EXILE AND INHABITANT": P.K. PAGE'S BRAZIL
A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts
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© Copyright by Emily Bryna Elizabeth Ballantyne 2010
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•+• Canada ABSTRACT
"Exile and Inhabitant": P.K. Page's Brazil
Emily Bryna Elizabeth Ballantyne
This thesis interrogates the "middle silence" of P.K. Page that began during her deployment to Brazil as wife of Arthur Irwin, the Canadian ambassador to Brazil (1957-
1959). Using unpublished poetry from the Page fonds at Library and Archives Canada, I construct a counter narrative to the narrative of silence propagated retrospectively after her return to poetry in non-fiction writing, interviews and the widely acclaimed Brazilian
Journal. In the first chapter, I begin by building a theoretical framework that is situated both eco-critically and biographically, and that makes connections and suggests continuities between Page's early works and the unpublished poetry. In the second chapter I provide a close reading of the Brazilian poetry, engaging with its tropes and themes, as well as its theoretical and biographical implications as poems written during a time of poetic "silence". The counter narrative of Page's years in Brazil is further explored in the third chapter, which deconstructs stylistic and thematic elements of her visual art of this period. Finally, this thesis ends with my genetic parallel text edition of the poetry, complete with an introduction to the file of poetry and textual notes.
Keywords: P.K. Page; Canadian poetry; silence; unpublished poetry; visual art; P.K.
Irwin; biographical narratives; Brazil ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to my thesis supervisor Zailig Pollock. Zailig: thank you for introducing me to P.K. Page and her works. Thank you for your ceaseless support and devotion throughout this project. Thank you for the countless hours you have spent reading, commenting, and helping me to improve these pages and clarify my thoughts. I don't have the words (or the thank yous!) to express how meaningful your guidance and knowledge have been to me at every step of the way. I look forward to studying Page together for the rest of our lives. I would like to thank my parents, Sharon and Cliff, my sister Sarah, and my partner Trevor for the emotional strength, love and encouragement I needed to complete this thesis. Thank you for understanding (or attempting to understand) how I have spent these last two years. Without you, I couldn't have made the pieces fit, and would probably still be staring at that dreaded flashing cursor. I am very grateful for the support of my committee members, Suzanne Bailey and Margaret Steffler. Thank you for your ceaseless enthusiasm, the time, and the energy you have devoted to my research. A big thank-you to Dean Irvine for introducing me to the EMiC Project, and for teaching the course that produced the first draft of my poetry edition. Thank you to Charlotte Smith for the lively discussion and verbal tour of the Trent University collection of P.K. Irwin artwork that sparked the third chapter. Many thanks are due to Christopher Doody for his careful proofreading and copyediting at the final stages. I would also like to thank staff at the Library and Archives Canada for their assistance during the multiple research trips I took to work with the Page fonds while completing the poetry section and the final edition. Finally, I would like to recognize the contributions of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, the Editing Modernism in Canada project, Trent University and the Public Texts program for the financial assistance that made this research possible.
in TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv List of Illustrations v
Preface 1
Chapter One 6 "Personal Landscape": Tracing the Development of P.K. Page's Eco-Poetics
Chapter Two 29 "Green Crowding Green & Being More Than Green": The Brazilian Poetry of P.K. Page
Chapter Three 65 "They are the same pen": Tracing the Movement from P.K. Page's Poetry to P.K. Irwin's Visual Art
Chapter Four 108 Brazilian Poems: A Genetic Parallel-Text Edition of Container 27, File 5 of the P.K. Page Fonds
Bibliography 177
iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"I saw a baleen in his bones." Orij?ina l manuscript page. 46 "Passaro Gigante & Teia de ouro. "Ori ginal manuscript page. 62 Private Chapel 74 Embassy Garden 75 View of Two Brothers 76 Cesta [02] 79 Cesta [04] 80 Leaves as Large as Hands 83 Arthur Reading on Sofa 88 Experiment [01] 90 Typewriter 91 Black Telephone and Flowers 92 Flowers and Phone 93 Mato Fino 98 Labyrinth 100 Stone Fruit 101 Insects 106
V PREFACE
This thesis project began by accident. In the summer of 2009 I took a summer reading course in Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada while beginning research on a thesis topic in an entirely separate area. At the same time, I also held a research assistant position under Zailig Pollock doing genetic transcriptions of poems from the
P.K. Page fonds. Though I had no previous background in editing, or specific literary knowledge of P.K. Page's career, I quickly became both fascinated by and immersed in the various poems I had encountered through this position. I developed the editing tools I needed to participate in the digital Collected Works of P.K. Page project, while simultaneously gaining an extensive knowledge of editorial theory and practice in
Canada. Slowly but surely, I began to devote more and more time to my study of Page, inevitably choosing to edit some of her poems and conduct some archival research as part of the course.
Deep in Page's archival fonds was a small body of poems that created a counter narrative to the "silence" so heavily emphasized in Brazilian Journal and in Page's other non-fiction writing. The poems, while only half finished and unpublished, begin to fill in gaps and describe transition and writer's block in ways a retrospective work could not.
The raw pain and the trailing lines, as well as the repeated images that Page worked over and over again could only really be described genetically, emphasizing the writing process as it waxed and waned. What started out as a final project for the summer course grew into the edition I present here in the final chapter of this thesis.
As I began to interrogate the issues of editing a body of poetry for which no "best text" exists, I started to explore social text editing, thinking about how best to socialize
1 my edition with the rest of Page's oeuvre, as well as the large body of critical work discussing it. By examining Brazilian Journal, the Brazilian materials housed at the
Library and Archives Canada (LAC), as well as a selection of her paintings, it became clear that the "definitive" biographical narrative that Page shaped around Brazil was far more nuanced and complex than any of the biographical material in her non-fiction writing and interviews. This "social text" grew into an interrogation of Page's overall genesis as an artist during her sojourn in Brazil from 1957 to 1959. At this time she both lost one type of voice, and gained a new one. Her writing pen became her drawing pen.
In part, the misrepresentation of Brazil was caused by Page herself, who used retrospective interviews and the popular Brazilian Journal to construct a narrative of her time away that was based largely on the visual splendor and overwhelming experience of moving to a tropical country and living in a foreign language. In this work, as in her long autobiographical poem Hand Luggage, Brazil becomes a place of creative renewal that is highly celebratory, in which
My vision was right for this rush of design correct for this colour—visual thirst quenched now by that column, this tree, a mosaic of black and white sidewalks, a delicate spire. Some deep correlation, unknown until then, responded with yes and with yes once again— a consummate bliss wheresoever my eye chanced to fall {Hand Luggage 54)
This carefully wrought verse is retrospectively retooled. Page seems to be included in the scene, finally finding a place to which her creative self could respond positively. It ignores any trace of alienation and seclusion, and does not represent the hardship of Brazil. This is nothing like Page's description in her lines,
2 There should be more to say but I become when confronted—dumb— like a bird in a cage, can't sing on request1
In her poetry written in 1957, there is much more discomfort and wariness toward Brazil.
Page feels like a domesticated bird asked to perform on demand, unable to perform basic communication with ease.
By the time Page publishes Brazilian Journal in 1987, she has been writing poetry again for two decades. She makes her fascination with visual art the primary narrative of her text, noting mostly amusing run-ins with a cast of Portuguese characters in order to cite her progress in learning the language and customs of Brazil. The deep psychological turmoil, as well as the illness she suffers that results in infertility after surgery, plays only a peripheral, hinted at role in the text. Instead, occasional references such as, "what to do about writing?" intermittently remind the reader that something is going on behind the text.
Page's "middle silence" has been accepted by critics not as an event specific to
Brazil, but as the result of a developing crisis in her writing career as a whole. For modernist scholars, Page's silence is an aesthetic crisis that has built up over a decade as an active, award-winning poet. Brian Trehearne describes the movement away from modernist impersonality and toward creative sympathy that "was to be so challenging that a prolonged period of personal silence was necessary to its undertaking" (Montreal
Forties 100). It was a shift in aesthetic, much more linked to the motifs and style of
1 Any poem that does not include a citation in parentheses within the thesis is included in its entirety in chapter four in the poetry edition. At the beginning of the edition is a table of contents for each poem, as well as a title/first line index at the end. The originals are all located in the P.K. Page fonds at Library and Archives Canada, box 27, file 5.
3 Page's writing, than to any particular over stimulation caused by the move to a foreign environment. Dean Irvine also attempts to explain this silence. Instead of suggesting a major shift in aesthetic, Irvine suggests that Page is constantly having to oscillate between extremes: subjectivity and objectivity, interiority and exteriority, self-reflexivity and self- effacement. These "unsynthesized dialectical pairs" (132) also contain an important gender dynamic, pointing to issues of gender consciousness that cannot be resolved while
Page remains in Montreal in a male-dominated literary circle.
These accounts, however helpful they are in reflecting on the changes Page makes upon her return to poetry with the publication of Cry Ararat!, also do not tell the whole story. It is only through a palimpsestic, socialized reading of Page's time in Brazil that multiple, shifting narratives emerge. As a result, the thesis I present here is unusual: it contains theory, close reading, editorial work and visual art interpretations. By looking at these layered narratives, this work seeks to move away from attempting to find a
"definitive" reading of Page's Brazil, and instead suggest that Page actively plays and engages with Brazil in different ways at different times.
This thesis project took shape as a result of this research approach, building on itself as I gained new critical perspectives on this period in Page's literary career. I begin by building a theoretical framework that is situated both eco-critically and biographically, and that makes connections and suggests continuities between Page's early works and the unpublished poetry. I then provide a close reading of the Brazilian poetry, engaging with its tropes and themes, as well as its theoretical and biographical implications as poems written during a time of poetic "silence". Then, I engage with the alternate narrative to the poetry, and deconstruct stylistic and thematic elements of Page's visual art. Finally,
4 this thesis ends with my genetic parallel text edition of the poetry. Since this poetry is central to my thesis, it was essential that it was included as a testament to the type of narratives that emerge when the writing process is the focus rather than retroactively worked up published poetry.
5 CHAPTER ONE
Personal Landscape: Tracing the Development of P.K. Page's Eco-Poetics
/ am both exile and inhabitant and though I would escape this is my chosen landscape.
In her 2007 glosa, "My Chosen Landscape," P.K. Page articulates her status in the environment as "both exile and inhabitant" (Coal and Roses 64). The land is not an extension of the poet, but exists as a separate entity. Page is an inhabitant of the world, and yet her mere presence in a familiar location does not provide her with a sense of belonging. Fundamental to her self-conception is the concept of alienation, of the inability of the physical environment to fully embrace and assimilate her. Page is both in-and-out of the space she occupies, recognizing the role she plays in constructing the world she inhabits.
Place had never been a source of stability for Page. From just a brief biography, it becomes clear that Page was a traveler even as a young child. She immigrated to Canada from England as a toddler, and was raised across the Canadian Prairies. As the child of a major in the First Canadian Expeditionary Force, Page became accustomed to moving from station to station based on the army's needs. After high school, she moved to
England for a year in 1934, and returned to Rothesay, New Brunswick (Orange "P.K.
Page and her Works" 222). To gain some independence, she left her family and moved to
Montreal to pursue writing on her own in 1941. In the summer of 1944, she moved to
Halifax to be near her dying father, and then moved to Victoria, B.C. with her mother.
She moved to Ottawa in 1946, where she met her husband Arthur Irwin, and was married
6 in 1950 (Orange 224). In 1953, Irwin began a diplomatic career that broadened Page's horizons further, encouraging her status as an "exile and inhabitant."
Page's experiences abroad were fundamental in establishing her status as a stranger and outsider. Her first deployment was to Australia for three years, from 1953 to
1956. Still working within an English context in an Anglo tradition, her experience of culture shock was relatively nuanced, involving accommodating herself to the differences between Australian and Canadian traditions, as well as becoming adjusted to diplomatic life. From 1957 to 1959, Page lived in Brazil. It was in this period that Page became the ultimate outsider, bereft of a cultural framework, and a basic language for communication. It is in Brazil that Page is first exposed to silence, and encounters a world that resists the language she has to describe it. Page followed this experience with four years in Mexico (1960-1964), during which time she also lived part-time in New York in
1959 and 1960. It is not until 1964, two years before her fiftieth birthday, that Page settled in Victoria, BC. Page was not the product of one particular environment, but instead acted as an outsider to many environments, constantly encountering new places without putting down permanent roots.
In her autobiographical narrative poem Hand Luggage, a similar sentiment is echoed. She describes herself as living "a life of paradox—/ a borderland being, barely belonging,/ one on the outskirts, over the perimeter" (9). It is Page's lack of belonging, a distancing from a particular place or people, which acts to clarify her sense of being and allow for self-definition. She appeals to a sense of shifting borders to construct her persona as an outsider, in which she is able to interact with her surroundings while still
"barely belonging" in alien environments. As she crosses borders into new physical and
7 artistic spaces, she moves no closer to coherence, but chooses to remain divided. She points to the insecurity of structures of identity based on physical associations with a place and feelings of belonging. Instead, she associates herself with the periphery, with perimeters that are only tentatively crossed. Page distances herself, while at the same time protecting her individuality from being merged with larger conceptions of self. She does not define herself using green spaces and nature, or with political boundaries such as region or nation. She walks the border, remaining peripherally associated without becoming subsumed within these definitions.
Page's self-conception as a "borderland being" is as much an attempt to distinguish the space she inhabits as separate from herself as it is to define herself outside its confines. Through recognizing the spaces she travels through as areas in which she
"barely belongs," she takes a perspective on the environment that does not appropriate it, give it voice, or attempt to merge it in some way with her own identity. The land is clearly separate from Page. It is a point of inquiry, a much-treasured subject of her writing, but it is not a direct part of Page herself. This treatment of the land separates the human from the non-human, placing questions of identity firmly in the realm of the mind and the imagination. People, not environment, are responsible for the social construction of themselves in relationship to the world around them.
This is a significant departure from traditional perspectives on the Canadian writer's relationship to the environment. The development of a national Canadian literature has frequently depended on the individual's relationship to the environment as a way to create a sense of unity across the highly diverse landscapes that make up Canada.
The "Canadian" identity has been theorized as a response to a relatively unknown and
8 unknowable environment. Northrop Frye argues that the question "who am I?" is
generally superseded in Canada by the riddle, "where is here?" (222). Due to widespread regionalism and a relatively sparse population, the national community of Canada has been described by nationalist literary scholars as united through terror of the land, and of
attempting to " survive" in a country that isn't particularly interested in the human presence upon it.
Northrop Frye's 1965 conclusion to Literary History of Canada, reprinted in his
1975 collection of essays The Bush Garden, forwards the view that Canadians occupy a
"garrison mentality" that is insistent on building borders against the frontier. These small,
defensive communities protect against danger, coming together out of a desire for unity
against a natural world whose vastness is able to overtake and overshadow any number of
people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. This perspective argues that
Canadians draw from a shared social imagination that originates in experiences and
interaction with, and interpretation of, environment. Frye calls this a "deep terror in regard to nature" in which communities form in opposition to the natural environment
(227). The land is a call to arms for the people; it is a rallying point around which poetic
muse forms out of fear. In this way, the individual identity is produced by the vast power
of land.
Frye suggests that, because of its morally neutral stance on human suffering, its
lack of empathy and "massive indifference" to the personal and poetic plights of the
individual, the land spurns Canadian writers (245). According to him the writer is
confronted by "a moral silence that is deeper than any physical silence, though the latter
frequently symbolizes the former" (245). But, paradoxically, by characterizing the land in
9 this way he projects a kind of humanity on it. In its silence and refusal to play ball with humanity, the land's neutrality suggests a deliberate stance and relationship to humanity.
Frye, then, continues, by implication, to rely on the pathetic fallacy, by giving the environment a consciousness that mirrors human consciousness and that has the power to shape it.
Building on Frye's research, the argument of Margaret Atwood's 1972 Survival is equally dependent on the environment for shaping the national poetic consciousness.
Geographical metaphors are used to describe our internal selves: "Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our [Canadian] literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as a product of who and where we have been" (19). Atwood suggests that we are embodiments of the land, and that our internal selves match in some ways our external experience with nature. Through the motifs she develops of survival, nature as monster, victimization, and sacrifice, she suggests that the
Canadian identity has largely been defined by struggle, by being unable to control nature, because it has always controlled us. This concept speaks to identity as a blank slate that the land writes on, as a primary influence that is "rooted" within us as well as around us.
The role of the artist in controlling and projecting on to nature is largely ignored.
In line with this view, Canadian poetics have often been described in varying degrees as pastoral, where the speaker and the land-subject are merged in some fundamental way. Even through feelings of isolation and fear, the trope of the land serves to immediately classify and identify the Canadian subject. In this way, the Canadian poet identifies with a particular land that shapes and nourishes his or her voice. E.J. Pratt's treatment of the Canadian Shield in "Towards the Last Spike" provides particularly
10 powerful evidence for this argument. The land becomes a hybrid monster, a reptile that must be overcome:
And the Laurentian monster at the first Was undisturbed, presenting but her bulk To the invasion. All she had to do Was lie there neither yielding nor resisting. Top-heavy with accumulated power And overgrown survival without function, She changed her spots as though brute rudiments Of feeling foreign to her native hour Surprised her with a sense of violation
From an existence other than her own. (182)
It is the land that has power over humanity. This allows for humanity to commit aggressive acts against the land as preventative measures for human survival. Indifference is paired with violation, as the monster begins to take note of the railway workers and actively resist the railway expansion. The land is a powerful villain that the human
"heroes" must master. Humanity acts upon the land to control our own identity, to protect against fear as a pre-emptive strike. In the realm of poetry, this often takes the form of possessing the land, and projecting personal feelings and values onto it.
Though the ideas of the The Bush Garden and Survival have been contested, expanded and nuanced by scholars concerned with Canadian identity since their initial publication, much of this work has been done without critically engaging with different approaches some Canadian writers take toward the environment. Scholars such as Diana
Relke have championed this view, beginning to bring non-Canadian approaches to the study of Canadian literature and the environment. People can now be defined outside the parameters of the land in Canadian literature, but the pathetic fallacy is still often used to describe the land as a place for the artist to project his or her emotions.
11 In more recent critical literature, the views put forward by Frye and his school have been critiqued as gendered, as expressing a masculine understanding of environment. Such critiques, in line with the arguments of the Frankfurt school, see the desire for control over land as a product of the Enlightenment. Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer argue that the masculine approach to land comes from a desire to control land. Through the enlightenment project, technical domination over nature mirrors social domination of people, particularly men over women. The costs of this are high: "Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power" (77). The desire to control and subjugate green space alienates the masculine from the land, which then encourages a cycle of domination that both stems from their alienation and is the direct cause of that alienation.
In the field of ecocriticism, a particular female ecopoetics has been put forward by a number of literary and non-literary scholars as a challenge to the masculinist aesthetic.
One particularly influential ecofeminist, Carolyn Merchant, argues that the feminizing of the natural world post-Enlightenment allowed nature to be "unveiled," controlled, and subordinated to masculine artificial power which inevitably constructed nature as an inert, passive "dead" object {Death of Nature 235). Using prelapsarian biblical metaphors, the land is all Eden, and Eve is nature itself, gendered female {Reinventing Eden 117). The pathetic fallacy is being developed in a new direction through the gendering of the land.
Instead of retreating from tropes like unity with nature, and the female as both nature and natural to the environment, these female-oriented readings encourage both identification and appropriation of nature, but now as a distinctly female experience.
12 Merchant describes the male as progress, acting upon the female nature to create a more civilized female form. She argues that these roles are not essentialized, but are socially constructed by larger metanarratives that come from the Bible, laissez-faire capitalism, mechanistic science, manifest destiny and the frontier story {Reinventing Eden
143). In the tradition of the Frankfurt School, she argues that they evolve through time along with the larger hegemonic ideologies they stem from. While explaining the gendering of the environment, Merchant also applies the environmental metaphor of pollution to the treatment of human bodies, families and communities {Reinventing Eden
164-5). This borrowing still appropriates and internalizes the land, but it does so without a sense of dominance or power.
In a Canadian context, Diana Relke's book length study Greenwor(l)ds:
Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women's Poetry is the first major text to tackle ecocritical feminist issues in the context of Canadian poetry. This work acts as a counter narrative to works like Bush Garden and Survival by providing a female parallel to the male-dominated view of the land implied by the "garrison mentality." Focusing largely on female Canadian modernist poets contemporaneous with Page, this text is more in-line with Merchant's ecofeminism. She argues, "if the struggle for national survival took on
Darwinian overtones in male poetry, the struggle for poetic survival took the form of an identity quest in poetry by women" (28). This link between the body, the self, and nature fuses and integrates in female poetry, instead of separating or isolating.
As Di Brandt describes it, these poets "tend to favour more holistic, fluid, and sustainable relations with the natural world, and new forms of expression and community building"
13 (13). Relke's focus is on intersubjectivity, on seeing and knowing that attempts to resolve the conflict of binary oppositions and hierarchically arranged power relationships.
Diana Relke is also the first scholar to provide an extensive treatment of P.K.
Page's ecopoetics. In her chapter "Tracing the Terrestrial in the Early Work of P.K. Page:
A Feminist Psychoanalytic Ecoreading," Relke applies the feminist-psychoanalytic perspective of Jessica Benjamin. In many ways Relke's argumentation is much aligned with its predecessors, in the realm of ecofeminism. She argues for Benjamin's
"intersubjective mode of spatial representation" in which the self desires aspects of the other to constitute the self. In this way, Page's poetry is paradoxical for experiencing the most profound sense of self when it is projected onto nature (240). Individual identity is eclipsed in favour of moments of identification with otherness. Relke emphasizes empathetic relationships between environment and self, and does not address a self- definition as other-than-environment, or as alienated from other objects and environment.
