January 2010 – Lit Bits

P. K. Page: 1916-2010

In 2005, my high school in Canada invited me to give a poetry workshop and reading. After the workshop, the instructor who’d invited me—one talented Mr. Terence Young—took me along on a social call to none other than literary giant P. K. Page. It was an unexpected pleasure during my visit to Victoria.

Then approaching 90, P. K. showed no signs of slowing down. She mixed us stiff cocktails and talked a blue streak. She drank more than I did. When I expressed an interest in Brazil, she talked about her two years there in the 1950s and grilled me on my Portuguese. She was sharp and amusing and easy to like. But I, for one, was also a little afraid. She was full of fire.

On January 14, Canadian poet, essayist, and visual artist P. K. Page passed away at 93.

Patricia Kathleen Page was born in England in 1916 and moved with her family to Alberta, Canada, when she was quite young. Her parents were both creative, artistic people, and she grew up surrounded by the arts. She was a prolific writer, publishing two new books just two months before her death.

As a young woman living in Montreal, she belonged to a group of poets who founded the magazine Preview (1942-45), associated with then-prominent Canadian poets F. R. Scott and A. M. Klein. While not a card-carrying member, she sympathized with Quebecois Communists who resisted the Anglo-Canadian establishment in Montreal, a French city. Her work was interested in language play as well as concepts from psychoanalysis.

Her first book As ten as twenty was published in 1946 and in 1954 her collection The Metal and the Flower won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Canada’s highest literary prize. She had a strong sense of social justice and believed in practicing literary form. As she said,“I make myself sit down and write sonnets and villanelles and sestinas because you need bones. If you don’t know all that, you have a very shaky scaffolding for your art.”

Working as a scriptwriter for the National Film Board of Canada, she met her husband Arthur Irwin, who at the time also worked in film. Thanks to his later diplomatic career, she lived for several years in Australia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Brazil.

While living in Brazil she painted often, and kept track of her daily life in a diary later published as Brazilian Journal. (I took her journal on my second trip to Brazil. It was an insightful and often hilarious companion, navigating the absurdity of a northerner in a tropical country without enough of the local language.)

In this 1983 CBC interview, she speaks about her experiences in Brazil, and reads “Traveler’s Poem.”

The CBC Web site published a poignant remembrance of Page’s life written by her friend and fellow writer Rosemary Sullivan. The page includes a video of " target="_blank">Page reading her most popular poem, “Planet Earth,” which the United Nations selected in 2001 to be read simultaneously in several locations around the world to celebrate the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

Upon her death, the Premier of Canada, Gordon Campbell, issued this statement: “As an author, poet, teacher, scriptwriter and painter, P. K. Page was an extraordinary and varied force in promoting and developing Canadian culture. Her efforts helped to set the stage for decades of cultural growth in our nation. Her long and illustrious career saw her achieve great heights including eight honourary doctorates as well as being named to both the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia.”

Poet and friend Lorna Crozier said in a 2004 profile in Victoria’s local newspaper, the Times-Colonist, “Her engagement with the world is obsessive, passionate and totally clear.”

Some of P.K. Page’s poems are available online:

“Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree”

“Cullen in the Afterlife”

“After Rain” (inspired by Rilke‘s “Autumn Day“)

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Poet of the Month: Louis Zukofsky

As Guy Davenport once put it, Louis Zukofsky, our January poet of the month, is a “poet’s poet’s poet.” Though he stands as a central figure in the development of modern poetry, he hasn’t achieved the widespread recognition of Eliot or Pound or many of the other Modernists, though poets and graduate students may know and appreciate his work.

Born on January 23, 1904, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Russian immigrants, Zukofsky’s first exposure to English literature was in Yiddish translation. He attended Columbia University where he worked on student literary publications and, in 1924, received a master’s degree in English. A devotee of Ezra Pound, he corresponded with the poet who was impressed by Zukofsky’s early work. In fact, it was through Pound that Zukofsky got his first big break into the poetry world: Pound convinced the editor of Poetry to let Zukofsky guest-edit an issue.

