It seems appropriate that I learned about the death of P.K. Page [The photo of her is by Barbara Pedrick, courtesy of Porcupine's Quill Press.] from Barbara Carter, TNQ’s chief poetry editor, whom I ran into when out to lunch—a rare outing for me—with poet Erin Noteboom. We were a trio for whom that death would signify. Given her age (93), Page’s death should not have surprised us, and yet, such was the vitality of the woman and the poet, we were oddly shocked by what seemed an untimely diminishment in the firmament of Canadian poetry.

I did not know P.K. Page except on the page, but I once met her. Or rather, admired her from across the room. It was at a reception, at the riverside home of Leon and Connie Rooke, for writers and publishers in attendance at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Page must have been in her early 80s then though she had the look and manner of a much younger woman. She was sitting on a couch, a glass of scotch in her hand (drinking scotch has always seemed to me the height of sophistication in a woman), and she was leaning into the conversation with whoever was sitting next to her. Her face was animated, her gestures lively, and I remember thinking, “It’s curiosity, not ego, that’s the mark of the true writer.”

This impression was born out on the few occasions when we solicited work from her for the magazine. In 2005, we asked for an entry in our series on the seductions of verse. Then poetry editor Lesley Elliott, with some trepidation, suggested that she and Page might write in tandem, two takes on the peculiar delights of poetry, and then cap the essays with a collaborative poem. Page had published, a few years earlier, a wonderful little book called And Once More Saw the Stars, a foursome of rengas undertaken with poet Philip Stratford who sadly died before the collaboration was complete. A renga is “a loose sequence of collaboratively written poems, often alternating accretive poetry; written in a range of forms, often experimental….” Page did not hesitate to step up to a similar poetic conversation with an unknown poet, though she did warn that “it might not work.” She proposed a form (“a series of unrhymed sonnets”), a subject (imagination), and provided the opening quatrain. Elliott used this analogy to describe what followed: “During the months in which we wrote our renga, P.K. invariably served or delivered a backhand shot while I was still experimenting with my grip. But oh, the game was fun!”

In her essay, Page confesses that she fell in love with poetry before she knew what poetry was: “I loved the rhythm and the rhymes. …It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work…,” soul’s work, in her estimation. She ends the essay with a parable about a prince who comes of age in a land of immense beauty that he must leave in search of a jewel. He travels to a distant land “where he is strangely unfamiliar to himself.” It is only after this period of estrangement that he can see the beauty of his place of origin. This story resonates, for me, with the story of P.K. Page’s life as told by Sandra Martin in the Globe and Mail obituary, the land of the imagination that strange and estranging world that lets her see the familiar world with unshuttered eyes. Here is her opening quatrain from “Imagination: A Conversation” (TNQ, Issue 96, fall 2005):

“Imagination is the star in man”

his cosmos even, stretching him above

the level gaze—quotidian—the glazed

obsidian stare that turns him into stone.

And the poem ends (its voices eliding):

We must imagine it. For if we can’t,

we forfeit possibility—and that

is grasped by reaching fearlessly and far

back to the star that was their origin.

Though unremembered, traces still remain

and seed imagination’s mysteries.

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