This emphasis on the power of empathy is highly relevant to Page's work but is only half the picture. She balances this concept with alienation, describing a larger process that covers a broader spectrum. She is a traveler by nature, observing environments and creating her own. Art allows Page to construct an identity regardless of her physical circumstances. But, more importantly, it allows Page to open herself up to empathy, allowing her to relate to her environment by making it a part of herself. She personally defines empathy in this way:
Sympathy is emotional. I would think empathy is more complete... Do you have moments when you are suddenly inside another person, just for a fleeting second, and you think you know everything about them? You can tell them things in those moments that frighten them half to death. (Orange, "A Conversation" 73)
14 Empathy is a part of a larger experience for Page: the immersion in the other is followed by a jarring removal, a return to oneself. These brief moments of connection bridge the gap between alienation and inclusion, between isolation and acceptance. Through her poetry, Page is able to relate to places and people that are not her own, and through this process, make them her own, a part of her identity as half-in, half-out of any particular environment.
Empathy builds relationships between the known and the unknowable. Through a conscious projection onto another person or environmental object, a temporary understanding occurs. Immersion is a fleeting way to feel connected or rooted in a space that is not yours, in which you cannot be firmly affixed. However, Page's understanding extends beyond an intersubjective mode for self-definition. In fact, it is in those moments of extreme empathy or immersion that the self becomes most radically aware of its otherness, and is able to understand itself as a radical rejection from another. Empathy by itself can be a dangerous tool for both artist and subject if that is all there is; it represents a false unification unless a deeper sense of division is eventually brought to light.
However, it is useful, even necessary, as a part of a larger process.
Relke uses Page's novel The Sun and the Moon published in 1944 but written in
1937 as a case study for her argument for intersubjective relations with environment. This very early work aligns the feminine with nature in a way that is unrepresentative of most of Page's work. The protagonist, Kristin, is able to " become" objects in her environment, both people and things, through concentration and empathy. By relating to a tree, she is able to take it over and become it. Kristin has a power over the earth even as she merges with it: "Exultant, she fought, knowing her supremacy; knowing the re-creation of self in
15 the united forgetfulness of self; she pitched her strength at the night and her strength was returned to her" (121). Relke interprets this as overcoming dualism, recognizing the line between inter subjective connection and erasure of identity through sustained merger
(246). This perspective, while recognizing the erasure of merger, fails to identify the problematic nature of appropriation. Relke does not take issue with the appropriative nature of the act.
The merger with the nature, as well as empathy in general, is problematized in several ways throughout the novel. At the end of the novel, Kristin chooses to become a tree. While this could be considered a positive immersion of the self with environment, it is a decision made to protect a loss of identity. As Kristin's relationship develops with her lover Carl, she realizes that she will annihilate and subsume him if their relationship continues. Carl describes an intimate moment with Kristin, "[I was j]ust body. As if my mind, my soul—he rejected the word as it formed—were sucked from me, the essence gone, the container alone, remaining; useless, empty" (93). Ultimately, Kristin's fear of becoming Carl, this complete form of empathy, is suspect. As Kristin matures, she realizes that some forced loss of self will inevitably take place at her hand. Thus, the merger with the tree is Kristin's martyrdom. She has chosen to save Carl from losing his identity in another human being by losing her own identity through total immersion in the natural environment.
As a result, Kristin's relationship with nature is not holistic or pure. It is a forced assimilation of the environment by a radical rejection of Kristin's human autonomy. The last paragraph of the text is written omnisciently with Kristin no longer possessing a separate consciousness. The colours are harsh, "On the far side, where the trees marched,
16 unchecked, right down to the water's edge, there the lake was a shifting pattern of scarlet, vermillion and burnt orange" (137). This violent imagery suggests a refusal on the part of nature to embrace Kristin's immersion. The orange is "burnt," a scarred colour that, combined with various shades of blood, is a visual marking of loss. As autumn's bright colours act as a last stand before the dead of winter, they also take on a certain violence associated with a brutal wound or loss.
Other early writings begin to explore the appropriative role human nature has over environment, and the falseness associated with a sense of unity or immersion. S.
Namjoshi argues that "the effort to mediate between the private world and the external one" is a central tension in Page's work (21). The external world serves as the space in which Page is able to negotiate her identity as an individual and as a poet. Through navigating the physical space in which she creates, Page is able to construct the environment to reframe her own subjectivity through her association with, and disassociation from, her own eye's experience.
One way that Page lessens the gap between herself and nature is through language celebrating the sensual pleasures of her environment. Relke cites an early poem, "Virgin," as an example of successful merging with nature. This poem eroticizes the land as a place of female pleasure. Page writes:
By the sun, by the sudden flurry of birds in a flock, oh, by love's ghost and the imagined guest— all these shattering, shaking the girl in her maidenhood, she knows him and his green song smooth as a stone and the word
17 quick with the sap and the bud and the moving bird. (HR 2.20)
Relke suggests that nature in this poem is "as intimately internal to us as a male lover closed within a woman's sexual embrace... Our relationship to nature is paradoxical: nature is our 'holding environment' which we in turn hold within ourselves" (240). Her argument is that while nature exists outside of the self, it is also fundamental in shaping our perceptions. Our immediate sensual experiences dictate our feelings and reactions about ourselves, to assess our growth and maturity as subjects. In this poem, the girl literally embraces nature in order to become a woman, as a rite of passage into adulthood.
Page describes the combination of sensual experiences in nature as orgasmic,
"shattering, shaking the girl" to provide fulfillment and pleasure. Before she has had a sexual experience, the girl "knows him and his green song," suggesting a more innocent sexuality that comes with a connection to fertility and spring. The girl is connected to nature, reliant on "him" to provide and celebrate natural life.
However, the powers of writing and imagination have a major impact on the girl's sexual awakening in the poem. Nature does not act on its own, but is carefully constructed by the girl. The sun and birds work externally to create sensual excitement, while an "imagined guest" takes the sensual experience to climax. The girl's sexual experience knows both nature "and the word," recognizing the fertility and necessity of both for climax. It is the knowledge of past constructs of nature, an identification with the genealogical history of imaginative projection onto the landscape, that brings the girl to climax. The taking in the heat of the sun and the visual splendor of the rising birds are combined with internal desires, the narrative of an imagined lover, which brings her to climax and constructs the verse. The production of a poem, of the fertile writing pen, is
18 linked to a construction of the natural landscape in which nature is freely interpreted by the artist for inspiration and voice.
Neil Evernden argues in "Beyond Ecology: Self, Place and the Pathetic Fallacy"
that "there is no such thing as an individual, only an individual-in-context, individual as a
component of place, defined by place" (103). As is clear even in very early works like
The Sun and the Moon and "Virgin," for an artist like Page, this type of link to a
particular environment, fuelled by a sense of distance, of feeling at odds with her
environment, is part of her creative process. Evernden's understanding of the individual
as defined by place is interestingly nuanced when place is considered in multiples, when
place is taken away from the individual, or when place must be re-established or re-rooted based on exposure to new places and environments. To understand the nature of place for
Page, we must see the natural environment or setting within which Page operates as in
flux, uprooted, changing.
An understanding of place, as distinct from land, is integral to understanding
Page's ecopoetics. Evernden describes the artist's relationship to environment as one of
placation, of knowing through "making the world personal—known, loved, feared, or
whatever, but not neutral" (100). The "land" is naturally /^accessible and must be
appropriated by human subjects in order to make it accessible. In order to gain a "sense of
place" (100), the place must be interpreted and incorporated into human understanding
through art.
Neil Evernden's book length study The Natural Alien: Humankind and the
Environment takes the ideas he develops about the importance of place in establishing
identity in his earlier writing and contrasts the human relationship to the environment
19 with that of other animal species. He argues that because humans do not have a singular habitat or environment, but instead have flexible and varying surrounding conditions, we are able to "believe in an abstract reality which pits us against, or more correctly separate[s] us from, the earth that houses all organic worlds" (103).
Our adaptability and our constantly improving technology allow us to have evolved outside one existing habitat, meaning that even in our place of origin, be it as a species or as an individual human, we remain "exotic," a foreign species that has "fallen out of context" with the green space in which we live (109). Much like Page in her description of herself as both "exile and inhabitant," Evernden argues that the human species is a
"natural alien."
The human relationship to the environment is paradoxical, in part because we are able to create identities that are not determined by habitat. Evernden explains that humans experience a secondary maturation process that involves incorporation into a second
"social uterus" in which we establish culture to overcome the placelessness we experience as creatures without a unique niche or habitat (121). Culture creates the illusion of place, grounding human existence and purpose separately outside of the natural environment.
Though his work is grounded in biology and ecology, Evernden's choice of terminology,
"natural alien," is not scientific, but literary. He grounds his understanding of the human condition in the Western literary canon, and takes the title of his book from Coleridge's poem "Limbo":
Even now it shrinks them—they shrink in as Moles (Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground) Creep back from Light—then listen for its sound;— See but to dread, and dread they know not why—
20 The natural alien of their negative eye. (6-10)2
Coleridge is describing the nightmarish in-between status of souls in the Catholic tradition who are denied access to God in Heaven, but are also virtuous or innocent enough to be saved from Hell. This terrible state is also negatively determined, as being denied access to both realms and to the final definition of life that comes from Judgment.
Coleridge also cites these lines in an 1818 letter to describe the worldview of contemporary materialist philosophers who insist on dichotomy and division. In both senses, Coleridge describes the limitation of culture, and a fear of incorrect over- definition, or a lack of final definition. As "natural aliens," Evernden looks to human- made culture as the creator of space. Culture hides our spacelessness, protecting us from the purgatory of being in-between, both apart and separate from the environment.
Michel de Certeau makes a helpful distinction between "place" and "space" in The
Practice of Everyday Life. Place he defines in terms of location as an "instantaneous configuration of positions... implying] an indication of stability" (117). Place is constant, a point of reference that is intransitive. Space does not imply this fixity, but instead operates as a human effect. Unlike place, space is "produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities... In short, space is a practiced place" (117). In order to gain access to a particular environment, or a particular place, it needs to be understood in the context of the human subjects that have occupied it, observed it, and shaped it with their own consciousness.
2 Emphasis added.
21 In creating and responding to these various spaces, the artist creates landscapes. In my theorizing of Page's ecopoetics, ecocriticism is balanced with an understanding of the landscape tradition in art. Landscape is a creative expression of the experience of the artist. It points inward instead of outward as it attempts to navigate initial reactions to place and elicit affective sensations in the viewer or reader. Landscape is a painterly term; it connotes a negotiation between environment and human presence. It does not attempt to recreate or speak for the land, but instead offers an artificial aesthetic human response to the object being viewed. Landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn comments that "in every landscape are ongoing dialogues; there is no 'blank slate'; the task is to join the conversation" (45).
In Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps, Edward Casey describes landscape painting as a "place-marker" (3). In this sense, through poetry, as through painting, the initial creation strikes up the conversation with an environment, and its physical reimagining, art, serves as a reminder or marker of this event that extends beyond the moment of connection. A dialectical understanding of the relationship between art and landscape allows for the separation and space between the artistic event and the "original" environment to be explored and criticized. It problematizes a fluid relationship between the two, recognizing the human presence as one of outsider, which exists on the periphery of the canvas through replacing environment with a landscape's representation of the human experience of nature.
One of W.J.T. Mitchell's theses on landscape emphasizes its dialectical character:
Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package. (5)
22 This sentiment is paralleled in Malcolm Andrews's extensive review of the landscape form in the Western Art tradition. He concludes Landscape and Western Art:
Landscape art doesn't happen in nature; landscape art is an abstraction from, an appropriation of, nature such that, once the process has issued an art object, one might say (pointing to the land) "there is the original" and (pointing to the painting or photograph) "here is the artist's representation." The distinction bestows a mystique on "the original," a different kind of value on the artifact, and generates a tension or dialectic between the two. It also renders both artist and spectator as detached observers of nature. The process terminates in what is perceived as a profound distinction—"art" and "nature." That dialectic is part of the condition of landscape art and, since the Renaissance, has given wonderful energy and complexity to western traditions in representing landscape, in literary as much as in visual forms. (201)
Studies of Canadian women's writing often use the trope of the map, or mapping, rather than landscape. In her 2005 study Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, Travel,
Wendy Roy uses the concept of mapping to discuss relationships between gender, imperialism, and social hierarchy in the representation of place in female writing.
Through representing the interactions and relationships in writing, women writers "map out relations" (5) to position themselves into gendered and imperialized discourses. The map is also used by Helen Buss in Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's
Autobiography in English to describe personal representations of identity in life writing, while Marlene Goldman describes the figurative use and significance of the map in Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Canadian Women's Writing.
I use the term landscape rather than map to describe the artistic vision of both
Page's poetry and visual art because map implies a coherence and unity of interpretation that is not present in an artistic landscape. Landscape is more removed from the direct representation of location and place than map, and foregrounds the role of the artist in
23 creating and responding to the spaces that are created as a result of lived experience. Like the map, the landscape is not the territory, but the landscape, as a subjective work of art rather than a scientific abstraction, is more aware of this fact. Because of its basis in subjectivity, in the interpretive and creative faculties of the artist, landscape is a more appropriate metaphor for Page's work than map because it is grounded in the self. It is not attempting to directly represent the lived world, but instead incorporates interiority into the final visual representation.
Casey's distinction between landscape art and mapmaking is useful in this regard:
"If many maps pass over places in their zeal to represent the totality of the world—its literal 'geography'—almost all landscape paintings represent places within the detotalized totality of a given locality or region, its 'chorography'" (241). Casey builds upon a distinction made by the ancient geographer Ptolemy, describing geography in terms of large sections or whole worlds, and chorography as a study of smaller sections, or parts that make up a place. As a result, a place such as Page's Brazil is not "Brazil," but her interpretation and misinterpretation of it, developed creatively through lived experience.
It makes up only the small areas that Page becomes familiar with, instead of attempting to map out all the general details of the region. The landscape marks her particular place in
Brazil, developing a unique sense of the personal space in which she creates.
Through critically reflecting on the distinctions between herself and her environment, Page is able to create landscape, to construct for herself an interpretation of the exterior world. The relationship is constantly being re-negotiated. Scott Slovic suggests in "Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology: The Interiority of Outdoor
Space" that there is a dialectical tension between correspondence and otherness in the
24 work of nature writers, particularly Thoreau, Dillard and Abbey (353). Page's work is infused with this same dialectical tension. Slovic's choice of phrasing "correspondence and otherness" has similar connotations to Page's own phrasing of "exile and inhabitant."
Correspondence, like inhabitant, searches for points of unity and intersection, in assimilating the individual with place. By contrast, exile and otherness speak to the gap between externality and interiority, between subject and object, which denies correspondence, and resists any readings that situate the human "naturally" in environment. The importance of this paradoxical dialectic is in its fluidity, in its constant dialogue.
It is through this dialectic, in which the difference between natural environment and the artist are manifested, that Page's poetics is best theorized. Human identity is outside of the realm of environment, a "natural alien" to environment, which needs to be understood in terms of culture instead of nature. As culture responds to environment, the tradition of the landscape can be used as a model from which to develop Page's ecopoetics. Informed by both the Canadian and ecocritical traditions, I read Page as a landscape artist, working through various media to explain her distance from and fascination with the natural order. As Page explores the idea of "rootedness" in an environment, it is always through the lens of an interior self, through a process of self- identification and representation that is self-consciously projected onto the land.
To conclude this section, I will discuss one key poem that develops this aesthetic more vividly than in any of Page's other early writings. "Personal Landscape"3 distances the landscape while still celebrating it. Page relies on the pathetic fallacy to suggest that
3 An earlier version of this poem, "Landscape of Love," was published in First Statement 1.1 (August 1942), 7.
25 "land is love" which she defines in terms of the body. The ground has "lips," with
"untouched hills/ as a thigh smooth" onto which she projects loveliness. The image of curving, of a rounded land are very feminine, sexualizing the land in a similar way to
"Virgin." What changes in this poem is the speaker's recognition of her own power in creating the landscape, in projecting the "love" onto the land. The poem's final stanza reads:
A lung-born land, a breath spilling, scanned by the valvular heart's field glasses (HR 1.38).
As the title suggests, this is a personal landscape. The land is "lung-born," created by the speaker and interpreted by her. The "valvular heart's/ field glasses" are the lens through which the land is given meaning. Page inscribes meaning onto the land while still relating to it sensually. It is through the eye and the heart that the sensuality of the land is evoked.
This experience has been interpreted by a knowing poet, who is able to relate to the land while keeping it at a distance. In contrast, the "Virgin" is overwhelmed by her senses, letting nature enter her completely and overtake her imagination.
Even in her earliest published writing then, Page uses the concept of the landscape to explore aesthetic separation and distance from the physical place of writing. Writing is removed from lived experience, from the space and place of production, existing as an intermediary between the artist and the environment. In "Personal Landscape" Page rejects ideological conceptions of the Land as an entity unto itself. Page constructs landscape that recognizes the author's inability to access a knowable land outside of the realm of language construction.
26 To Page, landscape is a multi-pronged extension of herself as a poet; it is a part of the creative process, the physical location of creation, and a figure within the creation itself. Landscape is representation, acting as a link between the physical world and its re- constitution in language. As W.J.T. Mitchell puts it, landscape is "a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity" (2). The private world of the artist constantly works against and interweaves with the outside world, providing points of overlap and intersection, as well as creating sharp contrasts and boundaries.
Page's relationship to the environment is in a state of negotiation throughout her oeuvre.
She is a creator of landscapes, both visual and poetic, that antagonize and embrace her.
Her writing does not sentimentally celebrate pastoral utopic spaces, nor does it view nature as nemesis, as a non-conscious entity that is out to consume and obliterate her.
Landscape is a construction, built on a concrete relationship with the world that recognizes the artist as a creator of space who gives environment human context. This reinterpretation of the pathetic fallacy operates with the understanding that it represents mediation on the part of the artist, and not a "natural" extension of inherent attributes of
"nature."
The integral time that P.K. Page spent in Brazil (1957-1959) has played an important role in studies of her work aesthetically, biographically, thematically, and genetically. Brazil has frequently been discussed by Page herself in interviews, poetry, non-fiction and travel writing, as well as by critics interested in marking stages of her poetic career and artistic career, and for those who attempt to make sense of her "middle silence" and turn toward visual art. Though time and time again this has been cited as a
27 key moment in Page's writing career, it has been a relatively under-theorized and misinterpreted period in Page's life.
Page's sense of herself as "both exile and inhabitant" is fundamental to her self- conception throughout her career. But it is in Brazil, where Page is faced with a totally alien landscape, that we see her most intense interrogation of the concept of rootedness, as she attempts to connect to the environment, to construct and inhabit a space that is a part of herself through language, and then, through visual art.
In the three chapters that follow, I build upon the theoretical framework I develop here, and explore Page's time in Brazil extensively from multiple points of entry.
Building on Page's status as "exile and inhabitant," what follows in the rest of this thesis is a fleshed out understanding of how she came to this identification through her own artistic development in poetry and paint.
28 CHAPTER TWO
"Green Crowding Green & Being More Than Green": The Brazilian Poetry of P.K. Page
When P.K. Page arrives in Brazil in 1957, she experiences a complete
"bouleversement" (FP 41) by the tropical world she found there. From a master of language to a child miming her desires, from safe blankets of white snow to a jungle of colour and sound, Page experiences a paradoxical re-visioning of her subjective self. Her early reactions are a mix of wonder and submission. She writes in her Brazilian Journal,
"How could I have imagined so surrealist and seductive a world? One does not like the heat, yet its constancy, its all-surroundingness, is as fascinating as the smell of musk.
Every moment is slow, as if under warm, greenish water" (9). This radical dissociation fills all of the senses, incorporating a change in the flow of time to something slower, that gives colour and substance to heat, becoming a body of water that is impenetrable and all encompassing.
As a poet, P.K. Page is driven by language to identify with her landscape and cope with her status as a traveller and outsider. In Brazil, English no longer has the words to describe an environment that did not lend itself to her vocabulary. Page is faced with a major dilemma
How can I describe to you the things I've seen describe them as they are Explain what they mean
The original manuscript, hastily written on foolscap, emphasizes "them" with a hard, dark underline, distinguishing between herself and the foreign environment around her. In
Brazil, Page moves through the process of understanding not only the limitations of
29 language, but even more specifically, the limitations of the English language in trying to describe Portuguese ideas and concepts. Page's poetic inclination requires new creative outlets as she determines what the role of English verse will be in describing tropical birds, pink palaces, and the multiplicity of green that invade her senses and demand to be accounted for. As she is challenged by the Brazilian landscape, "wordlessness" becomes a starting point through which Page slowly begins a process of self-reflection and redefinition.
Having the right words to describe an image or concept takes on a whole new dimension when operating across cultures and across languages. In her study of the travel writing genre, Mary Campbell explains, "the traveller's medium is language, and the language he uses has evolved as an envelope specific to its region and culture. It has no words for what is alien" (179). When Page moves to Brazil, she becomes a travel writer through her poetry and her journals, letters and correspondence. The various places she encounters are sites of transformation, as she moves from foreign places to personal spaces and imaginatively constructs her own, understandable Brazil. She interrogates place and space variously as a literary travel writer, attempting to find the right words to record what she is seeing and experiencing.
Entering the country as an ambassador's wife, Page has privileged and limited access to the lives of working class Brazilians: as a state representative, her new class position and authority over her staff inevitably move her into an imperial relationship with Brazil. Through her writing, she has the ability to frame colonial relations and create a Brazil to be disseminated abroad. As Mary Louise Pratt argues in Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation, travel writing "produces the rest of the world" (5) for
30 European, or more generally, Western readerships. Constructions and known depictions of "other" places are often created and disseminated by outsiders, claiming an authority and understanding of place through appropriation.
