It isn't easy to keep poets in a single category as poets will, they keep jumping out of their assigned niche to take up another space. Gary Geddes, for example, ought to be in this section of our history. He is Canada's premier political poet. But he is also an anthologist and as such Geddes has had immeasurable influence on two generations of Can Lit students with his 20th Century Poetry and Poetics, now in its fourth edition, Fifteen Canadian Poets, and The Art of Short Fiction. He is also a discriminating and eloquent critic, reviewer, and educator. So I discuss his work in a later section of Digital History. Still, it is important to see that Gary Geddes also belongs here with PK Page, Douglas LePan, Milton Acorn, and Dennis Lee. None of these poets is easily categorized, though all have a deep commitment to the well-being of Canada.
PK Page (1916-)
A video on PK Page, produced in 1990 by The National Film Board of Canada, is called "Still Waters". I show it to students as often as possible. Despite their distance from her age, her lifestyle, the film is so beautifully crafted they can't help getting pulled into it, and, in theprocess, catching an amazing glimpse into the heart and mind behind the haunting, mysterious poems, like "Stories of Snow" that begins:
Those in the vegetable rain retain an area behind their sprouting eyes held soft and rounded with the dream of snow precious and reminiscent as those globes souvenir of some never-nether land which hold their snow-storms circular, complete high in a tall and teakwood cabinet.
To my mind, this poem best captures PK Page's particular way of seeing. The startling juxtapositions occur because she has lived in "the vegetable rain," in "countries where the leaves are large as hands" and yet knows intimately the stories of snow. The poem is a haunting juxtaposition of life and death, innocence and betrayal, "as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know/who, lost in the white circle, fall at last/and dream their way to death".
In the documentary, Page talks candidly about the source of her poems, and especially the unique connections, often made intuitively, that constitute her lyrical poems.
Patricia Kathleen Page was born November 23, 1916 in Dorset England while her father, a soldier, was on a tour of duty. They returned to Canada when she was two, and her family,like most military families, moved to various postings including Alberta, New Brunswick and finally to Montreal. It was here in 1941, that she joined the Preview group of poets and began writing in earnest, publishing not only in Preview, but also in Contemporary Verse and First Statement. During this time she worked as a sales clerk, filing clerk, radio actress, scriptwriter and historical researcher. While working as a scriptwriter for the National Film Board, she met her husband, Arthur Irwin, who was then a commissioner of the NFB, but soon to become a Canadian diplomat. They travelled to postings in Australia, Mexico, the U.S. and Brazil.
In Brazil, Page stopped writing poetry, instead taking up painting and drawing, and keeping a journal, which would become the Brazilian Journal. She returned to poetry again in 1967 and has since then produced many highly acclaimed volumes. She has received Canada's highest awards, including the Governor General's Award in 1954 and the Order of Canada in 1977. And she has shared her insights by teaching courses and conducting workshops in creative writing.
Page's poetry is not overtly political, but her poems are both psychologically and politically observant, and, to an extent, they are illuminated by her experience in the diplomatic world. Like Avison and Webb, she is intent on weaving complex patterns of imagery to embody and express the human condition. Like Avison and Webb, it is a double vision that encompasses life and death, compassion and alienation, the flower and the metal. She uses recurring symbols, what Timothy Findley calls "obsessions" those images that occur again and again and people the writer's creative world. For Page the images are rain, snow, birds, the sea, vegetation, eyes, and moon. Colours, especially white, are also recurring symbols, as revealed in 'Photographs of a Salt Mine':
How innocent their lives look,
how like a child's
dream of caves and winter, both combined;
the steep descent to whiteness
and the stope
with its striated walls
their folds all leaning as if pointing to
the greater whiteness still,
that great white bank
with its decisive front,
that seam upon a slope,
salt's lovely ice.
But like the photograph of the salt mine, white is
never simply what it appears to be:
In a pit
figures the size of pins are strangely lit
and might be dancing but you know they're not.
Like Dante's vision of the nether hell
men struggle with the bright cold fires of salt,
locked in the black inferno of the rock:
the filter here, not innocence but guilt.Page's particular constellation of influences is complex. As she illustrates in "Still Waters", her poetry and her painting are interdependent parts of her creative imagination. She noted in The Tamarack Review (Spring 1960): "As to why I began to draw there must be a hundred reasons I don't suppose I knew before I began that drawing is the perfect medium for metaphor. But it is. For my kind of poet, my kind of drawing seems inevitable. It's the same pen." The Moderns Eliot and Auden, and the neo- metaphysical poets -- influenced her. Geddes states, "under the influence of travel, new languages, painting, age and a reading of the mystics, she came to see poetry as a form of exploration and conjuring" (20thc 229).
