News from the Feminist Caucus, by Anne Burke

This month, more news from Bernice Lever and Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes; previews from Inanna Press and Wilfred Laurier Press; and a review of Journey With No Maps, A Life of P.K. Page (McGill-Queen’s Press) by Sandra Djwa. Don’t forget to send your review, news, and/or link!

“Women are in language prison who can’t read safety regulations on the job, can’t read warnings on cleaning fluids or on wharfs, can’t read to get car licences or job contracts.” Bernice Lever edited and contributed to language(s) prison(s) 1998, with other papers by Nela Rio, Sheila Hyland, and Mary Dalton, in the Living Archives Series. She also compiled Singing, An Anthology of Women’s Writing from Canadian Prisons (Highway Book Shop, 1979).

From: Bernice Lever To: A. Burke Sent: Friday, February 22, 2013 1:26:20 PM Subject: Query on reviews and interviews?

Dear Anne: Sorry to be so slow in contacting you. Do you have a full slate of speakers on Male Mentors or topic for AGM in June? I am in Ottawa for Friday and Saturday --- for PLR and flying by banquet time to Toronto. Sat.8th. But I could send a prepared piece as some did last year who could not be present for the panel.

1.) Jennifer Footman interviewed me last year. She has the printed version and an audio one. Do you use audio ones on Feminist Caucus site?

2.) Also I wrote a book review of the Poet to Poet anthology by Guernica Editions which has some F.C. members in it. It is a book of poems to or in voice of a mentor---1 page and 2nd page is the Back Story--of prose understanding of the effect of the mentor... Somewhat interesting concept! 70+ poets... Allan Briesmaster-- etc. Bunny Iskov asked me to write it, and send it to Elana Wolff== Confusing literary life == in my old age. 77 next month. ------Tomorrow my friend, Anthony Dalton, Van. CAA member is coming as he asked me to write or use past poems of mine in a photo book he is creating of his top 50 story-telling pictures from around the world. He is long-time Explorers club, Adventurers, etc., leading groups everywhere over the decades--now a cruise ship speaker under Smithsonian Institute --DC. listing. He writes prose--- I helped edit his novel ---but usually writes non- fiction historical books-- sailing ships, ship wrecks, Can. history etc.-- but he is a fan of my poetry -- and reads Tagore from Calcutta. Anthony still writes articles for Pakistani Airlines. Maybe I have too many connections and people wanting my time /// Hope this makes sense to you. all the best to you & yours, Bernice

Poet To Poet: Poems written to poets and the stories that inspired them Julie Roorda (Editor), Elana Wolff (Editor)

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Julie Roorda is the author of three volumes of poetry Eleventh Toe (2001), Courage Underground (2006) and Floating Bodies (2010), and a collection of short stories Naked in the Sanctuary (2004) all published by Guernica Editions. Her novel for young adults Wings of a Bee was published by Sumach Press in 2007.

Elana Wolff is the author of four collections of poetry with Guernica: Birdheart (2001), Mask (2003), You Speak to Me in Trees (2006), winner of the 2008 F.G. Bressani Prize for Poetry, and Startled Night. Elana is also co-author with the late poet, Malca Litovitz, of Slow Dancing: Creativity and Illness, Duologue and Rengas (2008). A collection of short essays on contemporary poems, titled Implicate Me, was released with Guernica in 2010. Elana has taught English as a Second Language at York University in Toronto and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her time between writing, editing, and facilitating therapeutic community art.

Guernica Editions, 2012 Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 9781550716450 / ISBN-10: 155071645X $ 20.00 () $ 20.00 (United States) Prices may vary

Poets find inspiration in all manner of human experience, from the comical to the sombre. The creative processes by which they grow their poems to fruition are as diverse, and often as quirky, as their subjects. But what all poets have in common is their captivation by the work and lives of other poets, living and dead. Poet to Poet is a unique anthology that honours, and probes, this peculiar enchantment. Featuring work by Canadian poets written to, about, or in the manner of other poets, each poem is accompanied by a back story that provides a glimpse into the creative cauldron and the poetic communion of kindred spirits. {Guernica Editions}

Browse other titles in Guernica Editions' Essential Anthologies Series First Poets Series: First full poetry collections by writers 35 and younger. Essential Poets Series: Canadian and international voices in poetry.

Sent: Friday, February 15, 2013 3:32:25 PM Subject: Advance Notice: Launch date for Dark Water Songs - April 18, 2013 Dear Anne,

Hope 2013 is starting off really well for you. This is a belated note to thank you for featuring my Canadian Woman Studies article, "Beyond Questionable Certainties," in the LCP October “Feminist Caucus News”. It was great to see my work and the work of other League members acknowledged and to have both the CWS and Inanna Publications foregrounded.