However, this is not the path that Page takes. While Page makes reference to "her"
Brazil, her writing is very personal, focused on making sense of her experience and attempting to understand herself creatively, not in relation to others or other conceptions of Brazil. Page is serving the role of translator, attempting to use her existing vocabulary to make sense of the new place she has encountered. Miguel Neneve grounds his argument about how he translates the Brazilian Journal into Portuguese for Brazilian readers with a justification of Page's own role as a cultural translator
Page reveals her yearning to translate the Brazilian world to her world, trying to define, and sometimes to name, what she sees in the country according to her worldview, her previous experiences that the novelty resembles, and her readings. In addition to this, one could claim that she sees and writes what she has words to shape, what her history of life permits her to describe and her privileged position as observer without being observed allows her to interpret. (160)
Neneve suggests that Page must work within the limitations of her language, using her privileged and relatively obscure position within Brazilian society to act as an outside observer. As a traveller, however, her primary purpose is to write for away, for a
Canadian audience that could share her reactions and confusion. The Brazilian Journal, which has its own roots in correspondence and diary, is meant for Canadian consumption, and not for a Brazilian audience.
Page does act as a translator, but much of this process is self-discovery, and self- translation. Denise Adele Heaps makes this point when she argues primarily for the
31 Brazilian Journal as biography. The experience of Brazil is intensely personal, and is a moment of individual poetic crisis
Because [Page] was outside many of culturally specific signifying systems of Brazil, that myriad of discourses through which people communicated, made sense of their experiences, and constructed themselves, P.K. Page entered that country yet remained curiously absent. [She found] herself in a personal void. (369)
Page attempts no ownership over Brazil. Though some of her reactions retain colonial elements, they are not at the foreground of her Brazilian writing. Instead, she searches for a space to inhabit and situate herself in relation to the places of Brazil in which she lives.
This hunt for a space of her own, within a place that is not her own, is the primary purpose of the Brazilian writing and poetry.
After Page becomes a diplomat's wife, her relationship with the sensual world has become increasingly problematized. The pivotal poem that precedes Page's "silence" is the highly discussed "After Rain," in which the artist "suffers shame" in images of environment. The speaker of this poem is afraid of "encumbering the pure line" of the natural beauty that consumes her, distancing herself from common humanity, and marking a movement away from poetry. Brazil acts as the site of reconnection with the sensual world for Page.
Through extensive letters, notes and diaries, as well as painting and poetry, Page's
Brazilian period (1957-1959) is revealed to us in new ways. These texts are always shifting, as Page is often using poetic language in prose writing, or attempting to share content by using diary entries as letters to friends and family, or using paint when words fail. This palimpsestic, multimedia experience is best known through its poetic prose reflection, Brazilian Journal, published by Page in 1987 thirty years after the events it
32 describes. In the following two chapters, I will interrogate the primary material that was selected, edited and reimagined during the creation of this text. Through this process, we are better able to understand the Brazilian experience as it was lived contemporaneously rather than how it Was remembered and constructed retroactively. In this chapter, I will focus on the Brazilian poetry, which has received relatively little criticism, largely due to its unpublished and fragmentary nature. This poetry nuances and challenges Page's later representations of this period, focusing on the tensions that led her to lose her poetic voice, instead of on her redemptive redefinition as a visual artist.
This chapter distinguishes between the travel-writing genre that is largely composed of prose fiction, and a more distinctive sub-genre, travel poetry. Jahan
Ramazani describes this unique area of study as an "imaginative enactment of geographic displacement" (52) that is "what is lost in translation" (53). Travel poetry is even more dependent than travel prose on convention specific to its point of origin. More so than prose, poetry is "stitched and hitched to the peculiarities of the language in which it is written" (53). In this way, it traces the failure of language to communicate across culture, while at the same time searches for a unity and synthesis between cultures that is imaginative and unique. Travel poetry as a medium is liminal, caught while crossing the threshold from one cultural space into another. It straddles boundaries, firmly planting itself as a transitional medium that will eventually need to be reworked or replaced to meet with new conditions of artistic production.
The Brazilian poetry can be found in various files in the P.K. Page fonds at
Library and Archives Canada. One file, with twenty-seven poetry fragments and a detailed account of Brazilian birds, makes up most of the poetry I discuss in this chapter.
33 My supervisor Zailig Pollock and I have dated the file and several dozen contemporaneous poems from across the archive to the first half of Page's time in Brazil, from early 1957 to mid 1958, using internal and external evidence. This file makes up the bulk of Page's Brazilian poetry currently housed at LAC. Several boxes of previously un- catalogued material are now in the process of being archived. It is possible that these boxes may contain Brazilian material, though this can only remain a conjecture at this point in time.
Because the poetry in this file was never published, nor worked up for publication, these texts often leave it unclear when one idea stops and another begins. Many of the works discussed in this chapter cannot be considered complete, self-contained poems, but may be multiple fragmented ideas recorded on one page. I have therefore chosen to treat them in my edition and in my critical account not as completed texts, but as a series of interlinked writings occurring in the same time period. The readings I provide seek to represent Page's writing process as she struggles with her silence, and the role that writing plays in shaping her personal and artistic identity. As Page reflects on her new environment and on her relationship to her pen, she grapples with "placing" herself, trying to construct a landscape in which she will somehow fit.
Unlike earlier accounts that explore or attempt to explain Page's "middle silence," this chapter calls into question the very idea of this silence. I explore the various aesthetic dimensions of Page's Brazilian poetry, shedding new light on its role in Page's oeuvre, and its place of prominence in Page's developing sense of the natural world. I interrogate the role of the travel writer, the eco-critic, and the silenced poet within Page's poetry.
Building upon the ecocritical framework I established in the last chapter, this chapter will
34 articulate Brazil as a pivotal moment in Page's career that prompts a broader debate with the inaccessibility of nature and the limitations of art as Page moves toward her self- definition as "exile and inhabitant." Though some of Page's previous work addresses these issues, the Brazilian poems are the first that openly struggle with nature's failure to relate and empathize with its human inhabitants. Expanding upon Page's status as
"natural alien" or "exile and inhabitant," this chapter imagines the disjunctive synthesis of these terms as a positive, shifting experience that enables creativity even in moments of crisis.
The file of Brazilian poetry has not yet been examined critically, and there has not yet been any work that examines Page's poetry in its original manuscript form. However, there have been several earlier attempts to examine Page's poems about Brazil. Two critics, Kevin McNeilly and Cynthia Messenger, have written about Page's Brazilian poetry in relation to control over environment and place4. But these theorists largely wrestle with the Brazilian poetry from within the retrospective context of the Brazilian
Journal, later poems and later essays from the Glass Air (1985). McNeilly examines one poem contemporary to Brazil, "Brazilian House," but equally draws from the early poem
"Permanent Tourists" and from the post-Brazil poem "Brazilian Fazenda." Messenger states that "Page's Brazilian poems derive directly from the prose she wrote during the late 1950s and published in the Brazilian Journal in 1987" (110), but many Brazilian poems were contemporaneous with passages in Page's Brazilian diary, not later versions of them. Page's retrospective account of Brazil shapes McNeilly's and Messenger's
4 A third notable critic is Sigrid Renaux, whose work is concerned with providing a meticulous close reading of one Brazilian poem, "Brazilian House." Though her reading is very insightful, because of its detailed nature, and because it doesn't deal with the same issues as McNeilly and Messenger, I include it in the section dealing with that poem.
35 readings as Page intended it should, leading them to emphasize the move to visual art rather than Page's more painful movement away from poetry.
One further point: neither article examines Page's Brazilian works as a whole.
Instead, the articles compare and contrast Page's experience of Brazil with that of her contemporary, Elizabeth Bishop. In order to look at Page's particular writing circumstances in Brazil, and to interrogate the silent "gaps" that the unfinished poetry fill, the archival material must be better utilized. A close examination of the Brazilian poems in the archives makes possible an account of the texts in which writerly silence plays a central role in their genesis.
McNeilly and Messenger are particularly strong in their insight into Page's poetic aesthetic in Brazil, the role of the travel writer, and fears of appropriation and integration within the work. McNeilly argues that the "unstable foreignness of the Brazilian landscape and culture" is formative in Page's artistic development (85). He suggests that
Page is concerned about her image as a colonizer, concerned that she may be appropriating through the process of reconstruction. This claim is substantiated by Page's silence, instead of by direct textual references. He argues that Brazil suppresses Page, creating a "writing which refuses itself and a "failure of authentic expression" which must be overcome (90). He argues that Page operates within a shifting space, concerned that
Using Brazil is tantamount to abusing it... by making it into an exotic other [Page is] re-enacting a kind of colonial theft of an indigenous vitality for their own reanimation, a sense of life which is belied by their own lack of authentic bond to Brazilian land or culture. (89)
36 McNeilly suggests that a temporary form of colonization takes place with the creation of
a poem (92). Through a desire to possess the other, she exploits it. However, I would
argue that by remaining in awe of this other, silencing her own poetic voice, and
recognizing her own displacement as a visitor, Page resists this feared appropriation and
makes room for her own poetic remaking.
Cynthia Messenger focuses on the visual elements of Page's writing. Central to
Messenger's argument is a definition of Page's Brazilian poems as ekphrastic. She
defines ekphrasis as poems written about works of art, real or fictional. For Page, the
works of art she describes are imagined. Messenger argues that these poems position Page
within a frame of modernist art through which she attempts to catalogue her visual
experience of Brazil in words.
Drawing on figures such as Matisse, Portinari, Piper and Chagall, Messenger
argues that Page "sees" Brazil in terms of modernist art through references made in the
Brazilian Journal (111). Page often describes rooms and social situations as if they are
pieces of representative art. As Page attempts to construct word images, she begins to
interrogate what a painter is able to do visually without language, and what a poet's
limitations are within a single language.
Messenger argues that ekphrasis helps to bridge the language gap for travel
writers. She enumerates its benefits:
It acts as an intervention—and an intercession— between traveller/poet and place, the viewer and the subject of the gaze. For the poet/observer, ekphrasis is a way of ordering experience. When a foreign place is turned into a painting, a double distancing occurs: the real scene is reimagined as a painting but one that has life only in terms of the poem. The poem, particularly in creating notional ekphrasis, paints the visual art. If the poet actually creates the art about which she talks, then she has managed to take over the role of the painter, bridging the gap between the sister arts and making, crucially, visual image depend on word. (103)
37 Messenger argues that ekphrasis is a cultural outlet that attempts to deal with dislocation and alienation. The "double distance" occurs through constructing a painting-within-a- poem. This controlled access puts the power back into the hands of the artist, who, instead of being alienated by environment, now alienates the audience and environment.
Construction through image-making readjusts the power dynamic, however temporarily, in favour of the creator. In this way, foreign signifiers are made familiar and are controlled through relating them to imagined images to which only the speaker has direct access. My argument builds on and critiques these ideas by drawing on the concept of landscape, in which Page is able to control place through creating spaces in both poetry and art. I argue that the power dynamics within these poems is more nuanced and complex than Messenger and McNeilly suggest.
Of the two poems Messenger uncovers, the second, "Paintings by Portinari," appears in multiple versions within the fonds. Messenger chooses to publish a later, more finished version of the poem that has been edited by Page herself. As a result, her reading of the work does not take into account the poem's multiple versions and the changes they bring to the poem. In particular, the version that is selected for publication does not include an additional stanza or connected fragment that appears in the core file of
Brazilian poetry. By reflecting on this work as a developing series, we can better examine the process of this poem's construction, which enriches the argument Messenger makes about ekphrasis.
The version of "Paintings by Portinari" included in Messenger's article is an excellent reading text. Page reflects on the work of Brazilian painter Candido Portinari,
38 describing a bodily reaction: "it was as if he'd cut off my breasts/ & leveled my nose."
Page is dismembered through her interaction with the paintings, involving herself physically in what she sees. She inserts herself into the work, taking on its potential characteristics. In Messenger's analysis, this poem is an "expressionist work"; she notes that the bodily lacerations create "acute angles" that inevitably allow Portinari to paint a mutilated Page into his work (113). This inclusion into Brazil, by Page through the work of Portinari, provides a point of contact that she is unable to find in her day-to-day lived experience. She relates to the destitution and poverty Portinari expresses in his paintings, an aspect that is not well addressed within her travel writing. She describes Portinari's portrayal of Brazilian life, "he made them [the Brazilians] grey / and painted the grey all over my skin." Page is part of the colour wash and is radically included in the experience.
Examining the work genetically and comparing multiple versions of the text brings a new dimension to the work. The draft in the poetry file has another passage on the same page. The works resonate together, though they may not have been originally intended as the same poem:
And in Rio the bomb of light exploded the flash
This explosive imagery provides another level of connection between Portinari and the poet-speaker Page. The stanza includes a revelatory moment that connects Page to Brazil.
Even if the texts are considered separately, their occurrence on the same page, in the same pen, allows them to speak together. The explosion is of light, suggesting a powerful source that seems to simultaneously counteract and emphasize the grey. The moment
39 becomes epiphany. With Page's epiphany comes "light," "the flash" taking over vision,
and leaving the poem open-ended, without a description of the fallout.
The fragmentary version changes and brings new energy to the identity politics of
inclusion in a new colonial space without appropriating it. The greyness of all the subjects
in the poem points to a shared suffering between Page and the Brazilian people. While her
plight is far different from that of Portinari's subjects, Page experiences a common pain
in her inability to incorporate her identity into this Brazilian one. In order to be included,
Page becomes abstracted by loss, maiming her body to physically give up elements of her
past self. It is this movement, and particularly the role of writing and finding definition
outside of her writerly identity, that is made more prominent when this work is examined
in the context of the rest of the Brazilian poetry.
Issues of appropriation and inclusion/exclusion are present in the critical works of
McNeilly and Messenger, and are consistent with my conceptualization of the
development of landscape poetry to create a space in which Page can imagine herself.
Both recognize shifts in power through utilizing the creative space and constructed image,
while McNeilly in particular seeks to problematize the role of this process in colonization.
However, the role of the environment, in both excluding and resisting Page, is not
focused on in either interpretation. The inability to access the spaces of Brazil and the
people and the places that make up its culture dominates the poetic imagery far more than
concerns with ownership and power. It is Page who submits to the landscape and to her
language deficiencies, recognizing her subordinate position in Brazil.
40 The major Brazilian text that interrogates cultural inclusion and exclusion is
"Brazilian House," which does not appear in the file but is contemporaneous with it5.
"Brazilian House" relies on familiar people from Page's household in Brazil. These employees are juxtaposed with the speaker herself, who comes first, beginning and ending the poem. The first stanza emphasizes distance and the lack of interest of Page's staff in her:
In this great house white as a public urinal I pass my echoing days. Only the elephant ear leaves listen outside the window to the tap of my heels
Though there is a large household staff, Page is isolated in her home. It is a public space, with connotations of dirt and gendered awkwardness implied by the simile of the public urinal. The sounds that fill the space are echoing, and her specific involvement, her tapping heels, are not associated with the bustle of other people at work. Here the natural world is empathetic, listening to Page when no one else does. This does not act as a comfort to Page, but instead just emphasizes her unclear role within the house.
Page's dislocation from her environment takes precedence in this poem over observation of her home's inhabitants. Sigrid Renaux's close reading of the poem targets many key thematic concerns central to the Brazilian period. She argues that this poem
"reflects [Page's] sense of displacement in relation to her Canadian self... confronts the new physical space she is going to inhabit in Rio, and her sense of estrangement as she confronts the other" (264). Page experiences an inner struggle, attempting to find points
5 Page's original notation is '57. See file 1-8 of the P.K. Page fonds.
41 of connection between her location and her sense of self. It is not until she has grounded her own perspective as an outsider that she introduces other people into the poem.
Three other figures, the "laundress with elephantiasis," the "little black girl/ polishing silver" and "Ricardo" all express contentment and joy that combines work and pleasure. The laundress "sings like an angel" while she completes household chores. This connection to the physical domestic space and an ethereal understanding of language both seem to emphasize Page's removal from this space, her lack of both language and occupation. While the girl polishes silver, she laughs at her own reflection. Though the treatment of both figures is reductive, their agency within the domestic space, and their comfort, all contrast with the "passing" of the speaker's days, which happens submissively. Ricardo, sexualized as he "lowers his sweating body/ into the stream" is also able to relax and connect with his environment. He relaxes, comfortably penetrating the water and communing with it. This is contrasted with Page's tense descriptions as she forces herself to leave. The "yammering silence" of the "porcelain" forces Page to exit.
As she drives into the "hot gold gong/ of the noon day," it is unclear if she is actually able to escape. Even in the quiet, non-Portuguese space of the vehicle, Brazil continues to loom around her as she remains purposeless, and outside of the bustling activity and vibrant life that continues around her.
This poem does not convey a sense of worry in speaking about or appropriating the voices of its subjects. Instead, the focus is on the self and its own insufficiency.
Page's alienation does not make room for the type of concern that McNeilly talks about.
Her initial reaction is simply with her own lack of identity within the space. She has no
42 power because she has no language. She has not yet been able to grapple with her role as
head of household because she is not able to communicate her authority to her staff.
The world of Page's staff is inaccessible, though it is presented as something she
can both view and represent in poetry. Page's works both point to a break down between
the place of observation and the living spaces of Brazil. The boundaries of in-and-out
within Page's private residence, made public as an Official Residence with its own
constantly evolving staff, are played with constantly in the poetry. Her main personal
relationship and her connection to home, her husband Arthur Irwin, is complicated by his
public role as Canadian Ambassador to Brazil. Her private relationship becomes a public
performance before various dignitaries and representatives, which leads to further
complications in defining and establishing her own writing space.
The mixture of isolation and public display that we see in "Brazilian House" is a
repeated theme in the Brazilian poems. It most notably reappears in the series of
fragments brought together under the umbrella title "Natural History Museum," which
deals with animals forcibly relocated to zoos and museums. Page focuses on animals on
display that are novel to someone of her Canadian background: sloths, marmosets,
tropical birds and golden spiders. The fragments include animals in cages or display
cases, living or dead. She uses the various exotic creatures in this series, all forced into an
oppressive environment from which they cannot escape, as a comparison with which she
can scrutinize her own relationship to Brazil, its environment and its people. There is a
clear juxtaposition between containing and controlling the foreign, and the spectacular
display of oddity and difference.
43 The "Natural History Museum" series frequently describes animals in a scene, like a snapshot or a quick sketch. This is consistent with Page's early poetry, and is extensively commented upon by Brian Trehearne:
Albeit with more intervention in their arrangement and coherence, most of Page's poems make forward progress within this accumulative aesthetic. Hers is not a poetry that proceeds through logic, expansion of emotion, or unfolding of narrative; rather, it extends the range of the subjective eye through a constellation of images that are more or less dependent on a single central metaphor, abstraction, portrait or initiatory incident. (79)
Page uses her strong visual orientation to point toward similarities in the images that she crafts. Her desire to record in language mirrors a desire to represent the world as she sees it, creating a unique space for herself. This "accumulative aesthetic" is a passion for her, generating meaning and coherence from the unification of short images. The Brazilian poems regularly acknowledge this listing technique:
write, & imagine a poem that list of trees if you will, if you want; the list is still a list & not dissimilar to the laundry slip
Listing is both emphasized and questioned in the poetry, acting as an "old standby" that
Page begins to question, but continues to use. In particular, the list is used scientifically to provide classification and organization to individual images as she experiences them.
These taxonomies reach their climax in the last pages included in the Brazilian poetry file: a prose description of the birds of Brazil. This list links home and away, delighting the novice birdwatcher, and providing material that will recur in throughout Page's future as an artist and poet.
In the "Natural History Museum" series, listing again takes the form of taxonomy.
In one version of the "Museum," Page subtitles the different animals in the poem like the
44 didactic signposts that appear in front of a particular cage in a zoo. "The Sloths" and
"Marsupials" are haphazardly recorded, creating a catalogue, that, when brought together, provides access to the total frustration and debasement of the performance it encourages in its performers. These images are juxtaposed with quick, detailed descriptions, with
"faces by Henry Moore" and "a duck with a duclin in its pocket" which are not directly representing the animals as they appear. Page creates a landscape in which these creatures are completely subjective interpretations, not based in realism, but based on response and relations that are unique to Page.
Each fragment offers several unique images connected together in a list-like form.
The list is cumulative, with the images feeding off of one another to create a sense of the scene as a whole
in a coffin of glass all the pretty singers dead on sticks, heads cocked astraddle a painted tree in the crook of its wood the sloths union suited in loofah fur the zebras long spine & the coral snake pretty in brine
There is a darkness to what is being described; the bright "singers" are without sound, dead and mounted. The museum showcases death and suffering. The animals need to be lifeless, either dead or apathetic. Their environment is an artificial structure that is a caricature of the animals's "natural" environment. With the animals taken out of their natural context, the attempt at re-creation is flawed, punishing both the animal and the viewer.
Page's insistent reworking of this concept is fascinating. She seems to be unable to settle on descriptions and line groupings. Though the content is consistent, there is a
45 discontent with form that is reflected in the large number of fragments and in the inconsistency of the descriptive particulars. In a single line, a pair of lines, a four-line stanza, or an entire verse, Page meditates on a particular animal in the museum. The genesis of the passage on the sloths is particularly revealing. As the manuscript page reveals, it takes several attempts for Page to settle on the correct adjectives to encapsulate them.
-•N'-'S
• e_ -
e010799779
Original manuscript page. P.K. Page fonds. Library and Archives Canada. Box 27, File 5, Page 13.
46 The image begins quite stripped down: "The sloths in their loofah fur." Page then elaborates, describing them as "cretinous faced" and "suited in loofah fur." Page's sympathies appear confused. While she anthropomorphizes the sloths, marking their fur as clothing, she also makes an unclear reference. Does the "cretinous" adjective suggest that the sloths are a dwarfed and mentally challenged kin, comparable to herself, or is this reference derogatory, ridiculing the sloths? Page finally chooses to remove the reference altogether. Her final revision is to make the sloths "union suited in loofah fur." This expands the first reference, developing the humanity of the sloths with a less negative connotation. Page must balance her own negative reactions to the more absurd features of the creatures she presents with the sympathetic tone of the complete catalogue.