What makes Page's poetry outstanding is not only her exquisitely rendered ideas and her ability to make unique connections, but also her use of language. When you pick up a book of poems by PK Page, you know you are about to learn something new about rhythm, rhyme, repetition, word order and use, line breaks, and stanziac pattern. One of her recent books, Holograms, is a collection of glosas an ancient Persian form that is incredibly pliant for the current ideas on intertextuality, and which allows her to explore the relationship, to create a dialogue between voice and influence.
Page claims she doesn't write many love poems, but there are little gems throughout her oeuvre like this one:
for Arthur
When earth quaked
and lintel shook
my only thought
to shout:
I love you, love youPage has worked under many names: Page, Irwin, Judith Cape. Like her name, the identity of her work is difficult to capture. She has written poetry, a novel, the Brazilian Journal, three works for children, and a collection of short stories, newly released. Gary Geddes calls her "a psychic traveller." Northrop Frye claims that Page "seems interested in everything from salt mines to ski tows, but resists the temptation to be merely decorative and looks for the human situations involved in what she sees" (BG 39). She continues to evolve as a poet, (Poppy Press has just released two special-edition volumes of Alphabet and Cosmologies), and we learn from her transformations.
Selected Titles: The Metal and The Flower (1954) GG, Poems New and Selected (1974), TheGlass Air (1991)
Douglas LePan (1914-1998)
Douglas LePan, poet, novelist, diplomat, scholar and teacher, was born, raised and educated in Toronto. He received his BA with honours from University of Toronto in 1935. He spent two years at Oxford and was then appointed lecturer in English, first at the University of Toronto, and then Harvard. During World War II he served in the artillery during the Italian campaign.
In 1945, he was on staff of the High Commissioner in London. In 1949, he joined the Department of Eternal Affairs where he became special assistant to Lester Pearson. In 1955, he was secretary to the Gordon Commission on Canada's economic prospects. From 1959-64, he was a professor of Queen's University, moving in 1970 as Principal to University College at the University of Toronto, where in 1979 he was made Professor Emeritus.
Douglas LePan is one of the few writers who have won the Governor General's Award in both poetry and fiction. This is a remarkable achievement as he wrote only one novel, The Deserter, and three books of poetry. The Net and the Sword, his second book of poetry, won the Governor General's Award in 1953; it tells of his war experiences during the Italian campaign. Munroe Beattie identifies two particular strengths in the collection: 1) the graphic representation of an isolated incident and the actor in it, where the poet "finds exactly the right tone and the right details for bringing before our mind's eye the young Canadian soldier, disciplined and determined to make the most of an ugly assignment;" and 2) the extended contemplation of a situation or mood, "composing his impressions, memories and feelings into full-bodied poems of meditation and recollection" ( LH Vol. 2, 308). LePan's poetry is also gathered in Weathering It: Complete poems 1948-1987. LePan published his memoir, Bright Glass of Memory in 1979, and his final book of poems, Far Voyages in 1990.
Written in 1948, LePan's most famous poem is "A Country without a Mythology." It is a provocative title, and a provocative poem. It tells of an explorer, "no monument or landmarks guide the stranger/ Going among this savage people" who travels inland, much as Marlow travels into the heart of darkness, "There is no law even no atmosphere/ To smooth the anger of the flagrant sun." This is a violent land where "Lightnings in August/ Stagger, rocks split, tongues in the forest hiss" in which the explorer hopes that "waiting around the bend/ Are sanctities of childhood, that melting birds/ Will sing him into a limpid gracious Presence." The explorer is the epitome of the noble white man in a savage land. But Canada has a mythology; it's just not a white man's. What is the 21st Century reader to do with this tension? We can, of course, dismiss this sort of poem as sadly out of date, or we can see if there are redeeming interpretations available for it. The poem is most interesting in its final stanzas:
And now the channel opens. But nothing alters. Mile after mile of tangled struggling roots, Wild rice, stumps, weeds, that clutch at the canoe, Wild birds hysterical in tangled trees. And not a sign, no emblem in the sky Or boughs to friend him as he goes; for who Will stop where, clumsily contrived, daubed With war paint, teeters some lust-red manitou?