I know that CWS/Inanna would be very interested in being able to site the “Feminist Caucus News” feature of my article (as well as the rest of the CWS issue you featured)

St@nz@ E-Newsletter March 2013 on their facebook page, etc... I'd appreciate knowing if that would be OK with you and also, what the appropriate link would be. I wasn't sure if the “Feminist Caucus News” was meant to be available only to members of the League.

As it turns out, Inanna will be publishing my third collection, Dark Water Songs - the launch is scheduled for April 18th, 6:30pm, at the Women's Art Association of Canada, 23 Prince Arthur, Toronto. http://www.womensartofcanada.ca

I'd very much like to have it reviewed and would appreciate any thoughts/advice you might be able to share in that regard.

Would also appreciate your thoughts re: any reading venues/opportunities and/or contacts that you would recommend both in your area and beyond. I'm exploring the possibility of setting up some readings across the country in 2013-14.

Look forward to any thoughts/suggestions you might have re: the above.

With much appreciation and all good wishes,

Mary Lou

Note: The “Feminist Caucus News” is circulated monthly to League members and archived annually on the League of Canadian Poets website at: http://poets.ca/wordpress/programs-2/feminist-caucus

Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes, Books in Print: Dark Water Songs (Inanna Publications, forthcoming 2013) Travelling Light (Seraphim Editions, 2006) ISBN: 0-9734588-8- 7, Canada $16.95/U.S. $14.95 the fires of naming, Seraphim Editions, Toronto, 2001 (ISBN 0-9699639-8-X), Canada $14.95/ U.S. $10.95 The Writer Within: Dialogue and Discovery (with Trina M. Wood, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Toronto, 1989) ISBN 0-7747-1320-X http://poets.ca/members_data/Mary%20Lou%20Soutar Hynes

The poems in Dark Water Songs begin on the margins of islands and ancestors, and fan out, probing love, loss and life’s dilemmas. They expand and deepen the poetic exploration which began with my earlier collections, mining the reciprocal spaces enabled by the hyphen between Jamaican and Canadian, exploring silences, the weight of memory, and a sense of the sacred. The collection contributes to the body of work by contemporary Canadian writers of Caribbean origin. The perspective is that of a poet/educator and former nun ― a writer who

St@nz@ E-Newsletter March 2013 negotiates the world through the lens of islands and continents, landscapes and seas.

Page P.K.

P.K. Page, a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets, was born in England on November 23, 1916, and came to Canada in 1919. Educated in England, Calgary, and Winnipeg, and studied art in Brazil and New York. Under the name P.K. Irwin her paintings and drawings have been exhibited widely. As scriptwriter for the National Film Board, her script for the animated film, “Teeth Are To Keep”, won an award at Cannes. Page passed away at the age of 92 on January 14, 2010 in Victoria, B.C.

Organizing a PK Page Trust Fund Reading – Notes for Reading Organizers http://poets.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organizing-a-PK-Page-Trust- Fund-Reading.pdf Review of Journey With No Maps, A Life of P.K. Page, by Sandra Djwa ( and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012) 418 pp. cloth $39.95 Endnotes Bibliography Indexed.

The title is from “Traveller, Conjuror, Journeyman,” (1970) in which P.K. Page wrote, “I am traveller. I have a destination but no maps.” At the tender age of sixteen, I first read the poem “Stenographers” when I was perusing an anthology of contemporary poetry. The use of her initials disguised her gender. This was at a juncture when I resisted learning how to type, since it symbolized women’s plight. For example, there would come a time when my sister-in-law transcribed her husband’s dissertation, never

St@nz@ E-Newsletter March 2013 imagining composing one of her own, although she had graduated summa cum laude in History from Marianapolis, a women’s Catholic College in Montreal.

Sandra Djwa was the second graduate of UBC and the first woman to deliver the Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture at UBC, in 1999, in honour of the Department’s 80th anniversary. I read her 1968 Ph.D. dissertation in English on “The Continuity of English Canadian Poetry” and remember the voluminous daisy-wheel printout of sources she compiled in support of her research. She has been credited with being the first woman to write the review of the year’s work in “Poetry” for the Quarterly.

Her biography of Frank Scott, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987) was short-listed for the Hubert Evans Prize, in 1987. It was translated as F.R. Scott: Un Vie by Florence Bernard and short-listed for the Governor General’s Award in French translation, in 2002.