The poem ends with an account of animals that are not actually dead and mounted, but which are entrapped and consumed with impotent "frustration," the word with which the poem ends,
the marmosets grow stamens out of their ears & their fingers feel like the stems of violets yet a face the size of the top point of your thumb looks at you with frustration
Again, the foreign is juxtaposed with the familiar, as Page seems to emphasize the alienation while sharing in its familiarity. In an earlier version Page had "inner" rather than "your" in the description of the thumb. This change serves to strengthen the parallel between the human and animal, observer and observed. She draws this parallel explicitly in a retrospective essay: "The impotence of a marmoset in a rage, pitting itself against me, its fingers like the stems of violets, unable to break the skin of my hand. How quickly one learns about scale with a marmoset for comparison" (FP 37). Page recognizes in the
47 futility with which the marmosets fight to break out of their confines, her own troubled relationship to Brazil. Page recognizes a shared exoticism when she views Brazilian animal life. She begins to empathize with them because of her own curiosity about them, recognizing the futility with which they fight to break out of their confines.
In contrast, for Page the natural environment of Brazil is her own foreign, constructed space. Instead of the enforced caging of a zoo or museum, it is the "Brazilian
House" described earlier, and the Brazilian environment that displays Page in her inadequacy. As a result, images of plant life in the Brazilian poetry are usually treated as opaque boundaries that separate the poet-speaker from the space. Greenness is not associated with pastoral landscapes, but with walls and barricades. Security and a sense of knowing are crucial absences. Brazil invades Page, "pelt[ing her] with images" (FP 35) that her language cannot express.
The first stanza of an early draft of the poem "This whole green world" argues that the spaces of Brazil are not accessible to her:
This whole green world, crystal and spherical silent as a hole in a head, within which all those birds coloured beaks cheep cheep girls throats yell boy's brakes scream and Manuel's wheelbarrow crunches and scrapes its rusty iron rim
She juxtaposes silence and noise. The consciousness of the speaker, embodied by the head, is full and empty. The emptiness of the hole in the head is only an illusion; it is an individual experience that is not shared by those around her. Other occupants are loud and vibrant, comfortable with the environment, a part of the land. The tension in this first stanza appears to be between different conceptions of space all simultaneously occurring
48 in the same place. Page's awareness of how others use and relate to the place she is writing about is increased. But with that understanding there is no release, no freedom, no point of connection or relation.
"This whole green world" uses tropes often associated with literary "silence." In her discussion of writer's block, silence, and women writers, Tillie Olsen uses nature tropes to describe what happens when the writing stops. She contrasts a natural cycle of creation with unnatural silences, "the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot... the obvious parallels: when seed strikes stone; the soil will not
sustain; the spring is false, the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature" (6). Writing is described organically, as a parallel to a planted, growing
seedling that naturally should take root in the proper environment. In the first draft of
"This whole green world," the natural world continues to grow and evolve, with the
speaker standing in direct contrast to the natural rhythms and life cycles. She has been cast out.
As the speaker searches to describe the environment, it is in paradoxes and extremes. Silence is contrasted with only the loudest of noises. The onomatopoeia of the tropical birds "cheep cheep" disrupts the line and overtakes the speaker's own words in describing the scene. The speaker submits to the environment, though she cannot assimilate herself into its noise. The speaker's voice returns in the next line, but the line remains clipped, with the oral "yells" and "screams" dominating the description. These fragments resist unification, and do not fill out a traditional "frame" as a unified landscape painting. Sound and fragmentation take the place of fluid verse; the text remains unfinished.
49 Page describes the environment outside of the "whole green world" as "Hollow the other silence aches around it,/ is a green hoop in three dimensions" (7-8). The barrier between the speaker and the world she is describing is thin. It is a hoop that emphasizes the contrast between the interior and the exterior. Its greenness is both natural and foreign. Interestingly, even its status as three-dimensional is problematic. For Page, the two-dimensional surface of the paper is a comfort. The expanse of Brazil is not willing to be contained or limited by this constraint. This "whole" world overflows Page's perception, and resists the language barriers that move land or place into landscape.
The speaker's own place, outside the world, is a place of emptiness and negation.
The second stanza articulates the alienation as a direct contrast to the world within:
Hollow the other silence aches around it, is a green hoop in three dimensions, shaped with compass and theorem, a slow chrysoprase fire to flare and gut the head
It is an "other" silence, not natural to the environment. It is also without its own world, its own substance. Identity definition is negative, coming from the lack that is being experienced. Hollowness is a void that causes pain with no outlet. This makes the silence not a neutral quiet: instead it "aches around" a well-established, vibrant world. The speaker has no outlet for herself. Though the speaker seems to have a clear understanding of the role of place within the "green world," she remains placeless, outside of the natural order. The writing she has produced holds no comfort, but instead only seems to emphasize the separation between the experienced, living space of the Brazilian environment and Page's unacknowledged alien presence.
50 The fragmentary nature of much of Page's Brazilian poetry is very revealing in this respect. She begins one page, "I feel it in my," starting with a line in which the speaker is describing something inherently personal, internal to herself. Atypical for a poet who usually avoids self-reference, this short statement suggests a desire for a personal connection and response which cannot be articulated, or for which she can find no listening audience. The second version, which replaces "I feel it in my" with "In," depersonalizes feeling without removing it. This same sentiment, a desire to explore something internal, something resting within the confines of something else, continues into her second attempt.
And then, finally, Page produces complete stanzas, without a reference to herself, and without a reference to either of the earlier beginnings. The imagery is overwhelming, of descriptive colour so strong it blocks out all references to anything outside itself:
the 15 greens within a frame green crowding green & being more than green, til green became the total spectrum
By describing the images of green upon green, Page moves past her inarticulate and incomplete thoughts about herself, meditating instead upon the environment that has evoked such a strong response. The greens become "the total spectrum," overtaking the environment, completing it, and even producing a new palette from which to describe the world. Like the greys of "Portinari," the green becomes "more than green," standing in for a larger, unarticulated feeling.
The greens mark a distinction between an in-group and an out-group, a distinction that points to Page's own exclusion. In this circumstance, it is a painful exclusion that
51 Page frequently returns to throughout the rest of the fragments. Page's opposition between the speaker and the natural "green" environment reverses tropes of nature as calming, pastoral, idealized. Page becomes the foreign element, the viral contaminant that the Brazilian environment radically rejects. This painful exclusion is associated very heavily with greenscapes in the poetry. Always "more than green," the colour operates in the poems as a marker of distance and disability. The writing process, providing connection and intimacy with the outside world, has been called into question.
The landscapes Page constructs continue to be overwhelming and isolating.
However, contrasted against these spaces is a sense of hope, of a human connection being made, however small. One poetry fragment contrasts the writing process with a makeshift bridge:
A bridge across a chasm Lariat thrown Shining with deftness from hill to hill
How write a word the fashions swing despite
The first stanza is hopeful. Unlike the "whole green world," the chasm offers an open space. The strength of the shining lariat is powerful. Though the chasm is a place of terror, it is no longer inaccessible. This description does not seem to overwhelm the senses. There is room for poetic movement within the lines because the description is sparse. Instead of painting a word poem landscape, the speaker conveys the vastness of the gap she is crossing, and the strength of the lariat that will get her there.
This text, while hopeful, still questions the role of writing in this space. As the
"fashions swing despite" the desire to write, Page still is left wondering, "How [to] write
52 a word." This swinging, associated with the rope bridge of the previous stanza, suggests there is a fluidity to culture and to environment that does allow access and sees all communication as transitory and impermanent. Page seems to be questioning her medium, but her identity seems more secure. She has now made a bridge to connect her previous selves to her current "alien" self. She is moving toward her ultimate identity of
"exile and inhabitant," searching out how to best communicate these new experiences, no longer fearing they are incommunicable.
This search for poetic voice, contrasting Portuguese and English, is evident in
Page's more obviously personal poetry. The green space and the animal allow Page to project her experience onto something else, which she has some creative control to manipulate and re-imagine. Page's poems about writing processes and limitations, about learning and failing to learn a new language, are a final category into which the Brazilian poems can be placed.
In a poetic narrative, Page describes a woman as "swollen with emptiness" in the way that a drowned body is swollen as it "fills with water". The water imagery retains an association with language. This poem is also very temporally focused. Page is noting the time it takes to transition, much like the time it takes to become accustomed to a culture.
This transition makes her more aware of her current inabilities and limitations. Time is burdensome
so this woman swollen with emptiness is slapping against the leaves of the calendar— I cannot get her out of my eye The scene is sparkling yet she obtrudes within the frame She is in pain the fearful swelling bloats her
53 & the current of time carries her.
Linear progression through time only increases the woman's burden, moving her closer to drowning completely. Though time moves forward, there is no outlet for the loss and
"emptiness" she experiences. At this point, it appears that the woman does have some access to a sparkling "scene"; Page allows her protagonist to crash through, but has not yet moved to the point of assimilation and acceptance.
In this poem Page is still assessing material conditions, looking for some ideal combination of external factors to make her feel welcomed and at home. Her inclusion and successful fusion with her foreign space is always delayed, never achieved. The protagonist of this poem does not belong to the scene; her presence is forced, not naturally symbiotic with the space. At the same time, an agency has been granted to the speaker. She creates a space for herself, painfully including herself in the scene; she is an incongruous part of the landscape.
The actual "scene" the poem refers to is not accessible to the reader. There is a negotiation between the self and the landscape, as one creates the other. The woman's own person seems to be obscuring or complicating the image she observes. By
"obtruding," the woman makes it clear that she cannot be separated from the landscape she constructs. She can never completely remove herself from the "frame." This action speaks to the representative, constructed aspect of environment. The protagonist can only be part of the frame through her own creative process. Subjectivity has to link the two.
It is the limits of this subjectivity, knowledge of language and culture, which
"blocks" the scene from unfolding. Until Page is able to make a connection to her environment and create her own landscape, she is unable to merge herself into the frame
54 in a way that is unobtrusive and "natural" to the poetic form. The Brazilian environment and its images are not yet a part of Page, though her reactions are speaking to an important change. Instead of "15 greens within a frame," there is now a female identity present within the framed space. Brazil does not exist out of Page's understanding of it.
Her understanding of the power dynamic between herself and environment shifts as Page re-imagines herself as an artist.
A pivotal moment in Page's construction of Brazil seems to cue transition in a second poem with a female protagonist. Page begins to draw personal strength from successful negotiations with environment, regaining control over her surroundings. This poem describes environment and power in new terms:
She sat on the sill of the sunny morning the jungle straining its leashes there pulled the perpendicular mountain nearer & nearer her
Until with another life beginning: the green & ominous shade undid the flowering trees & feathered whistlers within her blood
& she rose pale as platinum & her love was the very shape of grief & high on the hill the wild wild plants like fire or the — rocket of love
fire
These short lines attest to a power dynamic that is no longer one-sided. The protagonist is no longer at war with her environment, though it continues to resist her. The greenscape is now a "leashed" jungle, and is working for the protagonist to move mountains. Control is in the hands of the artist who is both overseeing the jungle's task and reacting to it.
55 This poem speaks to creative control and a reassertion of the imaginative space. The role of the writer is to construct verbal imagery, to connect her lived experience within a place to a newly created artistic space.
With its three major stanzas, this poem marks out key moments in the transition process Page has experienced. Each occurs in a different temporal moment. The stanzas react to one another causally, moving time linearly from the first line to the last. The woman who rises in the poem is not the same as the one sitting on the windowsill.
Through a carefully orchestrated change in environment, Page is able to open herself up to landscape. As it approaches "nearer and nearer," it eventually fuses within her. The mountains enter her, spawning internal "flowering trees and feathered whistlers."
Landscape, the fusion of self and a green vision, is a subjective representation of environment. The external factors of "green & ominous shade" are the active agents that the artist reimagines, producing new life within her.
However, this process is not without physical tolls on the self. The third stanza speaks of love as "the very shape of grief." The writing process, and Page's silence, are a source of pain that is as integral to her as love. Creativity is linked to being for Page. New life and creative forces surge within the female protagonist; a celebration of "undoing" has a mixed reception. Silence and struggle have shaped Page, and the joy of new creation is mixed with the bitterness of the initial loss and recognition of creativity as something that can be mis-placed.
The final line of the poem, "fire," is both cleansing and destructive. The poem has gained momentum quickly, and just as quickly it seems to end and fizzle out. Whether
56 this is the author's intention or the poem has been left unfinished remains unclear. Has this poem been abandoned or is it complete? Does it end with silence?
The question of silence inevitably brings to the foreground the issue of Page's troubled relationship to language, which is in a large part spawned by her initial reactions to "her first foreign language to live in" (FP 36). The Portuguese language emphasizes for Page her own separateness. Without the ability to communicate, Page is no longer able to interact and make the world more familiar. In "Questions and Images," Page describes the process of learning the language as de-humanizing and infantilizing, "one is a toy at first, a doll. Then, a child. Gradually, as vocabulary increases, an adult again" (FP
36). Though Page has an extensive English vocabulary, it does not provide her with any access to Brazil.
Language is an act to be performed with varying degrees of skill that can be assessed in a classroom. Page must mature, in part through showcasing her language acquisition for her peers in a series of social calls, or "tests." In exploring her relationship to language, Page again resorts to the imagery of a trapped animal. Page writes
There should be more to say but I become when confronted—dumb— like a bird in a cage, can't sing on request
The ability to speak and communicate in one's natural environment is starkly contrasted with attempting to replicate these abilities in a new space. Writing becomes unnatural, as does speaking, when the language of interaction is foreign. A performative element of language is introduced in this reflection. What used to be a commonplace, natural activity becomes an exhibition over which Page has no control. She is the songbird, unable to sing for another's purposes. In fact, even understanding the command to sing, to write, or to
57 speak, has been made problematic. Writing means having a connection to language, which has turned into something burdensome and overwhelming.
Portuguese is not just one aspect of Page's new life, but as a language, it encompasses all parts of her life. As she attempts to learn the words, and perform the songs, she becomes a creature in the Natural History Museum. She attempts to explain the language barrier:
My muteness induced by ignorance of the tongue that is spoken here
The heat & weight of it the warm wet water through which I move silently lumbering through the green rooms
& the green garden where flowers like parrots form their ocean floor ascended slowly on a fleshy stalk move in a tiny current an instant float then more velvet silent than before Motionless now that green warm water dense as a cube of green glass
Portuguese is linked to the green environment, doubly reminding Page of her alien status.
She is coated in Portuguese, attempting to navigate through her life under the heat and weight of the unknown language. All her senses are submerged in Portuguese, incapacitating her. Unable to participate, she is "silently lumbering." There is a sense of futility to the movement the speaker is attempting. The image of a building with multiple rooms, expresses a sense of futile searching which is met only with more "green rooms."
Later in the poem, the speaker is stopped. After she describes the gardens, she describes the flowers "like parrots" which move in "a tiny current an instant/ float then
58 move more velvet silence than before." The flowers, like birds, experience a freedom of movement and connection with the water-language that the speaker is denied. Page sees
Portuguese as integral to the environment, associating the flora and fauna as one larger unit, much like the "whole green world." As the speaker stops, the poem ends with a change of state. Seeing the flowers and associating them with Portuguese, Page makes the connection to place.
Page first recognizes the limitations of her own language in shaping her status as an outsider. However, as the poem develops, external factors build. The Portuguese
"tongue" takes on fluid properties, being represented by the green ocean. The lumbering speaker reflects, "motionless now that green water dense/ as a cube of glass." As the water changes into an image of glass, the speaker is frozen in this relationship, either caught within the enclosure of glass or left completely outside of it. Fluidity is contrasted with solidity. The water imagery solidifies against Page; a transparent green glass wall without access. This barrier keeps Page out; her status as an exile and her limited language eliminate the possibility of accessing the Brazilian environment, though it looms before her. The poem feels incomplete, and likely is, leaving the speaker in suspension.
Similarly, Page describes the green in the "whole green world" series as a dividing layer that creates its own microcosm. Green becomes "a slow chrysoprase," quartz. Green is the geological matter of Brazil, hollow within, and yet impenetrable. Page refers to silence in this poem, recognizing its agonizing pain in her inability to circumvent the stonewall that separates her physical and artistic self from the conditions necessary to provide access and voice.
59 Issues of voice and control continue throughout Page's time in Brazil. The last poems that are written in Brazil are performative, occurring as part of a speech Page was asked to give to the Brazilian Academy in 1958. Page, along with the wives of two other ambassadors, a historian, Courtney Epsil of Argentina, and a novelist, Stella Zilliacus of
Britain, were honoured with an evening celebration. This address to the assembly was particularly difficult for Page because she was "no longer writing" and she had only been given the opportunity due to the privileged position of her husband. Brazilian women writers did not receive the same type of invitation from the Academy. Page recounts in her Brazilian Journal that she procrastinated writing the speech, finding it difficult to come up with something to say, "I milled around... and wandered around in an anguished dream, trying to make a whole cloth out of all the bits" (149). Page feels the loss of some of her artistic integrity, recognizing that in this situation, she is now the animal on display, and is being asking to entertain the masses with her quaint simplicity.
Not surprisingly, Page eventually chooses animal imagery to help her write the speech. She writes two short poems in English, "The Giant Bird" and "The Golden Spider
Web" celebrating Brazilian animals in their natural environment - not on display in a zoo or a museum. Page positions the poems as part of "my discovery of their Brazil," including within the speech accounts of places she has visited, and several references to
Brazilian literary figures.
Page contends with both finding the right words, and ensuring that they are something she can pronounce. Phonetic reproductions of words and phrases, as well as pages and pages of drafts and copies, suggest that this process of adapting to the foreign
60 language is both time consuming and frustrating. Eventually, Page has come up with a bilingual draft that has line-by-line translations of the two poems6:
The Giant Bird Passaro Gigante
During the night the wind pulled out Durante a noite o vento arrancou An old leaf from the palm tree. Uma folha seca de palmeira— With this enormous feather of a bird Uma pena enorme de passaro. I think pre-historic times have returned. Eu acho que a pre-historia voltou.
The Golden Spider-Web Teia de ouro
There is a fly which has Ha mosca que tern So much taste Tanto gosto That only gold spider webs So teias de ouro attract it. a atraem.
The spider which makes Aranha que faz those golden webs aquela teia is evil and ugly velhaca e, e feia and voracious. e voraz.
The poems occur in later English versions, 'Fly: On Webs' and 'Anachronism.'
61 The Giant bird. Pdssaro Gigante During the nip.ht the wind pulled out Durante a noite o vento arrancou An old leaf from the palm tree. Uwa folha s'eca de palmeira - ^ With this enormous feather of a- bird C*r^.. «vA Uma pena enorme de passaro . I think pre-historio times have returned. Eu acho que a pre-historia voltou. The Golden Spidor-Web. Tela de ouro There is a fly which has Ha mosca que tern bo much taste Tanto gosto. That only pold spider webs So teias de ouro attract-it. a atraem. The spider which makes ikgm Aranha que faz those frolden webs aquela teia is evil and np.ly velhaca e, e feia and voracious, e voraz.
Original manuscript page. P.K. Page fonds. Library and Archives Canada. Box 17, File 14, Page 3.
These short poems, while beautiful, are a far cry even from the fragments we have seen in Brazil. They appear adolescent, because they are. These poems reflect a working understanding of Portuguese, including basic rhyme, but without the nuanced understanding of Page's poetic adulthood. When placed beside Page's first poem in a major publication, the early distancing playfulness of the Portuguese verse becomes quite
62 clear. Page hides her identity in this first work, fearful that her friends might find out she writes poetry, publishing with her first initials, P.K. (Djwa 10). "The Moth," published in
The Observer in 1934, plays with both rhyme and content
I caught a moth, A silver moth That fluttered in my hair; And when I peeped within my hand I found but star-dust there.
The short, playful lines are not to be taken seriously. Poetry is distanced from the poet, even as it celebrates whimsy in this verse. In the Portuguese poems, a moment of fancy replaces the dark, snapshot images of the Natural History Museum.
As with "The Moth," in "The Giant Bird" a natural phenomenon is reduced to a playful, but essentially empty conceit: a palm leaf looks like the feather of a giant prehistoric bird. Like the moth's wings leaving Stardust, this verse is fanciful. Similarly, in the "Golden Spider Web," the fly is lured by the sparkle, playing into the hands of the greedy spider. Page is being playful as opposed to masterful. Like the spider, she is just spinning a vision of gold. The contrast between the spider's ugliness and the web's beauty seems apt. As Page focuses more on playing her role for this audience, she realizes the severity of her own degradation and loss. Page is performing for the benefit of the crowd, she/and has become the chirping bird that sings on cue. While her observations of nature emphasize the wonder of her encounters with the natural world, they become degraded as she tries to fit them into a language she isn't comfortable speaking, to an audience who isn't taking her seriously.
The Brazilian speech poems mark the end of the Brazilian poetry. Words were not universal enough, too limited in their interpretation, to attempt to cross boundaries and
63 deal with "green crowding green and being more than green." Page searches for a new medium that does not rely on an understanding of English or Portuguese. She moves into the world of visual art, reconnecting with environment and blowing open the doors of her creative vision.
The Brazilian poetry is particularly important given previous critics's discussions of this period as a "silence" for Page. Because no new poetry was published, and was not made readily available, it is Page's more traditional travel writing, the retrospective
Brazilian Journal, that is most cited in tracing her reactions to her Brazilian experience.
Travel poetry, particularly the fragmentary, responsive poetry of Page in this period, paints a different picture or "landscape" of Page's experience than its counterpart in prose. It emphasizes dislocation, alienation and separation that cannot be unified or overcome through narrativization. The poetry is dynamic, straddling the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion without the retrospective knowledge that Page would both find herself a new creative medium in visual art, and that she would eventually return to poetry.