The suggestion here may be that European mythologies are of no use in the new land, that one must forge new relationships, not escape behind 'a golden haired archangel.' There is fear in the explorer, as he is blinded by 'clumsily contrived' prejudice, but time is a virgin forest that awaits him. Because time and not the river is the conduit drawing the explorer into the land, LePan can be seen to subtly draw his readers deeper into the poem. We are also on this journey of time, and we are forced to ask ourselves: how we are doing on this journey? The poem is fraught with difficulties, but it is also filled with important questions about our prejudices, beliefs, and ultimately our action. LePan could have substituted 'history' for 'mythology' though this language suffers the same sort of problem but he chose 'mythology'. Mythology suggests more than a factual enterprise; myth making is a creative, spiritual quest.
LePan's citation for the Order of Canada, appointed in 1999, reads, "A great Canadian who helped define our identity, he made significant contributions to literature, public policy, and academic life."
Selected Titles: The Net and the Sword, 1953, GG; Weathering It: The Complete Poems(1948-1987); Far Voyages, 1990
Milton Acorn (1923-1986)
Milton Acorn, known as "The People's Poet,' was born and raised in Charlottetown, P.E.I. He served in the army in World War II, and then became a carpenter, working in P.E.I.,Quebec and Ontario. He gave up carpentering in the late 1950's to become a poet. Acorn has been described as a proletarian poet, a populist, a popular and a political poet. Thesedistinctions tend to blur; however, it is useful to distinguish a political poet from a popular poet. Robert Service is a popular poet, but not a political one. Northrop Frye defined a popular poet as one who writes in the oral tradition, whose function is as a teacher, 'the one who remembers'. In the current literature 'popular' usually means a poet who is not an academic, who does not work with elaborate allusion or symbol, a poet who uses standard metres and the diction of the working class and is interested in telling their stories. Popular and populist have also begun to blur distinction. A populist poet comes from the original Populist movement, a political movement, and adds a sense of political justice, such as the need for trade unions and fair wages for the working class. Poetically, in both popular and populist poetry, you "get it" in the first read, but you are moved by the force of raw emotion,
the piquant insight, the openness to truth. One can be a political poet, but not a populist. Gary Geddes' sophisticated use of figures of speech, his elaborate allusions, the breadth of political issues move beyond the realm of the populist. In Canada, however, we have a long and important tradition of socialist poets who are both political and populist. Poets such as FR Scott, Dorothy Livesay, Dawn Fraser and Milton Acorn fall under this description, and this provides yet another way of organizing the poets.
In Montreal in the 50's, Acorn met Al Purdy. Purdy can be thought of as a popular poet. He was self-taught; he wanted to write poetry that would be read in the streets and the coffeehouses, rather than in the universities, though Purdy read there too. But like Dorothy Livesay, Purdy's poetry became complex and multilayered, reaching a broader audience than is usually associated with popular poetry. And he had a profound influence on Acorn.
In the early 60's, Acorn travelled to Vancouver where he became involved in new-left politics, founding the underground paper the Georgia Strait. Later in the 60's he moved back to Toronto and was a mainstay at the Bohemian Embassy, a coffeehouse in Toronto, and a member of The Perth County Conspiracy (Does Not Exist), a communally-minded group of musicians who often performed his poetry. Throughout this period, Acorn was an activist with the Canadian independence movement.
In 1968, Purdy selected and wrote an introduction to Acorn's collection I've Tasted My Blood: Poems 1956-1968. When the collection failed to win the Governor General's Award that year, a group of fellow poets awarded him the title of "The People's Poet", a tradition maintained annually by The Milton Acorn People's Poet Prize. Acorn won the Governor General's Award in 1975 for The Island Means Minago. Shortly after, he moved back to P.E.I., where he died in 1986.
Ed Jewinski (L&D) states that Acorn is "best viewed as having been a spokesman of the oppressed, as an articulator of the outrage felt when man victimizes either himself or his fellow man" (153). Acorn was an outspoken, self-declared Marxist, Marxist Leninist, Maoist, and Communist. This was a cultivated persona often meant to shock. He insisted that his politics informed his poetry. However, Jewinski argues that Acorn did not adhere to any one socialist ideology; he had no single political allegiance; he was "a social poet in the largest sense of the word." In all of his many collections, Acorn depicted the struggle of Canada's working class.
Acorn's strength lies not in political theory, but rather in his commitment to social justice and, surprisingly, his lyricism. His strongest poems capture social protest in vivid images and subtle rhythms, whereas the weakest poems deteriorate into didacticism and polemic. 'I've Tasted My Blood' is forged from personal experience and gives a rare glimpse into the life that shaped the activist:
If this brain's over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
I've tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born into.
But my mother's look
was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;
her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:
and I loved her too much to like
how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel.
Playmates? I remember where their skulls roll!
