Two Giovannis: P.K. Page's Two Modernisms, The

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2004 by Irvine, Dean

Although P.K. Page published more of her poetry in the west-coast poetry magazine Contemporary Verse (1941-1953) than any other modernist periodical, critics and literary historians have primarily attended to her early affiliations with the Preview (1942-1945) group in Montreal. By shifting attention from her Preview period to her long-term involvement with the Contemporary Verse group, this study moves towards a reconfiguration of critical and literary-historical perspectives on the relationships among modernist poetics, gender, and little-magazine production that inform Page's participation in Canadian modernist literary culture from the early 1950s to the mid-1950s. With the publication of her two "Giovanni" poems ("Giovanni and the Indians" and "After Rain") in 1956 as its terminal points, this reconfigured history attends to the doubly-gendered contexts of Page's modernist poetry and poetics, namely the sociality of gender in modernist little-magazine culture and the gender of her two modernisms.

Meme si P.K. Page a publie plus d'oeuvres dans Contemporary Verse, revue poetique de la cote Ouest (1941 a 1953), que dans tout autre periodique a tendance moderne, les critiques et les historiens de la litterature se sont principalement penches sur ses premiers contacts avec le groupe Preview (1942 a 1945) a Montreal. En passant sa periode associee a la revue Preview, pour porter son attention sur sa longue participation au groupe Contemporary Verse, cette etude tend a reconfigurer les perspectives d'ordre critique et litteraires-historiques sur les relations entre les poetes d'expression moderne, leur sexe et la publication de petites revues qui documentent la participation de Page a la culture litteraire moderne au Canada, depuis le debut des annees 1950 et jusqu'au milieu de cette decennie. Adoptant pour reperes finaux la publication, en 1956, des ses deux poemes « Giovanni » (« Giovanni and the Indians » et « After Rain »), cette histoire reconfiguree aborde les contextes a double references sexuelles de la poesie moderne de Page et de sa poetique, notamment le caractere sociologique du sexe au sein de la culture des petits periodiques d'expression moderne et le sexe de ses deux modernismes.

Because critical and literary-historical studies of P.K. Page's early poetry have largely focussed on her activities as a member of the Preview little-magazine group in wartime Montreal, we have yet to take into consideration her affiliations with Canada's west coast little-magazine culture from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, particularly her long-term relationship with the Contemporary Verse group in Victoria and Vancouver.1 In particular, this gap in Page scholarship omits the little-magazine culture in which she produced alternatives to the modernist poetics of her Preview period. Founded in 1941 by a committee including Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Doris Ferne and Floris McLaren, and edited by Alan Crawley, Contemporary Verse (1941-1953) printed more poetry by Page than any other poet and published more of her poems than any other magazine of the period. To a greater extent than any other modernist periodical, Contemporary Verse consistently provided her with a venue to foreground the gendered character of her modernism. It is my contention, then, that the little-magazine contexts of Page's early poetry are crucial to her development as a modernist poet, principally to her formulation of a gendered modernist poetics. Recent feminist studies of Page (Relke, Killian, Paul) elaborate upon the construction of gender in Page's poetry of the 1940s, but these readings disregard the historical contexts of the decade's little magazines. Brian Trehearne's The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition offers readings of gender in relation to the modernist poetics of the period and its effects on Page's early poetry (43, 96-97), though her gendered poetics is not prominent in his narrative of the Montreal poets and their little magazines. By consolidating the analysis of her early poetry's gender-consciousness with the shift in focus from her formative Preview period (1942-1945) to her longer involvement with the Contemporary Verse group (1941-1956), I move towards a reconfiguration of critical and literary-historical perspectives on the relationships among modernist poetics, gender and little-magazine production that inform Page's participation in modernist literary culture from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s. With her publication of "Giovanni and the Indians" and "After Rain" in 1956 and her subsequent decade-long disappearance from little magazines as my terminal points, this reconfigured history attends to the doubly-gendered contexts of Page's modernist poetry and poetics, namely the sociality of gender in modernist little-magazine culture and the gender of her two modernisms.

The minor role that Contemporary Verse has played in Page scholarship can be attributed to two major tendencies in the historiography of literary modernism in Canada. First, literary-historical narratives about Montreal little magazines of the 1940s (Preview, First Statement and Northern Review) predominate,2 with a concomitant lack of attention to modernist little-magazine culture on the west coast. Second, and more profound, it indicates the extent to which a masculinist discourse has shaped the historiography of Canada's modernist little magazines, resulting in a marginalization of women's contributions to Canadian modernist little-magazine culture. Consequently, feminist scholars such as Carole Gerson have characterized literary histories of the period as masculinist, even claiming that Canadian modernism itself has been gendered in the historical record as a masculinist aesthetic (65). Pauline Butling has likewise argued that literary historians have defined Canadian modernist little magazines using "masculinist" terms (62), an argument echoed in Barbara Godard's critique of a male-dominated literary-magazine culture in Canada prior to the formation of feminist literary magazines in the 1970s (269). Certain masculinist tendencies are clearly evident - both in editorials, reviews and articles by Canadian modernists and in literaryhistorical narratives about little magazines and modernism in Canada - and these deserve further inquiry. The result of that critical inquiry should not be a solidification of the literary-historical myth of Canadian modernism and its little-magazine culture as a masculinist phenomenon, however. Rather, Canadian modernism's dominant masculinist discourses, whether evidenced by the editing of little magazines or by the practice of modernist poetics, should be viewed in dialectical relation to the articulation of an emergent women's modernism.