After months of struggle, Page has done some of the work of reconnecting to her creative self in new ways. Place slowly moves into space as Page finds new ways to creatively control environment based on experience and exposure. As her surroundings become normalized, her creative self is renewed. But, this creativity comes with a high cost. Verse does not flow freely through Page as it did before. Her new circumstances require a different type of communication. Page's relationship to the pen changes.
64 CHAPTER THREE
"They are the same pen": Tracing the Movement from P.K. Page's Poetry to P.K. Irwin's Art
When words fail P.K. Page, she turns to the visual image to open a dialogue that does not depend on language. Portuguese and English are not an issue in paint; this allows an understanding of place that is not grounded in the semiotics of language. Page's familiarity with the pen, and her understanding of line and composition seem to extend naturally from her status as a writer of poetry and prose. Her sense of the image, expressed with snapshot precision, occurs throughout much of her early poetry, suggesting a sensitivity and aesthetic understanding of the image that has been present throughout her career. In Carl Klinck's Literary History of Canada (1970), Munro Beattie describes Page's poetic style, "[it is as if] she has used a cine-camera with lenses of surpassing keenness, slightly out of focus and aimed from odd angles and through a glass of water" (771). Page's images are distinctive, transferred imaginatively from words on the page to the visual representations of the reader.
Many critics describe Page as a "painterly poet," discussing the combination of these two distinctive modes throughout her oeuvre. Cynthia Messenger recognizes Page's
"sense of both the close relationship between sister arts and their incompatibility" ("Small
Toothed" 80). Zailig Pollock takes this one step further, suggesting "the two arts have continued to enrich each other in her work up to the present day" (3). Page occupies the liminal space between these two mediums, using tropes and techniques from one to express herself in the other. Barbara Godard grounds Page's artmaking in transition: "her artmaking surges from the space in-between, the brief interval of potentiality when, past
65 suspended and on the verge of failure, structural transformation and cultural innovation occur" (5). It is in this moment of personal transition that transformation can take place.
Page explores limitations and points of connection, using multiple mediums to reflect the new descriptive possibilities of visual art. As Page makes the transition from poet P.K.
Page to a dual identity as poet-painter P.K. Page/Irwin, her engagement with visual art re fuels her creative spirit and gives a new voice to complement her struggling poetry.
As Page moves away from verse, her creative output does not decrease. To fully grasp the changes Page undergoes in 1957, the Brazilian poetry must be balanced with
Page's small but growing body of visual art. In this chapter, I evaluate the role of Page's visual art in shaping her relationship to environment, place and space. I trace similar motifs and imagery, and interrogate shifts in representation in both language and paint. I also discuss Page's development as an artist, creating a timeline for her first year that emphasizes the pace at which she moves through media and assesses the limitations and possibilities of the newly re-defined page and the pen. While Page's art is quite varied in this period, I largely focus on the large body of art concerned with natural and domesticated environments. It is in this body of work, rather than in the still lifes, abstracts or portraits, that we can see Page begin to master her environment, turning place into space.
This transition is marked at the end of her Brazilian poetry, where there is some overlap as Page still struggles to write, and begins to draw using the same pen. Two drafts of the poem "This whole green world" exist in Page's fonds at Library and Archive
Canada. I describe the first of these in the poetry chapter, emphasizing the hollow boundary between the poet-speaker and the "green hoop" of a complete world. Page is
66 reflecting on her isolation and alienation from a complete, organic sphere of which she is distinctly not a part. The boundary that separates her from the green space is demarcated by language: it is the English language that seems to deny access. Both versions would have been written in 1957, though based on the change in outlook the version included in the previous chapter came first, with the following being the revision. When Page returns to this poem in the later draft, the revisions she introduces change the overall mood and impact of the poem. Her relationship to the "green world" has undergone some significant changes that the earlier poem was unable to anticipate or represent. The imagery is largely maintained, but with more acknowledgement of the personal, with less aesthetic distance between the writer and her experience.
The first stanza becomes more specific, taking the impersonal "a hole in the head," and making it particular, "the hole in the head." This change acknowledges and personalizes the experience of the first stanza, making it specific to the individual speaker of the poem. It becomes a reference to a particular loss, instead of being generalized to encompass all such losses. This small change recognizes the specific place deconstructed and broken down, personalizing the poem to reflect the evolving relationship Page is developing with Brazil.
The poem now reflects the changes that Page has gone through as she begins to incorporate the alienation of Brazil into her personal and artistic identity. The second stanza of "the whole green world" establishes a completely different relationship between the artist and the natural world. Juxtaposing the original with the revision reveals Page's new creative relationship emerging. First Page writes
Hollow the other silence aches around it, is a green hoop in three dimensions, shaped
67 with compass and theorem, a slow chrysoprase fire to flare and gut the head
When Page returns to the poem, this stanza is fundamentally altered
Paint it. The other silence aches around it, is a green hoop in three dimensions, shaped with compass and theorem, a slow chrysoprase fire to flare and gut the head and leave among the charred curved rafters, elegant in carbon in a global shell through which those thousand noises dart like birds.
The exile of the first stanza is replaced with a battered admission into the world. Page is
no longer an exile, but an inhabitant of the Brazilian space. She gains access through a
change in medium. Through paint, a whole new level of agency is reintroduced; Page is
able to claim some autonomy over her environment by creating complete artistic works.
Artmaking reduces the impact of Page's difficulty with poetry writing without
eliminating it. As she reflects in a later interview with Christine Wisenthal, drawing
"saved her life," offering a solace that she "didn't question" (22). The "other silence" in
the poem no longer acts as a boundary; it marks a stage in a process. The actual exclusion
has ended, but only through violent intervention by the speaker. In the revision, bruising
replaces exclusion, marking lingering violence caused by environment. The bruise takes
an odd corporeal form; its greenness marks the accuser as nature. The bruise suggests that
the speaker is not fully integrated though now tolerably accepted into the natural space.
The environment has marked Page, but ultimately has allowed her passage; she is now
able to re-write. Page has lost her passivity, and is no longer stuck without place or purpose. Through paint, she is both "saved" and included in the space of Brazil.
68 Even so, Page's head is still "gutted," much like the speaker's in the poem.
However, while the head is left hollow, the experience of sound remains. It is internal to the speaker, "darting" through a recently purged space. Page's body becomes a site of renewal; its emptiness is a beginning. Reversing the imagery of the first poem, it is now
Page that is hollowed out, and the "green world" now exists inside of her. The space that is first described as external and inaccessible to the poet is now an internal part of her being. Land becomes landscape and place becomes space: the "green world" is now the domain of the artist instead of the site of exile. Page's identity is now able to incorporate
Brazil through taking it on as a visual artistic space.
In my discussion of Page's visual art that follows, I bring in an additional artistic term to discuss how the natural alien or "exile and inhabitant" responds affectively to the
Brazilian landscape: the sublime. In this discussion, the sublime refers both to Page's initial reaction to the colours and power of Brazil, and eventually to her abstract, biomorphic art at the end of her time in Brazil. Though the sublime is often used in
Canadian literature to describe rugged nature, particularly in states of upheaval, I apply it here to describe first and foremost, an affective response to overwhelming nature, and second to describe the biomorphic sgraffito style she develops by the end of her time in
Brazil. The environment is rich with life, dense with green, and ultimately exclusionary in a similar way to the vast mountains or rushing water in Canadian scenes.
Feeling overcome by natural beauty and landscape often takes the form of recognizing the sublime as distinct from beauty. Scholars since Edmund Burke contrast the sublime with the beautiful to emphasize a sense of magnitude and the affective response it draws from the individual. The term is often used in artistic discourses, but
69 has direct applications in the natural world, in which the sublime is used to describe foreboding, inaccessible nature that reduces the individual to powerlessness. Burke differentiates between beauty and sublime in 1756
For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are, indeed, ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and however they may vary afterward from the direct nature of their causes, yet these keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions. (157)
The sublime is "the great," defined in part by the pain with which the viewer may respond to the work. The deepness of the connection is not inherently positive, but it is moving.
When compared to the beautiful, it is the sublime that affects viewers more deeply, readjusting their perception based on this redistribution of power.
Not all scholars would agree with the binary distinctions Burke establishes here between the two terms. In fact, the beautiful often precedes an understanding of the sublime in artistic discourse. It is when something pleasing to the senses overwhelms the witness that it moves into the category of the sublime. In the landscape tradition in
Western art, the sublime is part of a triad: the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime.
Moving from the calm serenity of the balanced composition, the beautiful, to the contrast and variety of the visible, non-idealized nature in the picturesque, the sublime includes terror and wonder, depicting extremes of nature that overpower the viewer (Ketner and
Tammenga in Smith).
70 In the account of "This whole green world" with which I begin this paper, we can trace Page's affective response to the sublime, as it moves from passive alienation to a painful inclusion in the green space. This emotional journey is deferential to the natural world, recognizing that the painter or poet does not reign supreme, but is only able to construct reactions to the world from which they draw their muse. As Page begins to deal with her own response to the sublime landscape, a retreat from poetry, she begins a process of introspection and study of visual art which inevitably allows her to become an artist in the sublime tradition in her own right.
While Page had no formal training in visual art prior to Brazil, her experience and familiarity with the art history and the artistic community was well established. As Anne
McDougall suggests, "it seems as though she could [draw] right from the beginning"
(95). After graduating from high school, Page chose to travel for a year in England instead of attending university. Attending galleries, theatre and ballet, Page immersed herself in modern art forms, combining them with extensive study in new forms of poetry and prose. Sandra Djwa notes that Page was in particular "dazzled" by poetic painters including Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites (13). Furthermore, throughout the 1930s and
1940s, Page associated regularly with poets and painters, including the visual artists
Millar Brittain, Ted Campbell and Jack Humphreys (14). Barbara Godard notes that
Page's film board manuscripts also contain complex doodling that are similar in style to spiraling and geometric forms present in her later art. By the time Page starts drawing seriously "it was with an informed as well as practiced hand that she took up the felt marking pen in Brazil" (7). She leads an artistic life, constantly combining the seen and the heard, the invoked and the enacted.
71 The artistic communities in her formative young adulthood provide knowledge
and access to the contemporary art world, establishing a comfort and familiarity that is
present in her Brazilian Journal (noted afterward as BJ). This retrospective chronicling of
Page's time in Brazil exists as a non-fiction, mid-life Kiinstlerroman. Many of the art
works from the Brazilian period are briefly catalogued as they are created, providing
dates and emotional context related to their composition. As Page builds her own body of
visual art, she draws heavily on artistic muses and predecessors, exclaiming over their
techniques and use of colour. Other artists are regularly invoked in the Journal, and to a
lesser extent in the Brazilian poetry, to link Page's lived experience to something
universal, something that she has witnessed or seen before. Cynthia Messenger calls this
invocation "a willed effort to conjure visual images rather than write them" ("Small
Toothed" 80, her emphasis). This interesting form of self-teaching is very gestural,
pointing to her influences with only the most cursory reference to the artist him or herself.
In this way, Page participated actively in the realm of the visual through invoking artists
even before she let her pen explore the line in her early experiments with visual art.
Page's first drawings come as a distraction from dealing with her role as an
ambassador's wife. She describes experiencing both emotional and language difficulties
as she attempts to fire an employee for the first time7. She doodles as she searches for the
correct Portuguese terms to communicate his dismissal in the most tactful way she can.
Her drawing is automatic and reactive, not based on skill, but on distraction and removal
from the difficult scene she is confronted with. Eleanor Watchel emphasizes in her
7 The episode she associates with beginning to draw is highly wrought, included in the retrospective Brazilian Journal, but not in the original Brazilian diary or poetry. Page deliberately constructs a narrative of her turn to visual art only after it has occurred, through interviews and her own publication.
72 interview with Page that the doodles were first described as, "me, firing Salvador" (55).
The drawing is an extension of the poet, creating a space on the page that is unique to its creator, as poetry has been for Page in the past. Through the agency of creative control,
Page shows a mastery over the page that she does not have over language, or over her current physical circumstance. The drawing pen is able to overcome Portuguese in a way that English poetry simply cannot. As Page seeks to find definition, she quickly discovers that her "alien" language can be replaced by a medium that does not demand the same phonemes. Instead, Page develops an iconography, a barrage of images that replace all the words that have been lost.
After her experience with Salvador, she begins to draw, and eventually paint, voraciously. She began with a "broad, wedge-tipped pen" (Watchel 54-5) that was purchased to write packing labels. Much like a contemporary Sharpie marker, this felt- tipped pen was a tool to help facilitate the moving process to Brazil. Once this has taken place, it is repurposed to assist Page in learning about the structure and possibility of the artistic line. She explains in her interview with Watchel that this pen helped emphasize her mistakes, forcing her to pay close attention to her strokes because there was no way to erase the mark (55). The pen that was used for writing now becomes representational, attempting at first to directly recreate what Page sees.
These first drawings are more immediate and more permanent than the drafts of poetry she has been struggling with. They also are not revisable in the same way, and do not appear fragmentary or abandoned. Especially in Page's earliest drawings from 1957, she represents her subject as it is, in the moment of composition and in its place of origin or location. Place is simply recorded as it is seen, with a focus on the large shapes being
73 recorded. Her first drawings, completed in June of 1957, are traditional landscape portraits of the Pink Palace embassy estate in which Page lives and works.
P.K. Irwin, Private Chapel (1957)
Private Chapel incorporates the church building into the surrounding environment. In this drawing, it is the changing lines of the backdrop that stand in for green space. Though the chapel itself is the central focus, it is the less focused, dense lines of the backdrop that are significant to her emerging sense of "green crowding green." While some of the lines are
74 obviously needles, others are simply small points, or waves used to gesture toward ideas of plant life and green space instead of recording them in specific detail.
P.K. Irwin, Embassy Garden (1957)
In other early drawings Page has eliminated architecture as a central focal point altogether, and has focused on a larger scale. Embassy Garden and View of Two Brothers are drawings of the environment on its own. Produced using the felt pen, they are very detailed, playing with the line to create and differentiate between different types of foliage in a black and white space. Embassy Garden plays with points and short lines of varying shades to create a diverse environment that fills the entire page, presumably viewed from a vantage point closer to the building. The centre of the page is an area with shaded grass, left relatively undeveloped. Here, the small points, variously spaced, create
75 variation in landforms and light, suggesting small hills or rougher points in the terrain.
Similarly, View of Two Brothers has a relatively central blank space on the page, below the mountains. This draws our attention upward to the looming mountains. This drawing uses the mountains to play with perspective, emphasizing the vastness of the mountains in comparison to the large trees.
P.K. Irwin, View of Two Brothers (1957)
The two drawings are two views of a similar land in different scales. With their rough topographical markings, they appear somewhat map-like, though the area they
76 capture is not large. The link between landscape and cartography seems natural, as Page
attempts to show visually what she can only list in a poem. The "15 greens within a
frame" now can be differentiated visually, given height and depth through variations of
the line. They can be represented spatially, showing biological connections between the
flora and fauna, as well as the natural and imposed frames. As the landscape frames a
particular view of the natural environment, it also maps it, providing mediated access to
the world through the artistic lens of the initial observer. Page is able to show us what she
feels she cannot tell us in poetry.
Where most of Page's Brazilian poetry remains unfinished, unable to grasp the
full extent of her experience, the landscape painting creates boundaries. Through the
frame of the physical page, she must reproduce what she sees to fit within those confined
limits. Page is forced to visually select, modify and edit throughout the process of
creation. The bulk of Page's early drawings and paintings from 1957 are representations
of various types of flora and fauna, often in still-life style with an emphasis on one central
image. Colour and medium create contrast and distinction that show the disjunctions
between what Page sees and how she experiences it. Distinctions between place and space
are more tangible in her visual art, as the real, concrete images that Page sees can be juxtaposed against abstractions as Page fills in the blanks or creates breaks in foliage that
otherwise will not allow her in. The abstracted pieces of environment that are represented
in the artworks are unique to Page, building upon a particular place, but extending upon it
and removing it from its point of origin. By carefully selecting objects and organisms to
represent, Page edits the Brazilian environment into more easily manipulated frames or
images. Landscape painting shrinks the seen world into smaller, more digestible pieces.
77 Throughout 1957, Page spends much of her time teaching herself how to draw and paint by doing artistic studies. They are representational art works, built around learning and exploring shape and line. These realistic drawings appear to be testing the limitations of her pen, exploring the page as a frame, and refining her sense of detail and shading.
This art seems to have been composed relatively quickly, as Page responds in her journal,
"it amazes me how quickly I draw" (62). In realist mode, Page is interested in capturing the image quickly, creating immediate drawings based on her sensory perceptions.
P.K. Irwin, Cesta [02], (c.1957)
The drawings in the Cesta and plant series extend to include various representations of flowers in domestic contexts. Cesta translates in English to basket, but
78 usually refers to flower arrangements. Both cut flowers and living plants are central subjects in early drawings. The first cesta Page discusses in her journal is Cesta [02], which was a Canada Day gift (BJ 62). In this drawing, Page has filled in much of the backdrop with black lines, using negative space to make the individual flower types stand out in white. She has weighted the pen on the page to create varying shades of darkness, obviously having filled the black space in after drawing the central image. The large leaves at the bottom have each of the veins drawn in, while other broad leaf shapes only have the main vein drawn in. These details differentiate between types of plant life, with short lines representing texture on some flowers, and more quick, moving lines representing delicate fronds.
P.K. Irwin, Cesta [04], (c.1957)
79 Cesta [04] does not include the black backdrop, making this very similar drawing come across as much more rudimentary. Page is obviously very focused on how particular shapes exist in space, attempting to visually transcribe what she sees. This drawing has no real depth beyond the texturing of the basket. However, the image does take up the whole page, extending off the edge of the paper at several points. These points, emphasizing the rigidity of the page frame are the limitations of the recorded, but not of the original image. Page points to what cannot be captured, only gesturing toward the original cesta. Close examination shows that the occasional line has been redrawn, with Page using the pen as a guide for accuracy. The elements emphasize the drawings as artistic studies, as they allow for mistakes and correction.
The blackness, and limitations, of the pen also emphasize the subjective elements of the drawing. The drawings mark, or point to, reality but they are no substitute. In this way, Page is able to enter into a dialectical artistic space, as she has done in her poetry.
Page's own otherness, her humanity, is outlined through the experiential nature of the drawing as it is created. The rougher line markings point to the drawing as something composed, the artistic process, something artificial, instead of attempting to mask it in photographic realism. In this way, the genesis of the painting, like the genesis of the poetry in the previous chapter, illuminates for the viewer stages of development and integration with her medium as she finds her voice.
The group of drawings of potted plants, which for simplicity's sake I refer to as the plant series, is a more loosely connected set of drawings that make up a large body of
Page's early work. Within this grouping are actually several smaller series, such as
Plants, Plants in Pot and Flowers. Like the Cesta series, they are domesticated plants,
80 living indoors. In this way, much of Page's early work is reclaiming control over nature, and exploring her tentative command over her surroundings. The alienation of the
Brazilian poetry is not paralleled in the drawings. Where Page is excluded from the
"whole green world" in her poetry, in the art, it is she who controls access to her own studio space, having the power to select what she chooses to represent, and what she chooses to cross into the bounds of her artistic lens. Drawings such as H's Garden and
Flowers layer different types of plant life, creating a clear sense of the density of the green. The plants are actively competing to catch our attention, but their individual features are lost in the group. The power dynamics have shifted in Page's favour through shifting media. Page can be more focused on her initial responses without feeling obligated to translate the untranslatable.
Compositionally, the drawings in the plant series are similar to the Cestas.
Foregrounding a central image, they explore shape and detail to varying degrees. Many of the simple line drawings, such as Plants in Copper Mug or Plants [06], exist in abstract space, so that the only object existing on the page is the model. The central image may occur at various points in the space. The white space removes the plants from their place of origin twice, once through the domestication of being brought indoors, and again by stripping away the particulars of their new context. While many occupy the centre of the page, some images, as in Plants [08] play with frame of the page. In this drawing, the image is mostly located in the far left hand corner. The plant no longer appears domesticated, but includes various plant life devoid of context, sprouting from nothingness.
81 Other plant drawings take the opposite approach, and begin to build in new forms of expression. Page begins to experiment with different types of background, and begins to incorporate gouache. Barbara Godard argues that the plant drawings "manifest her strong structural forms: careful positioning and varied patterns of vertical and horizontal lines work the surface to create a pictorial composition" (7). Even while Page attempts to reproduce what she is seeing, she recognizes instinctively that this change in form gives her freedom to move beyond the limits of what she sees.
P.K. Irwin, Leaves as Large as Hands (1957)
82 In Leaves as Large as Hands, Page reproduces a large potted plant in her home.
Much like the early cestas, this image is focused on the general shape of the leaves, and is relatively sparsely represented. Page plays with lines in the backdrop, disconnecting the potted plant from its place of origin. In the various horizontal and vertical spaces, the central image is "transplanted" into the subjective, created space of Page's page, and is no longer situated in a realistic scene.
Throughout Page's representational work, she plays with the idea of
"transplantation" by taking various types of plant life and repurposing them to explore their shapes in art. When she finally introduces colour to her work, she does so selectively, continuing to maintain a distance between the original object and her subjective representation of it. Her first new colour medium, gouache, is a type of pigment that like watercolour is suspended in water. This colour wash is darker and thicker than watercolour, and stays active longer, making it able to be worked and manipulated on the page for more time before it dries. Gouache can be more layered than watercolour, allowing for more opaque shades that still allow some bleed through of the page beneath, but without being translucent. Page begins by adding colour to line drawings she has already created. On her first day working with gouache, she writes
I have added putty colour to the facades and laid a thin and mimsy sky. There is now a pale ochre wash on the jack-fruit and the house is pink. I like these gouaches. The colours are vivid, they mix easily and are what you will—transparent or opaque. (BJ 74)
The colours are an extension to already created artwork, often used to create emphasis, or to distinguish between different types of plant life at various stages of "transplantation" into the artistic space. One of the allusions Page makes in this passage is to Jacko Fruit which combines pointillism with the felt pen to create texture with a bright blue wash on
83 the fruit and a subdued yellow backdrop. The leaves and stems are not coloured. In this way, the detailed shading and bright colour are contrasted with gaps of uncoloured paper, emphasizing the work as constructed art. In another work, Arthurium, part of the background is coloured in a forest green, while the plants in the foreground remain black and white. The dark colour just stops on the right side of the page, with a lighter wash closer to the end. The brush strokes seem to just run out. In both cases, the addition of colour does not necessarily move the works toward realism, but instead further complicates the shift between the place of origin and the artistic space of construction.
