modernism. What a breath of fresh air she must have been, what a godsend to the Canadian Modernists.

Of the poems in As Ten As Twenty, "Stories of Snow" is perhaps the best known, considered "her finest early poem" by poet Rosemary Sullivan...

Those in the vegetable rain retain
an area behind their sprouting eyes
held soft and rounded with the dream of snow
precious and reminiscent as those globes – souvenir of some never nether land –
which hold their snowstorms circular, complete,
high in a tall and teakwood cabinet.

In countries where the leaves are large as hands
where flowers protrude their fleshy chins
and call their colours
an imaginary snowstorm sometimes falls
among the lilies.
And in the early morning one will waken
to think the glowing linen of his pillow
a northern drift, will find himself mistaken
and lie back weeping.
And there the story shifts from head to head,
of how, in Holland, from their feather beds
hunters arise and part the flakes and go
forth to the frozen lakes in search of swans –
the snow light falling white along their guns,
their breath in plumes.
While tethered in the wind like sleeping gulls
ice boats await the raising of their wings
to skim the electric ice at such a speed
they leap jet strips of naked water,
and how these flying, sailing hunters feel
air in their mouths as terrible as ether.
And on the story runs that even drinks
in that white landscape dare to be no colour;
how, flasked and water clear, the liquor slips
silver against the hunters’ moving hips.
And of the swan in death these dreamers tell
of its last flight and hot it falls, a plummet,
pierced by the freezing bullet
and how three feathers, loosened by the shot,
descend like snow upon it.
While hunters plunge their fingers in its down
deep as a drift, and dive their hands
up to the neck of the wrist
in that warm metamorphosis of snow
as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know
who, lost in the white circle, fall at last
and dream their way to death.

And stories of this kind are often told
in countries where great flowers bar the roads
with reds and blues which seal the route of snow –
as if, in telling, raconteurs unlock
the colour with its complement and go
through to the area behind the eyes
where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies
- Stories of Snow (pg. 8-9)

Of the poems in As Ten As Twenty, my personal favourites are "Waking" and "Round Trip"...

I lie in the long parenthesis of arms
dreaming of love
and the crying cities of Europe

wake to the bird a whistler in my room
and sun a secret

Light on the bed of air
and buoyed by morning
the easy bugle of breath
projects an echo

while over the difficult room
the brimming window
opens the bandaged eyes
to the shape of Asia.

Invalid, I -
and crippled by sleep's illness,
drowned in the milk of sheets
and silk of dreams,
I rise and write the rising curve of day
with mercury of the smashed thermometer
and trouble the silent mirror, who have been
pale in suspension on the oval bed.
- Waking (pg. 20)

The passenger boards the waiting train -
he is white
and poised as the sculptured gull in flight;
his matching bags might be packed with air -
they are neat and late.
Now he removes his hat,
smooths his hair,
arranges his long pressed legs away from the aisle.
(The girl inside, meanwhile,
afraid of adventure
trembles against his wrought-iron ribs like paper.)
He waves through the window a last farewell
his pale
sigh of a hand caressing the delicate pane
blots out the faces one by one as though
he were snuffing candle flames.

All is prepared for the incredible journey:
in the baggage car his trunks contain a sword,
binoculars and compass, powdered food,
shorts and a solar topee for the south,
letters of introduction and a mask.
A lifetime lies behind him
he has left
the tightly frozen rivers of his blood
the plateaux of his boredom
and the bare
buttonholes his pallid eyes had cut.

 Ahead - perhaps the mountains and the hot
 colours of the tropics
 and the sun
 awaiting only his miraculous foot.

Settled, he sighs. The train devours its track,
(the girl cries for her mother),
he is hot,
adjusts the air conditioner,
dares not
shed his respectable beginner's coat
fearing the ill-drawn map it might uncover.
Suffers unspeaking,
neither nods nor smiles
to anyone near-by.
Decides the country he is passing through
may offer some escape,
straightens his tie
and contemplates the view.

Unveiling the sluggish eye that is drugged with future
he notes the place where the sienna soil
makes an incision in the field of mustard
clotted against the acid drops of the poplars;
dilated the pupil's I as he approaches
the perpetual great-god-green upending marshes
where grey and ageing barns with a family likeness
are scattered about like relatives in a village.
A bridge against the sky
with metal girders
which droop in long black leaves
forms a grove of palms -
a hot illusion set with circling birds.