Djwa thanks William Toye, Literary Executor of F.R. Scott, for permission to quote from Scott’s poems, diaries, and letters. There is only passing mention of A.J.M. Smith as a professional colleague and no mention of the rumours that Smith, a married man, enjoyed a romance with Page. Interestingly, Toye is also the Literary Executor for A.J.M. Smith.

Much of this account is from the point of view of Scott, because Page was involved in a longstanding affair with him, a married man. Djwa indicates that Scott described his married life to Leon Edel, a close friend of his since the late 1920s. Edel remarked that wives sometimes become mother figures (to their husbands) after the birth of a child. I would interject that a woman is a mother to a child. Although the Scotts reconciled, his wife Marian was nonetheless hurt by Frank’s numerous affairs. (notes 63 and 64, p. 339; note 71, p. 344). According to Page, Scott “looked like the King of Diamonds – that look, sharp. His profile could have cut.” (note 28, p. 347)

When the Scott biography was short-listed for the British Columbia Hubert Evans Non Fiction Prize, in 1988, Pat’s Brazilian Journal ultimately won the prize, a consequence Djwa ascribes to her being chosen by Page: “Nonetheless, this coincidence may have encouraged P.K. to think of me as a possible biographer.” (p. 264)

Patricia Kathleen was the only daughter of Lionel Page, a Red Deer homesteader and Rose Laura Whitehouse Page, of whom Pat remarked, “She look like the heroine in a romance novel.” Djwa, who was granted free rein in interpretation, argues that P.K. believed her strict father, who was devoted to his beautiful wife, had to some degree rejected her.” (p. 285) The source given is a private conversation by Page with Djwa.

The genre of biography appears as early as the Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans, by Plutarch (c. 46-120 A.D.), translated by Sir Thomas North, in 1579; and Izaak Walton’s Lives (of the poets John Donne and George Herbert), written between 1640-78, the literary history form of “particular men’s lives.” (I am indebted to A Glossary of Literary Terms, seventh edition, by M.H. Abrams (Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999)).

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Leon Edel’s multi-volumes on Henry James (five volumes, 1953-72) have been described as psychobiography, which focuses on the subject’s psychological development, relying on evidence from external sources and the author’s own writings. It explores the role of the unconscious and disguised motives in forming the author’s personality and is usually written with a version or a revision of the Freudian theory of stages in psychosexual development. Edel, a member of the McGill Group, as well as among those of the Memoirs of Maupassant, became an expatriate.

Djwa remarks that, since 1986, contemporary expectations for biographical writing are greater and, perhaps, critical standards are more exacting. When I was researching the poet A.J.M. Smith, including interviewing his sister Dorothy, the Canadian genre was still in its infancy. Elspeth Cameron was working on Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (1981) for which she won the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography. Our simultaneity was a private pact of sorts. She had taught English and at Concordia College, on the Loyola Campus when I was an undergraduate student there.

While Cameron went on to produce Irving Layton: A Portrait (1985) and : A Life (1994), Djwa published Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells, awarded the Lorne Pierce Gold Medal for Literature from The Royal Society of Canada, in 2002. She edited the memoirs of Carl F. Klinck, editor of The Literary History of Canada, 1968. She also delivered a keynote address on Klinck at a one-day symposium in conjunction with the launch of Giving Canada A Literary History: A Memoir, by Carl F. Klinck, in 1991.

Djwa offers a frontispiece, “There are four ways to write a woman’s life”, namely, through autobiography, fiction, biography, and, finally, the woman may write her own, “in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.” The quote was drawn from Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life (N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1988). This speaks to Page’s creative process, but leaves a lingering sense of the critic as consciously aware and therefore more informed than her subject.

Since 1969, and the rise of feminism(s), there have been massive societal upheavals, and critical changes, among them the waves of androgynism, gynocentrism, semiotics, gendered and queer discourse, écriture féminine, etc.

When Page was reading The First Sex, by Elizabeth G. Davis, she expressed an encounter with feminism, and became “much more sympathetic to Women’s lib lately. Had a kind of breakthrough in seeing [Robert] Grave’s Greek Myths which I have read...for years suddenly helped me see the whole thing. God Knows I’ve read his White Goddess too. But one goes about blinded by one’s conditioning.” (pp. 224-5)

The 1971 book by Gould Davis is considered part of the second wave of feminism. She aimed to show that early human society consisted of matriarchal “queendoms”, based on worship of the “great Goddess”, and characterized by pacifism and democracy. These early societies were eliminated by the “patriarchal revolution”. Patriarchy introduced a new system, based on property rights, not human rights, and worshipping of a stern, vengeful male deity, instead of the caring, nurturing Mother Goddess.