Even after Page is introduced to gouache, she remains devoted to her felt pen, continuing to use it in much of her work. Flowers in Pot [03] uses very basic lines, making the work almost appear abstract. Using the thickness of the felt pen, she outlines the shape in a basic way, not fully connecting or closing the lines to finish the shapes.
There is no detail to the leaves, nor a clear distinction between the flower and the leaf.
Stems are just a single line. This work seems quite quickly composed, as if she is testing the limits of her instinctive response. When she describes her early art, she makes a key distinction
Realism I do very fast and am only excited when I finish and see how accurately I have drawn. It always surprises me. But in abstraction, I can hardly breathe. And it is much slower—each line coming from a long distance. (BJ 76)
It is clear that by this stage, she is not limiting herself to one style of art, but begins to explore various realist and non-realist methods of composition. The style she associates with realism is brief and immediate, associated with automatic reactions to the work.
84 Though these drawings are grounded in realism, Page's actual drawing technique
is associated with the surrealist practice of automatic drawing8. Her use of automatic
drawing has a similar purpose to the creation of a sublime landscape, marking a stage in
her development toward this style. Both of these concepts, surrealism and the sublime, are
interested in the annihilation of the subject as Page is, overwhelmed by an experience
beyond her control. In each of the artistic "studies," Page quickly recreates an art object
in a realist mode with a single pen of varying thickness. This process emphasizes the
psychological element of drawing. Barbara Godard suggests that Page adopts the mode le
hasard objectif(6). This surrealist technique links to the emotional side of the
unconscious, and is also concerned with immediacy, of creating based on instantaneous
reactions and response to place. Automatism applies the psychoanalytic principle of free
association to the creation of poetry and art (Trehearne 49). Through its responsive
nature, it works at the level of the subconscious, producing various effects because it is
not based in intention. The hand draws freely, attempting to dissociate the conscious act
of creating with the fluid motions of drawing and free association.
Both Cynthia Messenger and Brian Trehearne link Page to surrealism, in poetry
and in art. Messenger argues that her painting expresses a sense of the "fourth
dimension," but goes on to say that further research needs to be undertaken to help
understand Page's relationship to Surrealism ("Small Toothed" 86). Trehearne argues that
the Imagism he associated with Page's early poetry in Montreal Forties is complemented
by Surrealism, particularly the poetry as a form of automatic writing as well as the
8 It is not until Page moves to Mexico in the years that followed Brazil (1960-64) that she begins to formally learn about and create surrealist art under the guidance of Leonora Carrington.
85 "indefinitely bizarre landscape or atmosphere" that appears or grounds the poems through free association (Surrealism 48). In his "P.K. Page and Surrealism" Trehearne argues that
Page herself describes her writing process as passive, automatic. Using her remark from
"Questions and Images," "Why did you stop writing? I didn't. It stopped" (Filled Pen
36), Trehearne associates Page's "silence" with "creative automatism... run amok" (50). It is her reliance on a "muse" (Pearce 32 qtd in Trehearne 50), appealing to something beyond her control that explains both difficulty with writing and now, the speed with which she is attempting to create what she sees.
The automatic drawings Page produces are realistic, so they can only tentatively be placed in the surrealist tradition. David Hopkins argues that Surrealists's "elevated doodles may appear abstract, but [they] never took the step into complete abstraction"
(73). Representation can still be considered a part of automatism, though Page's style seems to extend beyond these surrealist principles into something uniquely her own. The excitement with which she records has much to do with the splendor of her senses, and she selects specific subjects that she works to capture. Page's pen is not just a "modest recording device" of her subconscious, but an active tool, connected to her artistic sensibility as she extends the seen world into an artistic space all her own.
Page completes a series of automatic and realistic drawings of her husband
Arthur. The first of these, Arthur Lying on the Sofa, depicts him as he reclines on a couch listening to a radio broadcast of Hendel's Messiah (5776). Page sketches his image in broad strokes. The lines are connected, and it is clear that she is focused on specific details. This realistic drawing has more details individually drawn in, which does not reflect the automatic drawing technique, though the rest of the series is very much drawn
86 in this vein. The Arthur Reading series emphasizes very few long lines drawn roughly on sketch paper. They are marked as a kind of "practice" as Page literally studies form and attempts to capture basic shapes. Page only selects a few details to record without broad strokes, particularly details in Arthur's face and shoes.
P.K. Irwin, Arthur Reading on Sofa
In the Arthur Reading series, the desire to capture a realistic form remains, but within more particular limitations than in the first drawing. The first four of these drawings in particular (01 to 04), focus on the broad line, on creating a basic outline of shape, instead of on particular details. The long, unbroken lines seem to test the artist's ability to capture a form quickly without taking her pen from the paper. In Arthur
Reading 01 and 02, the image appears completely out of context. A side portrait of
87 Arthur's bust with the vague outline of a paper, all in the most basic of lines, appears to really focus on the form or style of the artistic constraints Page has self-enforced.
This series in particular emphasizes a desire to act automatically, though without a background or training in the principles of surrealism. Instead, Page's experiments in surrealist techniques appear to be attempting to break through the limitations of realism.
Page eagerly anticipates a movement toward the abstract, but also wants to maintain realistic uses of line and shape. It is through automatic drawing exercises with a particular subject that Page builds the technical skill set she needs to complete her later, more complex works of art.
While previous critics have associated Page with surrealism, Page's automatic drawing, to me, seems to be the earliest way in which she attempts to connect to the sublime in her drawing. Not yet capable of recreating the awe with which she experiences sublime in the natural world, she resorts to quick, gestural sketches that do not attempt to encompass all the details she sees and experiences. She works to master the biological shapes and details in a rudimentary form, creating a catalogue of images she can later build on in more detail. At this stage, the work itself is not sublime, but, I Would argue, is a reaction to the experience of the sublime. Page has relinquished control to the pen, allowing the lines to flow freely. At the same time, she has not yet lost herself entirely as she would in a sublime artwork, as she still works to recreate limited objects which do not overwhelm or annihilate her as the creator. Instead, the automatic drawing is an outlet for
Page to transcribe and gesture toward the nature that most provokes and inspires her.
Page experiences the sublime as a witness, and creates art based on her emotional response to the Brazilian environment. The environment's power over her is rebalanced
88 in her art, where she is able to control her depictions of nature. Her automatic drawing technique distances her from strictly realist modes of expression as the automatic drawing gestures toward the object without attempting to reproduce it exactly. In these drawings,
Page seems to be searching for a way to express her own response to the environment through selective portrayals of nature. Though Page adopts a common practice within surrealist circles, she is not producing surrealist art. Page is producing affect-driven work, largely influenced by her own experience of the sublime. Page is awed and "silenced" by the natural world when she attempts to create art; her representations of nature are never fully realist.
P.K. Irwin, Experiment 01 (1957)
Along with experiments in automatic drawing, Page experiments with the limitations of the pen itself. Zailig Pollock notes on Page's official website that the drawings were made with "whatever materials came to hand," offering an immediate connection and response. Page's initial impressions can be recorded more quickly, and
89 with an eye for the complexity of the detailed images that leave Page without words. In her series Experiment that occurs before the movement to ink and gouache, Page treats her felt pen in new ways. In this series, Page creates a variety of brick-like blocks, attempting to develop various permutations of line thickness that the felt pen could create.
Page is attempting to determine and exhaust the limits of her pen. This exercise builds comfort with the pen as an extension of Page herself. Working in this new artistic language, Page builds a vocabulary for expression that she can now adopt in realist and abstract modes.
P.K. Irwin, Typewriter (1957)
At the same time, communication, and communicability remain central motifs that
Page questions. Through Page's art, a different type of exploration of communication can occur. Typewriter introduces the viewer to the much loved and feared Underwood typewriter that is not producing poetry as it should. By recreating this device, she is interpreting its meaning and reasserting creative power within herself. Page has created a way to include her new sense of self into previous versions, constructing a typewriter
90 over which she asserts complete artistic control. Page is negotiating with two of the sides of her artistic self, coming to terms with one through the other. This bridges the connection between the two art forms, as she uses them both to continue communicating beyond the limits of one medium or the other.
P.K. Irwin, Black Telephone and Flowers (c. 1957)
These sentiments concerning communication also return to the connection Page has established between nature and her ability to create. Before Page is able to make it to a full-blown sense of the sublime, she juxtaposes nature with technology. Black
Telephone and Flowers plays with these concepts by drawing an opaque blackened rotary phone next to pink flowers in a green vase. The colours of the gouaches do not penetrate the inked-in phone. The fluidity of the natural space is more open, penetrable. The brush
91 strokes are somewhat visible, making its construction more clear. The telephone is closed off, it does not allow for this same fluidity with the rest of the page. It is inaccessible.
P.K. Irwin, Flowers and Phone (c. 1957)
In a similar work, Flowers and Phone, in gouache and ink, contrasts the lively, bold flowers with a telephone in ink. We see that the landscape has some authority over the phone, showing simultaneously "sensory delight and communicational impasse"
(Godard 7). Here the phone is not coloured in, it remains an outline. The flowers exist in
92 colour, while the phone remains empty, a less effective tool. The setting is somewhat realistic, with a wall marked off from the surface the phone rests on. Again, Page plays with line in the backdrop, creating various vertical lines, some of which are filled in with a z-pattern, and some blank, some filled in black. Like the various wavelengths the phone uses to facilitate communication, the lines in the backdrop use the wave. When you read the background from left to right, it is the final set of lines that are filled and black. These black lines emphasize impasse, gesturing toward the link between service disruption and the language disruption of English in Page's Portuguese environment. It simply does not compute; the scattered, blackened wavelengths in the background emphasize the phone's disrupted communication in the foreground.
It is not until Page is able to move beyond artwork that acts as a re-presentation of what she sees and allows herself to create her own worlds, that truly sublime images begin to surface in her own artwork. In all of her realistic drawings, the dialectic between the natural world and the constructed image is concerned with artistic power in representation. Unlike the Brazilian poetry, which remains fragmented, the gestural drawings confidently both mark original elements of the environment and move them into the artistic realm. In landscape painting, the role of the artist does not need to be dependent on accurately capturing the land as a model. Like language, it exists at play semiotically. For someone concerned with her own reaction to her environment, Page is careful in her representations to keep her distance and avoid appropriation. Jonathan
Bordo describes some of the problems of landscape art:
The specular witness performs a rather special and dual role. It exalts a picture that testifies to an unpicturable condition—the wilderness sublime— while simultaneously legitimating, as a landscape picture, terrain violently seized, dispossessed of its indigenous inhabitants, and reconstituted as territory. (294)
93 Bordo's description of the specular witness speaks to the reflective process of the artist in digesting and capturing the condition of their experience. The images that Page creates point to their specularity. Though Page's written and artistic work in Brazil seems to be caught up in the details of the natural world, she never approaches these things directly.
What she has seen or witnessed is refracted through her own eye and into her artistic space.
Page's work becomes far more detail-oriented as she begins to create places of her own. She continues to operate loosely within the landscape tradition, but moves from few lines and general figures to an obsession with minutiae. Cynthia Messenger catalogues this progress:
As Page grew less dependent on models, she began to focus on the surface of her canvas, and under the influence of Paul Klee's work, lineation became central, drawing took over from painting. The late works cease any attempt at representation, and by tracing often labyrinthine constructions, they seem to rebuke the very possibility of mimesis. ("But How" 111)
While I would argue that drawing was always central to Page, Messenger's argument about the move toward lineation is valid. Page's connection to the physical object she creates with her drawing pen is an important part of her artistic discovery. Though one of her art teachers insists that she give up the pen and dream a bit more, she experiences disembodiment in this attempt, noting that "it was like an amputation renouncing that pen" (BJ 158). Page continues to experiment with line.
Though Page mentions the influence of Klee as early as 1958 in Brazilian
Journal, it is later, in January 1959 that Page suggests she first attempts to interrogate the process behind his work. Like Page, Klee is interested in building "a bridge between the
94 world within and the world without" (41). They both use the observed world as a basis for their work, though both move away from re-creating models and move inward. Page is moving through a transformation to more complex work, and she reflects on Klee
[Klee] talks of drawing in detail from nature, then turning the drawing upside down and deciding upon its construction in abstract forms, then righting it and combining the two. An ideal I shall try to adopt as this bending 'real' to suit oneself is something I find impossible. In fact Klee's ideas about construction are a comfort to me. (211)
In her reflection, Page distinguishes between attempting to control and recreate the "real" world, and constructing unique art that is less dependent on models. She finds the idea of synthesizing the real and the abstract engaging, but is not convinced that she can do it herself. By finding Klee's style "impossible" Page is not convinced she can claim the authority with which Klee describes constructing and deconstructing the natural world.
Once she has engaged with these ideas, she begins to develop a similar process in her own work, but with a difference: she feels that she relinquishes control, that she is a
"vehicle" for the art, and is controlled by it (Blake 42). This speaks to her witnessing of the sublime, and recognizing a power that is unique to nature that she cannot control.
By 1958, Page has already begun the process of creating more abstract works that are less dependent on an external model. She builds upon the techniques she has developed through rigorous drawing and painting series, and begins to dream, both with and without her favourite pen. If we follow this progression in her Brazilian Journal, it is clear that she is creating art, viewing and buying art, and reading about contemporary artists quite voraciously. In her own works at this time, she draws heavily from her immersion in other artists, but also moves distinctly toward her own developing artistic style.
95 Notable in this year is Page's drawing Mato Fino. Mato Fino is one of Page's most intricate drawings from Brazil. Mato Grosso, meaning "thick woods," is used to describe the vast vegetation and jungle that make up the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.
She plays with the meaning of grosso, meaning "large," using the antonym fino, or fine, to create a drawing of fine, delicate lines in ink. The page is covered in details recorded in minute size. Mato Grosso is known for its exceptionally biodiversity, including the world's largest wetland as well as Amazonian rainforest. The drawing uses biomorphic shapes, with vegetation and organic life forms making up many of the detailed shapes.
The drawing is densest in the right bottom corner, making the rest of the image move upward, springing forth. Though the drawing is abstract, it seems very concerned with vegetation and organic wholes, replicating feathers, eye shapes and cell shapes.
Images found in the Brazilian poetry also are present, including a large spider reminiscent of the "Golden Spider Web" and wing shapes of the "Giant Bird." It is interesting to note that these are images from the Portuguese poems, which are captured in their natural environment, not in a domesticated space.
96 P.K. Irwin, Mato Fino (1958)
97 Page has placed them within her own image-web, incorporating plant life that extends beyond cestas and philodendrons. Much of the plant matter seems to begin somewhere else, off-page. The viewer is only able to witness what Page has granted us access to. That being said, the agency of the viewer is integral to this image. In Mato
Fino, there is no central figure that draws the eye. Instead, hundreds of fronds, leaves, branches, and vines all coalesce. The drawing is not unified; each individual figure is rendered in very specific detail. The grand is pitted against the precious, leaving the viewer to read the drawing from left to right, up and down, searching for a synthesis that is denied.
It is this drawing that really foregrounds the sublime aspect of Page's art. She has created a drawing from which the reader is excluded, though the imagery is drawn from nature. Through this text, much of the "wordlessness," and painful beauty of Brazil is translated into terms that position the reader to witnessing the sublime. The drawing is somewhat closed off, the reader has only mediated access to the core of the drawing because of the density of images and fine detail. Without a central image, and with shifting curves and lines, the work doesn't show the reader how it should be read. This work is not guided, gesturing to the various possibilities, but handing us no specific route for reading or interpreting the work.
A year later, after digesting more Klee and further developing her style, Page continues to create complex line drawings of organic shapes. Drawings such as Labyrinth and Stone Fruit use oil pastel, and a technique called sgraffito to create similar fine lines, and further explore biomorphic shapes. In sgraffito style, it is through removing layers, pastel in this case, to create an image and play with colour on top of colour.
98 P.K. Irwin, Labyrinth (1958)
In more complex pieces, such as Labyrinth and Stone Fruit, distinctions between natural, organic shapes and abstract lines become blurred. In Labyrinth, the reds and blues create layers that give the drawing depth, making it appear womb or cell-like. The circularity of the shape draws the eye inward, though there is no central focal point. The lines are varied, giving each layer a different texture through its own patterning and colour combination. Only one distinguishable organic object, a tree, seems to occur
99 within the work. Its status is unclear. It is both incorporated with the rest of the drawing, and also stands apart from it.
P.K. Irwin, Stone Fruit (1959)
In Stone Fruit, it is an organic, natural object hanging on a branch that is abstracted through layering. Page reveals the inside of the fruit, detailing the stone that is its nucleic centre. The abstract is a part of the organic. There is no point at which the shape becomes indiscernible, though the complex weaving lines change and intersect.
Geometric shapes, triangles and circles, are interwoven into the texture of the fruit itself.
The drawing builds upon itself as Page creates it, building upon layers of pastel, and upon
100 existing lines. Lineation through Page's etching technique complicates the original, organic shape and creates something different, more subjective.
Page's interest in the sgraffito technique continues to develop throughout her time in Brazil. Page seeks out different types of instruction, leading to an expansion of breadth in medium and style. One of the painting sessions that was most remembered and returned to by Page occurred under the instruction of Israeli ambassador and painter Arie
Aroch, who taught her how to mix oil paints effectively. This session led to the creation of the small canvas Insects, and is recounted in both the Brazilian Journal and the retrospective poem "Conversation" first published in 1991. Like the "whole green world" poem I used to introduce Page's painting, "Conversation" provides a point of intersection between Page's two artistic spheres. Having a painting with a corresponding poem demands an authorial reading of the works on multiple levels simultaneously. The poem alludes to both real-life experience and abstracted artworks that are only fully grasped when read together as one narrative.
The painting and the retrospective poem that describes its creation each bring a different perspective to the experience, and together provide a unique, palimpsestic perspective of Page's experience of Brazil. For example, in order to read the intertextual references in the poem, you need to be familiar with both the original artwork and the journal entry. In contrast, just by looking at the painting, it isn't clear that Page has been instructed, or that this is her first attempt at sgraffito in oil paint. The convergence of poetry and paint, when read together, sketch a recovery from the poetic crisis of Page's time in Brazil, the abandonment of poetry for paint, to the final reaffirmation of poetic form.
101 The careful choice of title for the poem, as suggested by Sigrid Renaux in her close reading, refers to more than just the two participants; it points to the ongoing dialogue between poetry and art in Page's work (117). As in the "whole green world,"
"Conversation" is also concerned with boundaries and frames
'We were set in the green enamel of Brazil— you, monumental, an Old Testament prophet, caught mid stride and speaking in utterances: "Thou shalt. Thou shalt not.' (HR 2.124)
Page describes the setting of the conversation as if it were a piece of artwork "set" into the frame of the "green enamel of Brazil." Quite unlike the Brazilian poetry in which the solidified green imagery of the green chrysoprase excludes Page, in this poem the two characters are fused with the green, now clearly associated with the "green world" instead of seeking entry.
The importance of this afternoon to Page is made clear by the grandeur with which she introduces the scene and references Aroch. By speakin of Aroch as a
"prophet," Page speaks to the talent and wisdom she associates with him, as well as to the spiritual and emotional connection to her creation. Because he is "speaking in utterance," it is clear that Page feels a strong sense of subordination. Page's account of her day with
Aroch in the Brazilian Journal is built around a doubting observer who is concerned with her artistic shift. She writes, "Ever since he heard me say I have begun drawing, he has been rude to me about it, telling me I am a good poet, why chuck overboard all the understanding of one art form in order to begin another about which I know nothing?"
(217). Through reading these texts together, it is clear that Page is exploring her own capabilities for exploration and growth, disregarding the proclamations of others.
102 The serious tone of the first stanza is challenged by the next two, which describe the two artists painting together
'But—we were laughing. Have you forgotten? I was high—higher than Corcovado on the light the colour, the sharp smell of turps and the little jewel of a canvas we had made: insects, of all things, winged and crawling, bright iridescent bodies, hexagonal eyes and the absolute stamp of air in the gauze of their wings. No "shalt. No "shalt not.'
'I was laughing—true. Not up to utterances. Able only to slosh and slosh my brush in the paint your Old Testament hand had mixed with such assurance—additive colour—paint like light, when under its sudden weight, my hand collapsed. Each cell grew heavy. My arm fell (HR 2.124).
Page changes the tone of the poem by including laughter, and then asking, "have you forgotten?" She plays with the concept of memory, pointing to this moment as something important. However, knowing that the event took place over thirty years ago, the reference to forgetting reminds us that this recreation it is not something that accurately reflects her previous experience. The construction of the poem parallels the published constructions of Brazil as a whole: they are selectively remembered to centralize an uplifting narrative of becoming a visual artist while suppressing narratives of struggle and silence.
In this poem, the frame of the setting in "green enamel" of the participants creates another frame for the "little jewel of a canvas" in the second stanza. This painting-within- a-painting-within-a-poem emphasizes the relationship between the two arts as a unique space particular to an individual artist. As the "canvas" also points outward to a piece of
103 created art, Insects, it moves freely between objects in the real world, memory, and the imaginative space of creation. Sigrid Renaux elaborates in her close reading of the second stanza, "The canvas with the painting on it becomes iconic of the page of a book with the poem about a painting printed on it, thus indelibly mixing both arts and artists, and therefore also retrieving Horace's 'ut pictura poesis'" (121).