But "like" or "as" is not what he is searching.
Something is hidden in the scenery still -
the hero hovers just behind the curtain
articulating the perfect unheard words
and the changing country is only a view that swings
the silent globes of the eyes but nothing more,
for his eyes, unlike a doll's, have no lead ball
attached behind the nose to rise and fall.

A white house, stark with the memory of home
jumps from the unseen field - an ace in his face
and slips back swiftly in the indolent pack.
(He feels the girl's long-fingered hands like tears,
feels the contortions of her weeping face.)
And his mind in a tantrum draws its filmy shutter
invisibly across the dot of sight
turning the country into the negative, no
country of faint or fit.
Trees pass and pass,
the quick rush of their noise
the Niagara of blood evacuating the head,
while passengers in a trance of boredom or bright
with the coloured excitement of a child in fever
move along the corridors of plush
as if they had no choice.
A surgeon's voice pierces his deafened ear:
"Trains don't take you anywhere, nor cars -
they're just another standstill thing on wheels
screaming at full-speed stop through the moving landscape
and returning you to yourself -
it's a boomerang business
with the pretty revolving set of the old time movies."

 The traveller sleeps,
 in dreams explores the place
 where everything is foreign;
 the orange groves and the quick
 walk of the women
 which fit together like glass arithmetic.
 The sheen that lies on gutters in gold leaf.
 (The dream of falling followed him, he fell
 sideways along sierras
 down through boughs
 where monkeys smiled at him with his own mouth.)
 But everyone recognized him for their own.
 In such sweet rain his ears and armpits grew
 flowers and humming birds were part of him -
 hanging jewels upon lapel and hat.
 At night the oranges and lemons cut
 small amber caves from darkness where he sat
 and the mercurial rivers found their seas
 at any spot he bathed.
 When storms came up, fish glanced the thickened air.
 Nothing was permanent and everywhere
 immediate as music, slick as silk.
 With daylight silver girls on silver stilts
 called in his turret window as he woke.
 (But still the dream of falling followed him:
 he fell through bubble faces, fell through trees,
 he fell through purple fulminating smoke,
 through hands that were only gloves and arms that were sleeves.)
 Then falling passed and everywhere he looked
 was bright for diamonds had replaced his eyes.

Awake he sees the baking soil, the cracked
packets of earth
where thin anaemic weeds are grass snakes.
Following that the desert:
sand seeps between the badly fitting windows,
clings to his teeth,
settles beneath his nails.
Later he feels it pumping through his heart -
a mechanical hour glass.
Invisible as lice it crawls and spreads
over the sheets, the pillow's stuffed with it
and all night long it roars in his ears,
sifts over him as if it is wanted and loved,
settles in crease and pore; is his.
To be caught in a glacier, he thinks, to be mint
in the heart of an icecube,
to be contained in anything smooth, to touch
a hardwood floor in Iceland.
(The girl inside, with a rosary of sand
repeats her Aves and the Paternoster.)
He dozes fitfully and dreams he wakes,
wakes, thinks he's dreaming, tries to break his dreams,
feels feverish, attempts to take his pulse.

Light settles on his face at last in mist,
raising the blind the world is mist forever
and focus has to shift and shift for far
and near are now identical -
colourless, shapeless - echoing ghosts of snow.
Oh where is what he dreamed, forever where
the landscape for his pattern? The desired
and legendary country he had planned?
In all this mist, he says, in all this mist,
a man might not exist.
a man might be 
an empty snakeskin.
And as he thinks, the train is losing speed,
behaves as if the mist had clogged its wheels,
becomes a caterpillar mired in glue
 and stops.
"Home Town," the porter calls. "End of the track."
And all the passengers, as if they knew, 
and undeceived by fantasy or folder,
descend the waiting steps
and vanish in the mist
which hides the station and obstructs the view.

The traveller is lost. (His crying girl
grown into empress
moans, "Betrayed! Betrayed!")
He blocks his ears to her,
smooths back his hair,
prepares for the adventure with a smile,
swings to the door with an explorer's stride
and steps upon the platform to be met
by everyone he left.
Their waving hands are little flags for him
fluttering and blowing. Coming near
he heard the words their moving mouths repeat:
that nothing's changed, that everything's the same.
And though he cannot see because of the mist
he knows it's true - that everything's the same.

Forever, everywhere, for him, the same.
 - Round Trip (pg. 2-7)

[JB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arguably the best Canadian poet-- even in the company of her peers AM Klein, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, etc. This short book is full of great reflections on reading and writing. Well worth checking out.