Djwa asserts that Page objected to the male principle or left lobe in Western culture. She favoured reinstatement of the feminine principle (from Robert Graves). Page felt personally shunned by the literati and opined privately, that “you can’t win on the feminist

St@nz@ E-Newsletter March 2013 thing. The men don’t want any part of me either in case it appears they are supporting an anti-feminist.” (p. 256)

Of course, Page is referring to the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets. In 1972, she joined the League which had received a grant to sponsor readings at Canadian universities. Then, Canada Council began its own sponsored readings. In the fall of 1977, Page was elected to the League’s advisory council. Her plan was to make poetry tapes, starting with the senior poets. She chaired this committee and drew up a contract. As a result, she, subsequently, served on writer-in-residence juries. (pp. 240-1)

Djwa alludes to Frank Scott, , and Ralph Gufstafson as the League founders and the first national meeting was held in 1968. There are other sources which elaborate on the details. See: “Making the Damn Thing Work”: an informal look at the early days of the League, as we prepared for its 35th birthday, by Raymond Souster, with the kind assistance of Carleton Wilson. Another is “A Selective History of the League of Canadian Poets”, by Betsy Struthers, a former Chair of the Caucus. She was President of the League, 1995-1996. Self-described as “a short and by no means complete or official history of the League”, it was culled from Newsletters and some AGM minutes in the League office library; Souster’s “Starting Up: LCP 1966-1972”, in the 1991 Who’s Who in the League of Canadian Poets; Cathy Ford’s “Out of Con/Tex: Creating a Living Archive of Feminism” in Stats, Memos & Memory (Living Archives, 1992); and “brief but illuminating conversations” with Cathy Ford, Maria Jacobs, and Robert Priest. “Any omissions or inaccuracies are my own.”

By 1989, Page rarely attended League meetings. She explained, “I’ve never been a joiner and even to join the League when it was small took some effort. I was just about to de-join when they made me a life member!” (p. 267)

Djwa declares that Page decided she did not want a biography written when she read Isak Dinesen’s biography in the eighties, a time when Djwa was progressing with the Scott biography. Judith Thurman’s 1983 Isak Dinesen (St. Martin’s Press), about the author of Out of Africa and failed entrepreneur Karen Blixen, inspired great interest when a movie of the same title was released, with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford as star- crossed lovers. Great interest was revived in the author’s works, especially her autobiographical accounts of lived experiences. Page was interested in autobiography and genealogy.

Djwa writes, “I began to wonder about P.K.’s life story. Would she have a biography?” This was after Page related a dream about her military father, “as a tall upright figure on a horse”, an image which resonated with Djwa, because of her own father, a captain in the Canadian Merchant Marine during the Second World War. (p. 264) This followed, in the early nineties, after Page spoke of her father “affectionately but sadly”, according to Djwa.

Furthermore, Page wrote about her own relationship, (after listening to another essay about a brutal father and dominated daughter) in her essay for Sandra Martin’s The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write About Their Fathers.

Djwa was invited by Page to contribute a biographical interview to a special issue of the Malahat Review on the occasion of the poet’s eightieth birthday. However, Page

St@nz@ E-Newsletter March 2013 indicated this was, in no way, a commitment, since both were still becoming accustomed to the idea. A biography would be “better now [rather] than after I’ve lost my marbles or am dead.” (p. 285) Her memory was good and her friends still “alive”. By 1997, agreements were made about interviews, access to files, and permission to quote from her poetry and prose. Page is quoted as commending Djwa’s painstaking scholarship and “ability to get on top of a body of material” (a sexual connotation notwithstanding). (p. 286)

Djwa was “her Boswell”, an allusion to James Boswell, the eighteenth-century author of Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), and to Page, as Samuel Johnson, author of Lives of the English Poets (1779-81). Djwa wanted the “what” and “when”, patently linear, constructing a timeline or chronology, made more challenging because family papers were lost in storage during the Second World War.

The biography recovers Page’s breast surgery, cataract surgery, depression, hip operation, and other illnesses. Her aunt earned a Cambridge degree but was not able to accept it because she was a woman. In 1976, her aunt’s gravestone read “M.A. Cantab” for Master of Arts.