The way that Page describes the painting also reflects a highly idealized memory of the canvas. The "little jewel of a canvas" that is Insects is celebrated in the poem. Page experiences a euphoric "high" as she learns how to layer paint, and how to recreate the sgraffito look in oil. As she explains in the journal,
Arie showed me how to mix the tempera of the Old Masters—egg, oil, and water— and how to use this as a surface to scratch through. He also showed me how, in oils, to paint wet on wet without getting the colours dirty. An exciting morning. (217)
The whimsy with which she reminisces about the "bright, iridescent bodies" and
"absolute stamp of air/ in the gauze of their wings" does not necessarily reflect the very primal, simplistic look of the finished work.
P.K. Irwin, Insects (1959)
104 Insects carves basic insect shapes out of layers of oil paint using a sharp tool. The shapes are very primitive, playing with the lines of wings and antennas. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the gestural sketches of the various plant series, focused on various line shapes on a bright background. The layers of colour are rough in some places, and in others she appears to have made a better attempt at layering without "getting the colours dirty." Without "Conversation," the significance of this rather small, simple drawing is lost on the reader. It is only at the intersection of prose, poetry and painting that real insight can be gained into the composition of the work.
The final stanza of the poem speaks most strongly to the place of composition, with several key markers that elevate the canvas into the space of memory
'It was then you put the fire in the canvas, flame in the wings. Made little phoenixes of the simple flies. Spun, on the ball of your foot.' (HR 2.124)
Page simultaneously celebrates the artistic knowledge of her instructor, and the majestic nature of the environment that has allowed her to create. It isn't the actual painting that is being celebrated, but the conversation and mentorship of Arie Aroch and Brazil as a whole. Sigrid Reneaux suggests that the "fire in the canvas" can be linked to the natural world and Brazil itself. The pau brasil, the reddish tree trunk from which the country takes its name is connected to the term pau brasa, the colour of ember and live red coal
(125). It is this fire that brings flame to the wings, and makes "phoenixes of the simple flies." In this way, Brazil has ignited Page fiercely.
Page is first allowed a battered admission into the "whole green world," and is now set on fire by it as it cleanses her and offers an opportunity for re-definition and self-
105 actualization as a visual artist. "This whole green world" was written during Page's time in Brazil. It is contemporaneous with Page's struggle, allowing it to register the pain and exclusion in an immediate, intense moment. In this earlier poem, fire imagery is also used metaphorically: "fire to flare and gut the head." It is the loss and removal that the fire draws attention to, first emphasizing the artistic space, and then removing its contents. In the later poem, "Conversation," fire takes on a completely different meaning. Through hindsight, Page is able to incorporate fire mythically, creating a simultaneous image of death and rebirth. Through paint, "little phoenixes" ascend from the ashes and the narrative changes. Through examining the two poems together, we can see the genesis of these narratives, how they are constructed and changed over time. It is only after Brazil that the circle is completed in the later poetry in which Page is able to embrace words once more.
Page's status as "exile and inhabitant" has shifted through her turn to visual art.
Though still an alien to the environment, Page becomes more comfortable as an exiled inhabitant of Brazil. She uses the visual to recreate familiar creative rhythms that she initially feels are lost when she finds it difficult to write poetry. Near the end of the
Brazilian Journal, she links her artistic process to her writing process, "Just as one word draws out another, so one shape draws out another" (221). Page initially uses her pen to draw when she cannot find the words; by the end of her time in Brazil, she argues that her compulsion to write and draw are both driven externally, beyond the limits of her control.
In this way, the writing pen and drawing pen are "the same pen," what she will later call the "filled pen."
106 It is her fascination with the natural world, and the difficult process of mediating it, that fuels her creatively. Her reactions to the sublime nature of Brazil and its exoticness foreground for her her own subjectivity. She realizes that it is she who is foreign, exotic to Brazil, and must find new ways of communicating and embracing the new world she has entered. As she develops artistically, Page is able to negotiate the sublime in new ways, drawing from landscape art and surrealist automatic drawing, and, finally, merging the two in biomorphic abstraction and fine lineation.
Brazil is a turning point for Page because of its multiple moments of transition and impasse, culturally, linguistically and aesthetically. As a result, Page's new relationship with art includes alienation and inclusion, crossing between natural and organic spaces and abstraction. Page is momentarily forced into an immediate present from which she can only move forward. Because of her frustration and the pain of being unable to write, as well as an intense love for the vivacious colours and images of Brazil, P.K. Page redefines herself as a visual artist. She changes her artistic identity to match her lived experience and new worldview as a "neophyte painter" (Godard 5). Page's developing painterly identity as P.K. Irwin reflects a new vision of borders, boundaries, and the space between art and poetry.
107 P.K. PAGE
BRAZILIAN POEMS:
A GENETIC PARALLEL TEXT EDITION OF CONTAINER 27 FILE 5 OF THE P.K. PAGE FONDS
EDITED BY
EMILY BALLANTYNE
108 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION AND EDITORIAL PROCEDURES 110 EXPLANATION OF TRANSCRIBED REVISIONS 113
POEMS 116
A bridge across a chasm 118 There are the two things here: the giant leaves 120 This whole green world, crystal and spherical 122 This whole green world, crystal and spherical 124 The seas are empty 126 Brazilian Conversation 128 My muteness induced by ignorance of the tongue that is spoken here 130 Negralinha 132 Write, & imagine a poem that list of trees 134 There should be more to say but I become 136 To Those Who Write of Italy 138 Everyone writes of Italy but here in Rio 140 Our house is all openings 142 Some Paintings by Portinari 144 The candles gutter in the rack and smell 146 On Looking Out My Bedroom Window 148 She sat on the sill of the sunny morning 150 As a drowned body fills with water 152 At my feet as we walked 154 Not your problem 156
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM 158
Natural History Museum 158 I saw a baleen in his bones 160 I saw a baleen in his bones 162 The Sloths 164 In death as light 166 These tiny creatures have for face a space 168
EDITORIAL EMENDATIONS 170
APPENDIX A- PAGE's LIST OF BIRDS 171 APPENDIX B- BRAZILIAN POEMS AT THE 175 LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
TITLE/FIRST LINE INDEX 176
109 EDITOR' S INTRODUCTION AND EDITORIAL PROCEDURES
Container 27, file 5 of the P.K. Page fonds contains twenty-seven unpublished manuscript and typescript poems, most of them fragmentary, which Page wrote in Brazil in 1957 and early 1958. This genetic edition of the poems, by recording blanks and revisions, emphasizes the process of composition and sheds new light on the process by which Page lost old identities, and gained new ones. Unlike the much-revised Brazilian
Journal, published many years after Page had left Brazil, the poems in this edition have not been retrospectively "worked up." They offer valuable insight into Page's time in
Brazil as she was experiencing it.
These pages exist on the boundary between the public and the private. Page may have intended some of them for eventual publication, but none ever were published.
Based on the number of typographical errors and revisions in the typescript pages, it is clear that none of these are "fair copies," ready for submission. In this edition all versions are therefore considered equal, representing various stages in the unfinished genesis of text with no "best text." In most cases, I have maintained the sequence of the poems in the file, though it is not clear whether this sequence reflects Page's intentions. Some years after the file was deposited in the archives, the pages were numbered by Zailig Pollock in the order in which he found them - but there is no evidence that the file as he found it still maintained its original order. The most important exception is that I have chosen to group together fragments which seem to be part of a single developing work, irrespective of where they occur in the file. In this case, I have placed the poems in an order based on their location within the original file.
110 If a poem is titled, I have italicized it in the index and contents. All other poems
are assigned a title based on their first line, which is in roman.
This edition is designed to provide a clean reading text on the right-hand pages,
with a transcription of the process of its genesis on the left-hand pages. The right hand page also includes explanatory notes at the bottom of the page. Where possible, I have
referenced the Brazilian Journal (BJ). General references have also been included when
necessary, from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) where applicable. The notes
include brief definitions of words, images, people and concepts.
Integral to these texts is their status as transitional, which emphasizes Page's
working through the writing process. Through the transcription of the genesis of the text
on the left pages, changes are all presented equally, allowing the reader to use the
numbering system to view multiple, shifting texts all on one page. The transcriptions on
the left hand pages are not diplomatic. Instead of attempting to recreate the layout of the page, they are meant to reveal the stages of composition, to generate a narrative of changes that Page made to her poems as she revised them.
My approach comes from the German school of textual editing. Hans Walter
Gabler, editor of the synoptic version of Joyce's Ulysses, argues that his practice is to
"edit text not so much to emphasize the author, but rather to render transparent the text in
its material historicity" (4). By marking the various stages of the text, recording false
starts and inevitable tangents, the text's fluidity becomes apparent on the page.
Though clean texts have been produced for each poem, on the right hand pages,
these texts should not give the impression that the works are finished or the edition definitive. These right-hand "reader-friendly" pages have been included for the
111 convenience of readers and as the basis for texts to be included in print versions of the poems, as in Kaleidoscope, the poetry volume in the Collected Works ofP.K. Page, where some of these texts appear. They are not to be taken as "definitive" versions of the poetry.
Zailig Pollock at Trent University, general editor of the Collected Works of P.K.
Page, developed the transcription system I have employed. With his guidance and support, this edition has been developed to showcase, on a much smaller scale, the type of work to be anticipated when the digital edition is published in the near future.
The genetic text I have created is intended to eventually appear in an online format, coded using the Textual Encoding Initiatives (TEI) markup language. It will be part of the larger digital Collected Works that encompasses Page's Complete Poems. By creating a digital text using the markup language, versions completely different from the one presented here will be made possible using the same core data. In its digital incarnation, this edition will include a digitized reproduction of each page of the Page fonds, allowing for immediate comparison between the editor's text and its source. The digital edition will also allow the user to access only the data s/he needs for research, accommodating new scholars looking for simple clear text renditions, as well as complete genetic transcriptions for textual scholars.
112 EXPLANATION OF TRANSCRIBED REVISIONS
On the left pages, each line of the poem is numbered. If there are multiple variations of this line, they are recorded chronologically in parentheses (). This results in a short list of all the possible versions of a particular line, i.e. 2(1), 2(2), 2(3). The last version of a particular line is the one that has been recorded on the clear text right hand page.
When the revision occurs over more than one line, the format is altered slightly to group all of the initial lines, and then all the subsequent changes to the group, i.e. 1(1),
2(1), 3(1), then 1(2), 2(2), 3(2). This is helpful for viewing stanza changes, particularly for reflecting changes in layout.
To make the actual altered text stand out from the rest of the page, I have indicated all revisions using angled brackets <> and square brackets []. The angled brackets mark the part of the line that was altered from by the addition, deletion or movement. The square brackets mark the part of the line it was altered to. Thus,
When you follow a transcription all the way through, all angled brackets will be replaced by square brackets. If there are multiple sets of changes, the angled brackets and square brackets mark the stage of the individual components of the line during that particular revision.
113 I use colour coding and symbols to distinguish between two different types of revisions. The text, as Page wrote it, appears in black. Red marks out revisions made to the content or layout of the work. This includes deletions and additions both within the line, as well as entire stanzas. Blue marks layout, including such matters as line breaks, line spacing, or indents. Here is a brief breakdown of several of the markings I use:
and
that are carried over or spaced out in a line for stylistic
effect.
/ Line break is used to marks a line break in the text, when
space limitations force one line to be continued onto the
next.
| No line break is used to mark a text where a line break is
taken away during revision,
[incomplete] Incomplete is used when a change or typeographical occurs
in the middle of the line that renders it unfinished.
There are several points when I have had to use nested revisions. This occurs when there are both line-level changes and grouping changes. Thus, if in the middle of a four-line group, Page decided to add a single word to one line, the changes would need to be marked within the larger group. These changes are marked by letters, to keep them separate from the larger multiple line change. Thus, the lines may appear as 1(1), 2(1),
3(1), 1(2), 2(2a), 2(2b), 3(2).
114 I will end this section with a short narrated example of the first stanza from the first poem in this edition:
1(1) obridge across a chasm 1(2) [a] bridge across a chasm 2(1)
In the first version of the first line, 1(1), red angle brackets with nothing inside them <> indicate that a word will be added in the next set of revisions. In the second version of the first line, 1(2), the [a], indicates that the line now has add an initial "a". Because the
1(2) is marked in black, this is the final revision to that line.
The second set of changes, to lines two and three, involve moving some text around to create a clearer line sequence, and then eventually eliminating a line altogether. The lines are grouped together, marking the first version of lines two and three, 2(1), 3( 1) followed directly by the second version of lines two and three: 2(2), 3(2). Thus, "thrown like / lariat" becomes "like / lariat thrown". In the final revision, Page decides to remove the first line altogether, thus 1/2(3) contains empty square brackets [], and line 2(3), "lariat thrown," is all that remains. What this means is that in the final version the line that used to be between what are now lines one and two has been deleted. This means that the final version is shorter by one line than the previous versions.
115 The final two lines, 3 and 4, are unaltered. Thus, "shining with deftness / from hill to hill" is consistent in all versions of this poem.
By matching up the black line numbers in the revised text, you will get a text identical to the one that appears on the right hand side of the page. The clear text version reads:
1 a bridge across a chasm 2 lariat thrown 3 shining with deftness 4 from hill to hill
116 POEMS*
* In order for the edition to be read correctly, the odd and even pages must be viewed side-by-side.
116 117 1(1) obridge across a chasm 1(2) [a] bridge across a chasm 2(1)
5 How write a word 6 the fashions swings despite 7 [ILLEGIBLE] lava 8 mincing
9 And when he marrk 10 it was as if some mi
118 A bridge across a chasm lariat thrown shining with deftness from hill to hill
5 How write a word the fashions swings despite [ILLEGIBLE] lava mincing
And when he married 10 it was as if some milestone had moved of its own accord.
lariat] A rope used for picketing horses or mules; a cord or rope with a noose used in catching wild cattle; the lasso of Mexico and South America (OED). ILLEGIBLE] As per correspondence between P.K. Page and Zailig Pollock (07/30/09), transcription remains unclear, and the author cannot confirm a particular reading.
119 1(1) [incomplete] 1.(2) <[In]>[incomplete] 1 (3) [There are the two things here: the giant leaves] 2 the 15 greens within a frame 3( 1) green crowding green & being
8 the other: the high cries of girls— 9 cries like the speech 10 of each green stalk. 11 The ones that end in feathers,
12 Who drums? 13 the girl in denim or the boy in tweeds
120 There are the two things here: the giant leaves the 15 greens within a frame green crowding green & being more than green, til green became 5 the total spectrum in the prism see light split & break one drums in this green sea
the other: the high cries of girls— cries like the speech 10 of each green stalk. The ones that end in feathers,
Who drums? the girl in denim or the boy in tweeds
121 1 This whole green world, crystal and spherical 2 silent as a hole in a head, within 3 which all those birds coloured beaks cheep cheep 4 girls throats yell boy's brakes scream 5 and Manuel's wheelbarrow crunches and scrapes 6 its rusty iron rim
7(1)
122 This whole green world, crystal and spherical silent as a hole in a head, within which all those birds coloured beaks cheep cheep girls throats yell boy's brakes scream 5 and Manuel's wheelbarrow crunches and scrapes its rusty iron rim
Hollow the other silence aches around it, is a green hoop in three dimensions, shaped with compass and theorem, a slow chrysoprase 10 fire to flare and gut the head
Manuel] Manuel is identified as the gardener's assistant for Page's Brazilian estate (BJ 26). chrysoprase] Applied to an apple-green variety of chalcedony. A precious (or semi-precious) stone, which in its various tints is largely used in lapidary work: a cryptocrystalline sub-species of quartz (a true quartz, with some disseminated opal-quartz), having the lustre nearly of wax, and being either transparent or translucent (OED).
123 1 This whole green world, crystal and spherical 2 silent as the hole in a head within 3 which all those birds coloured beaks cheepcheep 4 girls throats yell boys brakes scream 5 and Manuels wheelbarrow crunches and scrapes 6 its rusty iron rim.
7(1)
[incomplete] 13(2) through which those thousand noises dart like [birds.]
124 This whole green world, crystal and spherical silent as the hole in a head within which all those birds coloured beaks cheepcheep girls throats yell boys brakes scream 5 and Manuel's wheelbarrow crunches and scrapes its rusty iron rim.
Paint it. The other silence aches around it is a green bruise in three dimensions shaped with compasses and theorems, a slow 10 chrysoprase fire to gut the head and leave among the charred curved rafters, elegant in carbon a global shell through which those thousand noises dart like birds.
125 1 These seas are emty 2 neither shell nor gull 3(1)
9 Riding the winds instead 10 a hundred kites on strings 11 & one a giant bird & one 12 a sweet heart candy pink 13 & where the large one led 14 so went the smaller one. These seas are empty neither shell nor gull ride on their tides or winds one wet carnation from a sailing birds 5 going-away bouquet was carried in & lies like blood upon the ashy sands
Riding the winds instead 10 a hundred kites on strings & one a giant bird & one a sweet heart candy pink & where the large one led so went the smaller one.
127 Brazilian Conversation.
1(1)
1(3) The giant rests.
2( 1)
128 Brazilian Conversation
1 The giant rests.
the people on the beaches complain of the resting giant complain & rest
Even the heroes are resting now, he said 5 & I saw the leaders, all the famous generals resting upon their swords
Explorers resting midway on the map like statues resting on their pedestals.
Standing they lean as in a balustrade 10 the angle of the elbow on a ledge— hip in a bevel of stone like lovers lean upon each other
women on window sills—in a diminishing scale of lighted squares 15 women with languor & longing resting in their hearts
giant rests] Brazil is often referred to as the "sleeping giant." This economic term refers to the wealth of resources and economic potential that Brazil has that has not yet been utilized at the international stage. Page's decision to use "resting" suggests a far more temporary sojourn from international economic power.
129 1 My muteness induced by ignorance of the /tongue that is spoken here
2 The heat & weight of it 3 the warm wet water 4 through which I move 5 silently lumbering 6 through the green rooms <> [~-] 7 & the green garden 8 where flowers like parrots 9 form their ocean floor 10(1)
130 My muteness induced by ignorance of the tongue that is spoken here
The heat & weight of it the warm wet water through which I move silently lumbering through the green rooms
& the green garden where flowers like parrots form their ocean floor 10 ascended slowly on a fleshy stalk move in a tiny current an instant float then more velvet silent than before Motionless now that green warm water dense as a cube of green glass
warm wet water] In BJ, "How could I have imagined so surrealist and seductive a world? One does not like the heat, yet its constancy, its all-surroundingness, is as fascinating as the smell of musk. Every moment is slow, as if under warm greenish water" (9).
131 Negralinha.
1 The goat came with the cook 2 was black & cried 3 all night among the mangoes 4 then with one 5 heavenly tug broke free 6 the chain a thin 7 silvery serpent in the undergrowth 8 & raced now in the garden 9 among the pink 10 lilies of patent leather 11 shook the pale flowers of the frangi pani /from /the /tree 12(1) Cook in his high hat
17 caught at last in a cul-de-sac 18 outwitted she 19 walked like a mincing girl 20(1)
The goat came with the cook was black & cried all night among the mangoes then with one 5 heavenly tug broke free the chain a thin silvery serpent in the undergrowth & raced now in the garden among the pink 10 lilies of patent leather shook the pale flowers of the frangipani from the tree Cook in his high hat chased & dark Jose flapping a duster 15 & the two & she all nimble
caught at last in a cul-de-sac outwitted she walked like a mincing girl 20 passing the pool she is no ordinary goat she has lived with a circus
Negralinha] "The Episode of the Goat" is detailed in full in the Brazilian Journal. The goat belonged to Morel, the cook, who brought it to the estate. She had frequent escapes, bleated regularly and ate parts of the garden during her brief stay. Called Negrinha, which contains the Portuguese for black, "negra" and the female suffix, "a" (BJ 37-40). 11 Frangipani] A fragrant ornamental shrub or tree of the genus Plumeria having large, fragrant, white, yellow, or purplish salver-shaped flowers in terminal cymes (OED). 13 Jose] Identified as "our mulato cleaner" (BJ 38).
133 I write, & imagine a poem that list of trees 2(1) if you will, if you want; <|>the list is still a list 3(1) [] 2(2) if you will, if you want; [/] 3(2) the list is still a list 4( 1) onot dissimilar to the laundry slip 4(2) [&] not dissimilar to the laundry slip 5 what if those leaves are large as the ear 6 of the Indian elephant? 7 & those like a woven fan 8 & those & those 9 spiked, plumed, feathered 10 hand-blocked, carved embossed— II together though—en scene—entier
134 write, & imagine a poem that list of trees if you will, if you want; the list is still a list & not dissimilar to the laundry slip 5 what if those leaves are large as the ear of the Indian elephant? & those like a woven fan & those & those spiked, plumed, feathered 10 hand-blocked, carved embossed— together though—en scene—entier
135 1 There should be more to say but I become 2 when confronted—dumb— 3( 1) like a bird in a cage,
4 Possible to like what one has got: 5 The Rousseau painting at my back that string 6 swinging a little is a monkeys tail 7 & among the bright innocent flowers 8 of the jungle
9 small lizards nude as chickens newly plucked 10 run about with leaf insects in their mouths— 11 look up alertly 12 alerted by the twitching on their tongue 13 not to relax
14 It is not enough to describe it 15 who wants a list of fauna besides myself 16 voracious
136 There should be more to say but I become when confronted—dumb— like a bird in a cage, can't sing on request
Possible to like what one has got: 5 The Rousseau painting at my back that string swinging a little is a monkeys tail & among the bright innocent flowers of the jungle
small lizards nude as chickens newly plucked 10 run about with leaf insects in their mouths— look up alertly alerted by the twitching on their tongue not to relax
It is not enough to describe it 15 who wants a list of fauna besides myself voracious
Rousseau] Henri Rousseau (May 1844 - September 1910) was a French Post- Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality. His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle.
