The Filled Pen: Selected Non-fiction of P.K. Page (review)

P.K. Page’s career as an artist is astonishing and it continues in productivity and variety into her nineties. Her career encompasses poetry, fiction, travel writing, drama, a libretto, children’s books, essays, drawings, and paintings. Any official biography of Page will have to contend with this wide-ranging vitality, and with the generations of artists with whom she has interacted and on whom she has been an important influence. Her career spans the period of major growth in the arts in Canada, a period that is in many ways comparable in richness and importance to the Irish renaissance in the early twentieth century. Page has been at the heart of many crucial artistic moments in this country’s development, and this small collection of eighteen pieces of her writing, spanning nearly forty years, provides a glimpse into the importance of that career and of her meditation on what she characterizes as a ‘larger reality.’ All but five of these pieces were commissioned, and commissions are important spurs that take the writer into a space not anticipated. There is a relief in entering the commissioned space, for who would write on someone or something in which one had no interest? Few writers. The goad from beyond is very useful indeed. And the essays on A.M. Klein, on David Adams Richards, on fairy tales and folk tales, on ‘Falling in Love with Poetry,’ and on ‘A Writer’s Life’ are essential reading for anyone who has contemplated the imagination of the artist or the importance of the historical moment to the development of art.

Although the material in The Filled Pen, with one exception, has been published in scattered sources, it is the collection as a whole that creates a coherent insight into the imagination of a working artist. It constitutes, in fact, as the editor suggests it might be styled, ‘her autobiography of the imagination.’

Something of Page’s luminous intelligence is immediately apparent in this excerpt from what might be argued as the central essay in the collection, ‘A Writer’s Life’:

I have never belonged to a school. I have been in love with, but not wedded to, form. I believe with Graves that the theme chooses the poet; with Salvador Dali that to gaze is to think; and with Goethe that ‘The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance had been foreverconcealed from us.’

I suspect that metre is a brain-altering drug – one we ignore at our peril . . . iambic is the lub-dub of the heart . . . iambic pentameter that lub-dub repeated five times . . . It is difficult for me to believe this is accidental.

I believe art has two functions: a lower and a higher. The lower is invaluable. It shows us ourselves – Picasso’s Guernica, for example. The higher – more valuable still, in my view – gives us glimpses of another order. If I may quote from my poem, ‘Poor Bird’:

in the glass of a wave a painted fish like a work of art across his sight reminds him of something he doesn’t know that he has been seeking his whole long life–

And Page concludes the essay with this moving tribute to the life in art:

So where do I go from here? I have no idea. The journey is without maps. But when I glance back, as I have tonight, to where I have been, I know that the life of the artist is one of the most privileged of all lives.

I would have chosen no other way.

Wherever one dips into this gathering of essays, there are similar illuminations. It is the very specificity of Page’s writing and its beauty that make The Filled Pen deeply engaging. P.K. Page is a national treasure, and The Filled Pen admirably distils some of her essence.