One died hungry, gnawing grey perch-planks;
one fell, and landed so hard he splashed;
and many and many
come up atom by atom
in the worm-casts of Europe.Like Alden Nowlan's poetry, Milton Acorn brings us news of another country that we must not forget. George Woodcock (LH Vol. 3) states, "Milton Acorn may be Canada's last may indeed be its only proletarian poet in the sense of a genuinely and revolutionary urge that is transmuted into poetry" (313). In "A Shard of Steel" Acorn wrote of his poetry:
My poems are one long varitoned shout To reach you and get an echo. They are as well a listening To land amidst your stir and hear you sing.
There are two films on Acorn, "In Love and Anger: Milton Acorn Poet" (1984), and The
National Film Board's "A Wake for Milton" (1988).
Selected Titles: I've Tasted My Blood (1968), The Island Means Minago (1975) GG; Dig UpMy Heart: Selected Poems 1952-1983
Dennis Lee (1939-)
Dennis Lee, poet, teacher, and editor, was born and raised in Toronto. He was educated at the University of Toronto, and he later taught at Rochdale College and Victoria College. He also taught English at York University. From 1967-1972, he was an editor for the House of Anansi, a press he co-founded. He has also been an editorial consultant at MacMillan Press and the director of the poetry program at McClelland & Stewart from 1981-84. In 1975, he was writer in residence at Trent University, and in 78-79, writer in residence at the University of Toronto. John Robert Colombo, in The Poets of Canada, describes Lee as "one of the country's leading literary figures" (234).
If Dennis Lee were a tenor, he would be a Pavarotti, a voice with incredible range. Lee's poetry ranges from the amusing, rhythmically delightful children's verse:
Alligator pie, alligator pie,
If I don't get some I think I'm going to die.
Give away the green grass, give away the sky,
But don't give away my alligator pieto Civil Elegies that discusses, among other things, what it means to be a citizen, dread,conscience, guilt, the ontology of being, and destiny. Civil Elegies is a tough-love look at the relationship of public/private lives. As Robert Fulford states in a review for the Toronto Star,"Being a citizen is hard, Lee tells us; love is hard, he also tells us. Being alive and having to look yourself in the mirror is painful. But when all of this is accepted and lived with, it is still possible to affirm your right to be here and to state your case. Lee states this with unique eloquence."
Like many other poets of the 60's, Lee also explores the relationship of the profane and the sacred, blurring boundaries. Take the lovely little poem "Recollection":
I remember still
a gentle girl, just married, how she
drew her husband down, they had
no practice but she gave him warm
openings till he became a
cocky simpleton inside her
coming like kingdom come for the excellent
pleasure it made in her bodySex as sacred was a theme explored by poets such as Leonard Cohen ("Oh the sisters of mercy they have not departed") and de-constructed by poets such as Atwood ("You fit into me/ like a hook into an eye/ a fish hook/ an open eye"). Lee's gentleness and mutual respect lie somewhere in between Cohen and Atwood. Even here, though, he is aware of how easily:
We impose the roles that feed the other's
hankering, and go on to
savage what we have made, defacing
images, our own, and thus finally
destroy the beloved trapped inside the image.
And the nerve ends come apart, and we spend
long nights separate in the same bed, turning and raunchy as if
our dreams are real for there are
few among us who are competent at being, and few who can
let our lovers be.Dennis Lee has contributed widely to Canadian letters. He has written critical articles and books such as Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology, plus edited a number of anthologies including The New Canadian Poets 1970-1985 and two with Roberta Charlesworth, An Anthology of Verse 1964, and A New Anthology of Verse 1989, both published by Oxford Press. But Lee is best known for his children's poetry, books such as Alligator Pie, Jelly Belly, Garbage Delight, Dinosaur Dinner, and most recently, Bubblegum Delicious. We love his children's poetry because it is rhythmically joyful, and because it describes Canadian places, Canadian historical figures, and contemporary issues with a whimsical lyricism. In a CBC interview with Shelagh Rogers, Lee called children's poetry anincantatory thing, "you're working with sound and rhythm as it distills into meaning it's absolutely pure. It's like working with pure music." He began writing children's poetry for his daughters, and went on to publish to great acclaim. He has been dubbed Canada's 'Father Goose' and understood as the poet who began the renaissance in Canadian children's literature. Jim Henson also appreciated this talent. Lee wrote many of the song lyrics for Fraggle Rock, and was involved in script work for two of Henson's films: The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. For the generation just coming of age, Dennis Lee is a household name.
Selected Titles: Civil Elegies and Other Poems 1972 GG; Dinosaur Dinner with a Slice of Alligator Pie: Favourite Poems 1997; Night Watch: New & Selected Poems 1968-1996
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.