In editing the issue of Poetry, as well as a subsequent anthology, Zukofsky was credited with creating the Objectivist movement. (The Objectivism of second-generation Modernists, not the Objectivism of Ayn Rand.) More a sympathetic cast of mind than a defined school of poetry, Objectivism sought to treat the poem as an object, breaking up the normal patterns of speech by conscious fragmentation. Much in the mold of Ezra Pound, Objectivists were also concerned with incorporating history into their works. Thus it’s not surprising that Zukofsky’s own poetry is often obscure, intellectual, and rife with allusions.

Zukofsky published forty-nine books in his literary career—ranging from fiction to poetry to criticism—but undoubtedly his major accomplishment was his 800-page poem “A,” an eclectic mix of personal reflection and historical allusion. He worked on this epic project throughout his life.

“A“ is Zukofsky’s masterwork but was only published in full and made widely available in 1979, a year after his death. It includes twenty-four sections—one for each hour of the day—and is what poet and critic Dan Chaisson called “a mélange of styles and forms, from Poundian free verse to Italian canzoni.”

Chaisson writes of the all-encompassing nature of A: “Zukofsky’s life was unusually directed toward the poem that was unusually open to absorbing it; you cannot talk about Zukofsky the man without talking about the poem that collected, to an extent few writers have ever attempted, the history of one person’s perception of experience, from Bach to Watts, from Spinoza to Kennedy.”

We’d love to offer you a sample of Zukofsky’s work here on our blog, but the strict copyright interpretation of Zukofsky’s son makes that impossible. We encourage you to take a trip to your local library to check out his poetry in book form, or browse the many online sources.

Poets.org has a biography with a link on the Objectivists. The Poetry Foundation’s Web site includes a lengthy bio and bibliography along with a number of links to audio recordings on Zukofsky.

The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo offers links to a large number of critical and academic resources, and Z-Site is a thorough companion to Zukofsky’s work…in case you should find any of it confusing. For those dying for more, Mark Scroggins has written the authoritative Zukofsky biography.

Happy Birthday, Louis Zukofsky!

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before coming to Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

From Classroom to Creative Work: How do You Get There?

What did we do in class today?

Oh, nothing.

Early on in my experiences as a poet-in-the-classroom, I went to hear John Ashbery, who read some poems but who also had a few words to say about the teaching of poetry. Someone asked him what his “secret” was as a teacher of poetry—what exercises did he use, how did he structure assignments so that his students produced poems, what were his secrets.

He said that as a teacher of poetry, he believed there was only one thing he could do, one thing it was all about: “creating an environment.”

And that was it.

That was John Ashbery’s big secret.

At the time, I had a picture in my head of John Ashbery in one of the dingy, overcrowded, sweat-stinking NY public school classrooms where I encountered my fledgling poets. He would come tiptoeing in, he would close the door, he would reach up high and pull down the shades or at least turn off the dimmerless overhead lights, and he would switch on an old-fashioned dial radio he had with him. Some bewitching scratchy music of an uncharted station would fill the room, from the linoleum to the flaking ceiling. The radio would screech or hum as he fiddled with the dials and bent the antenna.

And “environment” would have been at last created.

Poetry would fill the room and the students in it would turn to their sheets of paper and begin writing.

That was my first impression of “creating an environment.”

It hasn’t changed much.

From my experiences teaching high school and middle school poets, those standard issue classrooms are not usually the most creative spaces in which to work, add or subtract carpet, linoleum, windows that open or don’t, desks that are welded or unwelded to their chairs, bulletin boards with pushpins, or walls with masking tape.

But creativity seems to abound there, in that range of most uncreative environments.

I read through the anthologies of student poems from past years, looking for traces of what my lesson plans were, as if I were John Ashbery and an earnest teacher had asked me how I teach my students to write poems. And I read through my diligent teacher notebooks. My instructions to myself—and to them—are sketchy. Or rather, sketches. As if the poetry “lesson” were so ephemeral, it never really made it to the paper.