137 To those who write of Italy.
1 One cannot be too literary about Rio— 2 employing rather 3 the vocabulary of a jeweller 4 the platinum skyscrapers that follow the curve /of 5(1)
6 It is very much the vogue nowadays 7 to write of Italy & to show 8 the world you know all the references
9 the hills of carved jade 10 I saw, as a child, 11 the tiniest golden teaset in the world 12 made by a jeweller through the jeweller's /glass 13 screwed in his eye
138 To those who write of Italy.
One cannot be too literary about Rio— employing rather the vocabulary of a jeweler the platinum skyscrapers that follow the curve of 5 ultramarine
It is very much the vogue nowadays to write of Italy & to show the world you know all the references
the hills of carved jade 10 I saw, as a child, the tiniest golden tea set in the world made by a jeweler through the jeweler's glass screwed in his eye
139 1 Everyone writes of Italy but here in Rio 2( 1) the
3 his — exile 4 shimmers like an island out in the bay 5 & the conical bits just behind abstracted
6 On cannot be too literary about it 7 employing rather 8 the vocabulary of a jeweller 9 the platinum skyscrapers which ring the /beach
140 Everyone writes of Italy but here in Rio the palace where emperors danced the night before his — exile shimmers like an island out in the bay & the conical bits just behind abstracted
On cannot be too literary about it employing rather the vocabulary of a jeweller the platinum skyscrapers which ring the beach
exile] Dom Pedro II (December 1825- December 1981), was Emperor of Brazil from 1841 to 1889. His regime was supported for 40 years due to his liberal attitudes, recognized widely for his leadership and compassion for the Brazilian people. The royal family went into exile in Portugal following a military coup d'etat on November 15, 1889. the platinum... beach] Page describes Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, "From our height in the platinum apartment block, we could see the whole beach with its flickering lights and white bodies moving against the dark rhythmic waves of the sea" (BJ 192).
141 1 Our house is all openings 2 Everywhere you turn 3 doors or windows open onto 4 sheets of hot air 5 on those verandahs
6(1) & the two
142 Our house is all openings Everywhere you turn doors or windows open onto sheets of hot air on those verandahs
& the two parakeets from Mato Grosso crack sunflower seeds the whole day long & shriek
& the two parakeets] "Nearby, two green parrots, chained and aggressively bad- tempered, screamed at each other and everyone else" (BJ 47). Mato Grosso] The third largest state in Brazil, located in the West. It translates into English as "Thick Woods," but the birds Page references are in captivity.
143 Some Paintings by Portinari
1 With the first lot flat 2 it was as if he'd cut of my breasts 3 & levelled my nose 4 Like the side of a barn 5 I walked
8(1) With the others lord all the colours
15 And in Rio 16 the bomb of light exploded 17 the flash
144 Some Paintings by Portinari
With the first lot flat it was as if he'd cut of my breasts & leveled my nose Like the side of a barn 5 I walked & met them flat flat—on & one uptilted my chin
With the others lord all the colours gone Strange but I wore 10 red when I came & green & he made them grey & painted the grey all over my skin & the pain pulled all the muscles & cords
15 And in Rio the bomb of light exploded the flash
Portinari] Candido Portinari (1903-1962) is a Brazilian neo-realist painter and mural artist. Known for exposing disparate conditions in Brazil such as poverty and drought, his paintings are often without colour, with muted earth tones and figures represented by flecks of colour and plays of light. 11-14 he made them grey...] Page describes a roomful of Portinari paintings in Chateaubriand's collection at the Museu de Arte as, "large, strangely grey paintings full of pain" (BJ 49).
145 1(1) The candles gutter in the
7 walker among so many supplicants
146 The candles gutter in the rack & smell remove the body of the church the wax drips on the iron in Latin icicles grey ostrich feathers curl above the wicks walker among so many supplicants
147 On looking out of My Bedroom Window
1 15 greens within a frame.
The tree
148 On looking out of My Bedroom Window
15 greens within a frame.
The tree
149 1 She sat on the sill of the sunny morning 2 the jungle straining its leashes there 3(1) pulled
5(1) Untilo another life beginning: 5(2) Until [with] another life beginning: 6 the green & ominous shade undid 7(1) the flowering trees &
9 & she rose pale as platinum 10( 1) & her loveo the very shape of grief 10(2) & her love [was] the very shape of grief 11 & high on the hill the wild wild plants 12( 1) like
13 fire
150 She sat on the sill of the sunny morning the jungle straining its leashes there pulled the perpendicular mountain nearer & nearer her
5 Until with another life beginning: the green & ominous shade undid the flowering trees & feathered whistlers within her blood
& she rose pale as platinum 10 & her love was the very shape of grief & high on the hill the wild wild plants like fire or the — rocket of love
fire
151 1 As a drowned body fills with water— 2( 1) swells, <|>blows up like a bladder floats 2(2) swells, [/] 3(2) blows up like a bladder floats 4( 1) on the heavy as mercury
152 As a drowned body fills with water— swells, blows up like a bladder floats on the heavy as mercury lake 5 so this woman swollen with emptiness is slapping against the leaves of the calendar— I cannot get her out of my eye the scene is sparkling yet she 10 obtrudes within the frame She is in pain the fearful swelling bloats her & the current of time carries her. It is macabre to see the smallest eddy spin 15 that great sac undo her slow corolla
16 corolla] The whorl of leaves (petals) either separate or grown together, forming the inner envelope of the flower, and generally its most conspicuous part; usually coloured and of delicate texture.
153 1 At my feet as we walked 2 the butterfly Navy-blue 3 outstretched in death 4 How beautiful I said & bent to touch 5 But Homero's voice full of alarm & drama
154 At my feet as we walked the butterfly Navy-blue outstretched in death How beautiful I said & bent to touch But Homero's voice full of alarm & drama
Homero] Identified as one of Page's cleaners. Page describes an episode in which Homero discovers a robber (ladrao), calls the police, and other servants lock the robber in a room, only to have him escape by jumping out a window (57 78-9).
155 1 Not your problem 2 yours will be different this 3 already seems old-fashioned to you & 4 hardly exciting yet I swear 5 young man, intelligent & fair as you 6 grew grey in its service, crusted
7 the same black night that priests have /suffered
8 your face is beautiful 9 as mine was once 10 simply by being young & arrogant 11 & knowing your cause is right 12 the world will change
156 Not your problem yours will be different this already seems old-fashioned to you & hardly exciting yet I swear 5 young man, intelligent & fair as you grew grey in its service, crusted
the same black night that priests have suffered
your face is beautiful as mine was once 10 simply by being young & arrogant & knowing your cause is right the world will change
157 Natural History Museum.
1 The Sloths
2 have loofah fur
3 and faces by Henry Moore
4 Maursupials
5 To be a marsupial in Australai 6 in strange enough 7 But in Brazil its stranger still: 8( 1) consider a
158 Natural History Museum
The Sloths
have loofah fur
and faces by Henry Moore
Marsupials
To be a marsupial in Australia in strange enough But in Brazil its stranger still: consider a duck with a duclin in its pocket and a blonde rat with a brood of four
Moore] Henry Moore (July 1898 - August 1986) was an English artist and sculptor. He is best known for his abstract monumental bronze sculptures that are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces.
159 1 I saw a baleen in his bones 2 long-fingered hands close to his ribs 3 I saw him swim in the air like a stone 4 I saw through the holes in his face
5(1) <> 6( 1) astraddle a painted tree in the crook of its wood 7( la) the slothso in
11 A gold splotched spider guards /his golden web—
12 the marmosets grow stamens out of their ears 13 & their fingers feel like the stems of/violets 14( 1) yet a face the size of the top point of
160 I saw a baleen in his bones long-fingered hands close to his ribs I saw him swim in the air like a stone I saw through the holes in his face
5 in a coffin of glass all the pretty singers dead on sticks, heads cocked astraddle a painted tree in the crook of its wood the sloths union suited in loofah fur the zebras long spine 10 & the coral snake pretty in brine—
A gold splotched spider guards his golden web—
the marmosets grow stamens out of their ears & their fingers feel like the stems of violets yet a face the size of the top point of your thumb 15 looks at you with frustration
I baleen in his bones...] "The Natural History Museum" appears in a narrative form in the Brazilian Journal. This discussion of the tufted ear marmoset, stuffed birds, and the Brazilian marsupial duck occur in the Brazilian Journal, dating the various versions of this poem to 1957 (BJ 50) 8 Union suited] A union suit is a one-piece set of long underwear. Originally created as an alternative to constricting corsetry for women in the 1860s, the garment quickly gained popularity across both genders. Traditionally, it has full arms and legs, and buttoned up the front and with a button flap "trap door" at the rear. II A gold splotched...] Page talks about the first time she sees a spider in a golden web in the Brazilian Journal (52). Spider and web imagery reoccurs in other poems, see "Fly: On Webs"; "The Flower Bed"; "Ah, by the Golden Lilies." Page also wrote a poem in Portuguese on this subject "Teia de ouro" which she delivered to the Academia Brasileira de Letras in Rio de Janeiro on 12 May 1958.
161 1 I saw a baleen in his bones 2 long fingered hands close to his ribs— 3 I saw him swim in the air like a stone 4(1) through
5(1)
8 12,000 lying in rainbow 9 quiet in the pose of death 10 ankles together
162 I saw a baleen in his bones long fingered hands close to his ribs— I saw him swim in the air like a stone through the holes in his face
5 Astraddle a painted tree in the crook of its wood the sloths in their loofah fur cretinous
12,000 lying in rainbow quiet in the pose of death 10 ankles together
163 1 The Sloths.
2 With their loofah fur
3 & faces by Moore
1 Marsupials.
2 To be a marsupial in Australia 3 is strange enough
164 The Sloths
With their loofah fur & faces by Moore
Marsupials
5 To be a marsupial in Australia is strange enough
165 1 In death as light: 2 straw-stuffed 3 laid out 4 12,000birds 5 green yellow orange red blue violet
166 In death as light: straw-stuffed laid out 12,000 birds 5 green yellow orange red blue violet
167 1 These tiny creatures have for face a space 2 no larger than the top joint of my thumb— 3 eyes blue pin heads—pupilled 4 & which look, register excitement 5 interest anger. 6 Stamens grow out of their ears 7 they are absurd 8( 1)
12 I poke my fingers through the wire my ring 13 catches the light 14 their tiny hands attack 15 their fingers like the stalks of violets 16 move on my flesh 17 & their tiny eyes look into mine 18 as if they know the ring they cannot /move
168 These tiny creatures have for face a space no larger than the top joint of my thumb— eyes blue pin heads—pupilled & which look, register excitement 5 interest anger. Stamens grow out of their ears they are absurd swing round a horizontal log as if to say look I'm playful 10 watch me—aren't I cute come up again—3 on a raft.
I poke my fingers through the wire my ring catches the light their tiny hands attack 15 their fingers like the stalks of violets move on my flesh & their tiny eyes look into mine as if they know the ring they cannot move
These tiny creatures...] The marmoset is a particular fascination of Page during her time in Brazil. She mentions them from the beginning of her journal (20), and includes a parallel narrative encounter to this poem, "More interesting was an absurd trio of small monkeys in a cage-the ones with the tufted ears-their tiny fingers, trying to remove my rings, felt moist and limp as the stems of violets" (BJ 46).
169 EDITORIAL EMENDATIONS
The list of emendations features the edited text as it appears in this edition before the square bracket (]). The variant in the original archival text is noted after. Page and line numbers are given for each noted line and refer to the corresponding line of the poem printed in this edition. For further research and inquiry into these changes, the archival box, file and page number is noted in italics at the end of the emendation.
List of Editorial Emendations
118.1 A] a 27-5-1 124.5 Manuel's] Manuels 27-5-4 124.8 dimensions] deimensions 27-5-4 126.1 empty] emty 27-5-5 128.7 midway] middway 27-5-6 130.15 now] nwo 27-5-8 132.11 frangipani] frangi pani 27-5-9 134.11 scene] scene 27-5-10 138.3 jeweler] jeweller 27-5-14 138.11 tea set] teaset 27-5-14 138.12 jeweler] jeweller 27-5-14 138.12 jeweler's] jeweller's 27-5-14 140.8 jeweler] jeweller 27-5-17 142.6 parakeets] parrokeets 27-5-14 142.6 Mato Grosso] Matto Grosso 27-5-15 142.8 shriek] shrieak 27-5-15 144.3 leveled] levelled 27-5-18 146.5 Latin icicles] latin icycles 27-5-19 158.4 Marsupials] Maursupials 27-5-12 158.5 Australia] Australai 27-5-12
170 APPENDIX A- PAGE'S LIST OF BIRDS
In a future edition, this document will be included in an unedited format using scanning technology to digitally produce the original pages. This version has been cleaned up for readability. Some formatting alterations have been made to give the document as much consistency as possible. It was originally recorded in at least three different pens, suggesting that this document evolved over Page's time in Brazil.
Birds:
Sparrow, of course.
Hycaicha type: 6"? grey head, pale lemon yellow breast. brown wings & tail— typical head tail & mannerisms of Hycaicha Swallow:
Honey-eater type*: large appearing clumsy bird- ILLEGIBLE mottled & striped browns and fawns
Low-set, hopping] bird bright lemon yellow breast—wide white eye
Kingfisher stripes continuing to back of heard
I think it is the same bird I have now seen on the ground behaving much in the manner of a robin—but also jumping high off theground—beak joined up (pres catching ino- flying insects) Cannot determine whether size of robin or sparrow!!! striped head. It can jump high. When 4 of then do it, it makes you feel your eyes are wrong.
It shows ILLEGIBLE a dirty whitish patch of throatwhen it jumps. Longish narrow tail.
This bird has been diving into the lily pool from a nearby hibiscus. I have been able to observe it well. Breast clear strong lemon yellow chin & cheeks white, head white with black eye stripes and black crown in centre of which brilliant yellow mark—beak nowhere near as long as kingfishers—dark white & white line capturise ILLEGIBLE; back grey brown, wings & tail russety brown BUT what confuses me utterly is that on a nearby branch an apparently identical bird, smaller by a good 2 inches, dives and returns to dry itself. To further complicate everything I find other jumping birds: —smaller than the large sparrow fellows but with them; red markings on head & white faces—jumping in the same manner. bico-de-lacre ploceidae
171 Finch-like birds of dark brilliant red with either blue, dark brown or black wings & tail & white beak
Slim pale grey bird with small head & dark eye terminal wiry feathers grey green & tail feathers grey russet. Appears to like the flower of the Spanish cassic.
Sparrow-like 5"? brown & pale fawn striped curly ILLEGIBLE head, chestnut neck, pale almost white throat, pale soft breast, spotted brown & buff back
Dove Small 7-8 pale head, pale chestnut body
Warbler-like yellow birds 3" male bright Very restless, yellow breast, blue grey wings, with 2 white wing pair: stripes, darkish back & tail with yellow patch in tail female—more muted— pale yellow breast—pale grey
Close inspection= small finch—donkey-coloured with paler underside, neatly tailored— brilliant flame-coloured eye—line on beak
At the moment our lawn where they jump needs cutting. It has long seed stalks growing in it & it seems to me that the bird are either jumping for the seeds at the top of the stalks or for insects on the seeds. For it is to that height they jump. Bending the stalk over from the top in many cases! Very extraordinary!
172 Green finches 4-5"- green blue & yellow— & the shades in between sai de sete cores pair: yellow green collar—greens all indistinguishable jades & blues Turquoises— each from each, some thin black etching.
Wren-like. Smooth, streamlined pale chestnut bird with fine dark stupple pair & similar: over wings & body—longerish beak—straight un-wren tail. Quick moving. Pale buff breast. Chestnut undertail. Black eye.
minute green cigar! breast deity white. Dirty white tip to tail.
Hummingbird Breast emerald—head purple & alight. Back darker green with blackish tail & wing feathers. Wings and tail same length.
Blue finch— Azulao Brilliant smooth as if polished cerulean pair: cobalt blue, 4-5" dissimilar, black throat, eye streak & bit in wing. Female dull blue head, dull green body.
Olive drab 6" 6 1/2"—slim bird—black eye pale saffron wash on crown which "falls" out of trees.
Robin & now, for knowing sake, so like a NA Robin I can barely believe my eyes— a NA robin & mate— male larger than female— run along ground in same way—dark grey on top—"red" breast— female grey bib—male likewise, bib extending
173 lower, (still don't know size- -but this bird is big— maybe 8-10"
Larger jumpers scuttle and search like hens! Bound too after bending insects. Head grey with many black stripes—black eye line & 2 lines between eyes. Marking of head stops abruptly as if head of one bird glued onto body of other. Body markings not distinctive. Male chestnut wash on shoulder. green finch Turquoise head & breast black cerulean in wings keeper ILLEGIBLE yellow on back much use of black pen strokes as in Piper painting 12 pairs perhaps, plus yellow, plus blue, plus urens all to yellow. Some "green" finches very green— immature perhaps? yellow short tail pale under side, flesh col. legs smaller than "green" finch Threepidae
Sai de sete cores. Smaller than (Tangara seledon) Plumage of various colours, difficult to describe in minutia. The head is black, but the back part is orange, shorter blades blue, breast of a living blue, but the back part green as chryoprase & the abdomen.
Azulao. (Cyancocompsa cyanea sierea) 15-16 cms. including tail, the head, fringillidae nape of the neck, back are of a blue with violet, feathers of remiges ILLEGIBLE & tail black, front of body entirely blue, the eyes of dark, have as well an a bright stripe. The female, smaller than the male, greenish grey & the males when new, have the same colour, but the wrong feathers are bleached
174 APPENDIX B- BRAZILIAN POEMS AT THE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
The following poems have been located within the P.K. Page fonds that also date to Page's time in Brazil (1957-1959). Before this edition appears in its final online format, it is the intention of the editor to socialize the file published here (27-5) with transcriptions of these other more "finished" Brazilian poems. Additionally, there are also a number of poems that have been acquisitioned by Library and Archives Canada posthumously that have not yet been catalogued.
I have included the archival information for known poems in the fonds for the use of future scholars interested in Page's poetry during this time period. In situations where there is not enough evidence to confirm they were written in Brazil, I have marked with an star (*) poems which are most likely Brazilian.
Title Location in Page Fonds (Box, File, Page)
A Wish 1-8-3 Could I Write a Poem Now? 3-17-1 & 3-17-2 Cross 1-10-13 Brazilian House 1-8-9 The Knitters* 1-8-2 Natural History Museum 1-10-13 Passaro Gigante 17-14-3 Rage 1-8-6 Some Paintings by Portinari 1-8-13 The Snowmen 1-10 The Snowmen 16-6 Teia de ouro 17-14-3 Truce 1-8-8 Voltive Candles 1-8-13
175 TITLE/FIRST LINE INDEX
Title/First Line Page
A bridge across a chasm 118 As a drowned body fills with water 152 At my feet as we walked 154 Brazilian Conversation 128 Everyone writes of Italy but here in Rio 140 In death as light 166 I saw a baleen in his bones 160 I saw a baleen in his bones 162 My muteness induced by ignorance of the tongue that is spoken here 130 Natural History Museum 158 Negralinha 132 Not your problem 156 On Looking Out My Bedroom Window 148 Our house is all openings 142 She sat on the sill of the sunny morning 150 Some Paintings by Portinari 144 The candles gutter in the rack and smell 146 The Sloths 164 These tiny creatures have for face a space 168 There are the two things here: the giant leaves 120 There should be more to say but I become 136 The seas are empty 126 This whole green world, crystal and spherical 122 This whole green world, crystal and spherical 124 To Those Who Write of Italy 138 Write, & imagine a poem that list of trees 134
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Roberts Creek, BC: Nightwood, 2002. 11-30 Visual Art' Arthur Reading on Sofa I November, 1957 / ink on Kraft paper / 45.4 x 60.0 cm / collection of Trent University Black Telephone and Flowers I between August 22, 1957 and c. end of 1958 / felt pen and gouache on paper / 32.5 x 47.0 cm / collection of Susan Irving Cesta [2] / c. July 5, 1957 / felt pen on paper / 71.1 x 55.9 cm / owner unknown Cesta [4] / c. end of 1957 / ink on paper / 31.6 x 44.3 cm / estate of P.K. Page Embassy Garden I between June 15 and the end of June, 1957 / felt pen on paper / 55.9 x 71.1 cm / collection of Camilla Turner Experiment [1] / c. end of October, 1957 / felt pen on paper / 18.2 x 13.9 / estate of P.K. Page Flowers and Phone /between August 22, 1957 and c. end of 1958 / felt pen and gouache on paper / 45.1 cm x 30.5 cm / collection of Arlene Lampert Insects I between March 29 and August 14, 1959 / oil on canvas / 10.7 x 16.6 cm / * NOTE: Whenever possible the owner of the work is identified, but in some cases the image is taken from unidentified slides that were in P.K. Page's possession. 182 collection of Didi and Zailig Pollock Labyrinth /between August 14, 1958 and end of 1958 / oil pastel on wove paper / 23.8 cm x 23.8 cm / National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa: gift from the Douglas M. Duncan Collection, 1970 Leaves as Large as Hands I between c. end of June and c. end of 1957 / felt pen on paper / 43. 2x31.5 cm/ Trent University Mato Fino 11958 / ink on wrapping paper / 52.0 x 38.1 cm / Trent University Private Chapel I between June 15 and c. end of June, 1957 / felt pen on paper / dimensions unknown / collection of Kate Irving and Steve Whipp Stone Fruit I between end of January 3 and 8, 1959 / oil pastel / 40.5 x 3.18 / collection of Eugene Hawke Typewriter /between c. end of June and c. end of 1957 / felt pen on paper / 18.2 x 20.7 / collection of Didi and Zailig Pollock View of Two Brothers I between June 15 and end of June, 1957 / felt pen on paper / dimensions unknown / collection of Anne Irwin 183 184