Djwa fact-checked information from their interviews with letters from the applicable period, “as biographers must”. (p. 293) Djwa depicts Page as absorbed with apocalyptic themes. Page was preoccupied with point-of-view, she wanted to tell her own story or, at least, have another reflect that, “a transcendental view of her own life–and a pressing desire to have her story told in this form.” There is a convention by which the biographer is authoritative, telling the truth based on the facts. The tone is impersonal and voice objective.

Page gave access to unpublished journals and art, when Djwa, Zailig Pollock, and Dean Irvine undertook a scholarly edition of her work. The Complete Poems of P.K. Page, a critical edition, will include all of Page’s poems, including her juvenilia, arranged chronologically. It will contain one version of each poem, the latest published one, unless otherwise noted. There will be a critical introduction, the work’s relation to Page’s milieu, and a textual introduction with editorial principles and procedures. (note 91, p. 377) It will be interesting to compare with The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott. Djwa penned this, “My belief is that [Page] is the person next to [E.J.] Pratt & [A.M.] Klein deserving of this.” (note 20, p. 374).

Pollock, who edited Collected Poems: A.M. Klein, became Page’s Literary Executor. See: Page’s essay on “The Sense of Angels: Reflections on A.M. Klein,” in The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction, edited by Pollock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems of P.K. Page, edited with an introduction by Pollock (Erin, : Porcupine’s Quill, 2010). Irvine wrote about Page and Preview magazine, in “Gendered Modernisms”: Women and Little Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, pp. 127-80). See also “The Two Giovannis: P.K. Page’s Two Modernisms, in Journal of Canadian Studies 38 (Winter 2004), pp. 23-45.

Pat went on to use her married name, Pat Irwin for her visual art, which was a convention and convenience. Page had married Arthur Irwin, an avid editor, who assisted her in the last decade of the full and fulfilling life they shared, when she

St@nz@ E-Newsletter March 2013 produced nineteen titles. In 1999, P.K. was awarded the Companion of the Order of Canada.

Page once wrote, “What one wants most in one’s life is to write well.” (cited by Djwa from B.C. BookWorld, 1991). According to Djwa, Page told her own story, in poems, short stories, diaries, and librettos. She learned to draw and paint, recording her life in visual art. Djwa speculates, “It is possible that she did meet death in full consciousness.” (p. 320)

The biography offers illustrations, with Colour Plates of “Fiesta”, “Woman’s Room”, and “A Kind of Osmosis”, all paintings by Page. In addition to the full colour cover close-up, there is a painting of “Pat Page”, by Miller Brittain. There are also several black-and- white photographs, of particular interest there are the Preview Group, Pat Page and F.R. Scott, P.K. Page and Margaret Atwood, and a group photo of Elizabeth Smart, Doris Lessing, Martha Butterfield, P.K. Page, and Michael Ondaatje (after Lessing’s address to the Canadian Club.) P.K. Irwin’s “Tree of Life”, a black-and-white octagonal series, and a photo of Page performing “Me Tembro” are also faithfully reproduced.

Anne Burke

Wilfred Laurier Press Imprints: Cruel but Not Unusual Violence in Canadian Families, 2nd Edition Ramona Alaggia and Cathy Vine, editors

December 2012 Paper $52.99 604 pages 17 tables, 5 fi gures 6 x 9 978-1-55458-827-5 ebook available Second edition presents readers with the latest research and thinking about the history, conditions, and impact of violence in families and intimate relationships. Chapters have been updated to reflect changes in data and legislation. New chapters include examination of trauma from a neurobiological perspective; critical analysis of the “gender symmetry debate,” debate that questions the gendered nature of intimate violence; and an essay on the history and evolution of the women’s movement dedicated to addressing violence against women.

A compilation of stories narrated by single mothers in their own way and about their own lives. Each story is unique, but the same issues appear again and again. Challenges related to abuse, parenting, mental health and addictions, childcare, immigration and status vulnerability, custody, and poverty—combined with a lack of support—contribute to their continued struggles. To address these issues we need to challenge

St@nz@ E-Newsletter March 2013 the fl awed public policies and the negative discourse that continue to marginalize single mother.

Challenging the Single Mother Narrative (Wilfred Laurier Press) Lea Caragata and Judit Alcalde, editors September 2013 Paper $24.99 176 pages 6 x 9 978-1-55458-624-0 Life Writing series ebook available

Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory (Wilfred Laurier Press) Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard

Eva C. Karpinski, Jennifer Henderson, Ian Sowton, and Ray Ellenwood, editors Essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard’s infl uential transdisciplinary practice.

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