It’s not as if nothing made it to paper: I did write things down, by way of lesson plan, things like the words “Neruda today,” with an accompanying worksheet that has “Ode to My Socks” magnified and Xeroxed onto giant 11×17 paper. This particular worksheet also has, at the top right, a space for the student’s name, with the word “name” written in curlicue cursive, and then a prompt as unhelpful as: “Now think of some ordinary object and write your own ode, right here next to Lorca’s!”

How could that have possibly lead to poems?

But it did.

As I try to write a few paragraphs about how there is so little “on the page” after all my experience teaching poetry, I think the answer does lie with John Ashbery. What those half-worksheets and rich anthologies attest to is how much of teaching poetry is about creating an environment, in this case a rich classroom environment.

That is how poems get made—you have to conjure them up, call them down, court the Muse or the spirit of poetry, all in the standard issue classroom.

How?

How do you create an environment?

The main way is nothing fancy. It requires no radio, no costumes, no appliances—it is simply by bringing in poems. A poem. And by reading it aloud in a way that brings it to life in that room.

Neruda was an old friend in this regard: His poems seem to fit so well in the classroom because they are about ordinary things, which can make us remember the magic of being in that ordinary space.

You can read a poem aloud by having students, one after the other, in the order of how they are seated, be it in rows or in a circle, read a line from the poem. That can be fun with Neruda, for example, and his Elemental Odes because sometimes his lines are only a few words. You can read it once as quickly as possible, once as slowly as possible. The third time, you can have a few students chime in at random on a line they like. Clumps of students can read clumps of the poem out loud in unison. Little by little, the sounds of the poem, when rendered this way, make the meaning come alive. And as the students get used to the sounds of the poem, and the way those sounds feel, the poem becomes more and more theirs.

There are mysteries for students to solve which seem to make sense as the poem is brought to life by reading it aloud: in “Ode to My Socks,” who is Maru-Mori? What are green deer? Is the tuna in “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” just a tuna? Or is it someone he loved—someone who worked hard and dies beloved? Is this a serious poem or a silly one? Reading out loud allows for a lot of permission to play, to play with tone, not just sound.

A poem’s mysteries can open up more mysteries, and more ways for students to approach their own odes. There are so many points of entry for the students when they write their own odes—they can invoke their own Maru-Mori, their own green deer, their own line lengths, their own roller coasters of feeling and tone.

But even this starts to sound vague as I write it.

How does the mention of “green deer” lead to another poem, an ode?

How does a poem about a dead tuna lead a 14-year-old boy to write an ode to his father?

I don’t know, exactly, except that I was there and it happened, over and over again.

The reading out loud of the poem, in these cases, was the key to “creating an environment” where poetry could take place.

Even as I write this now, I can remember how urgent it can feel, in a classroom, after experiencing the energy that reading (and rendering) a poem aloud, together, in different ways, releases.

It’s transformative.

In that moment, when the poem is most present in the “environment,” it is at last time to ask the students to flip the page over and write—write their own odes, write until you tell them they can stop.

And they will and do.

There are other ways to create environments, ways involving stopping at greengrocer and buying a Chinese persimmon, or procuring some postcards, or bringing in a scratchy record of your own, or no doubt wearing flowy scarves, but for now, this feels like enough. To create an environment, you must create an energetic focus. You must choose the poem. And you yourself in some real way have to show up in the environment, too; you have to be there, risking something. It’s a collaborative environment, after all, and as a teacher you are using your own link to poetry to help others find their own.

For now: To create poetry in the classroom, create an environment in which poets can work. To create that environment, use poems.

No wonder so little is written down in my lesson plans except the names of the poems themselves. It’s not a class you can make up, really.

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Mary Dilucia, has worked as a teacher of literature and an editor, and has also taught in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in poetry from NYU, and now lives and writes in Manhattan.