Looking at "The Gold Sun"; or, The Glosa's Glasses

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2004 by Stacey, Robert David

Tracing the intertextual relations of "The Gold Sun" from Hologram, P.K. Page's 1994 collection of glosas, this essay explores the evolution of Page's poetic philosophy in relation to her "vision of vision." It focusses, in particular, on the poet's exploitation of the formal properties of the glosa - which takes the quatrain of another poet as its inspiration and starting point - as a means of summing up her own poetic career. The basis of "The Gold Sun" is Wallace Steven's "Credences of Summer" (1946) which embodies an unresolved tension between the desire for a fully autonomous art and a more subjective (and necessarily "flawed") poetics. "The Gold Sun" resolves this crisis, revealing Page's solution to a similar problem in her own career, by re-enacting the shift in her work from an autotelic and objective poetics to a more contingent and dialogical one. Reflecting this transition, the poem's initial idea of seeing as "revelation" is gradually displaced by a vision of mutual recognition.

En retracant les relations intertextuelles de « The Gold Sun » a partir de « Hologram », un recueil du gloses de P.K. Page datant de 1994, cet essai explore l'evolution de la philosophie poetique de Page en relation avec sa « vision de la vision ». On y met l'accent sur l'exploitation que fait le poete des proprietes formelles de la glose - qui consiste a s'approprier le quatrain d'un autre poete comme source d'inspiration - comme un moyen de resumer sa propre carriere de poete. « The Gold Sun » trouve son origine dans « Credences of Summer » (1946) de Wallace Steven qui exprime une tension irresolue entre le desir d'un art entierement autonome et d'une poetique plus subjective (et necessairement « imparfaite »). « The Gold Sun » resout cette crise, revelant la solution que Page a elle-meme applique à un probleme semblable au cours de sa carriere, en modifiant son optique de travail, et en passant d'une poetique autotelique et objective a une poetique plus dialogique et plus contingente. Meditant sur cette transition, l'idee initiale du poeme cherchant a percevoir la vision comme une « revelation » est graduellement remplacee par une autre idee cherchant, elle, à percevoir la vision comme une reconnaissance mutuelle.

In the forward to Hologram, her 1994 collection of glosas, P.K. Page writes that the idea of using the Spanish Renaissance form, in which original poems are generated from the excerpted quatrains of other poets' works, obliged her to search for texts that "paralle[led] in an intimate way my own knowledge, experience, or - but preferably and - some other indefinable factor I could recognize but not name" (10). Hologram constitutes a gathering of poems and poets, a constellation, if you will, formed by the pull of Page's own poetic personality. At the centre of this constellation is, appropriately enough, "The Gold Sun," one of the most successful poems in the collection. Based on "Credences of Summer" by Wallace Stevens - a poet for whom Page acknowledges a certain affinity - "The Gold Sun" reproduces the effect of the collection as a whole by bringing together, in a (temporarily) fixed orbit, not only Stevens's poem and its new voicing, but, significantly, a number of Page's earlier works. Explicitly intended as "companion poem" to "A Little Reality," the elegiac second part of her 1987 poem "Kaleidoscope," "The Gold Sun" traces an entire poetic career by alluding to "Stories Of Snow," published the same year as "Credences of Summer," 1946; "Cry Ararat!" from 1967; and the sestina "After Reading Albino Pheasants" from her 1981 collection Evening Dance of the Grey Flies. Like "Credences of Summer" itself, each of these poems foregrounds an idea of vision, which Page has used consistently as the metaphoric means of addressing tensions between a world of poetry and a world of experience. That idea has not remained constant, however. By way of the poetic interrelations established by "The Gold Sun," this essay will chart some key transformations in Page's vision of vision; her poetic ideas have moved from the revelational to the contingent just as her poetic ideal would seem to have shifted from the apocalyptic to the accommodational, as the intertextual form of "The Gold Sun" itself suggests.

The glosa is a form remarkable for the way it self-consciously draws attention to an act of reading that precedes and enables a subsequent act of writing. The quoted quatrain, or cabeza, that heads the poem not only serves as the material basis of the work, in which the quatrain's four lines are separated to form the concluding lines of four successive stanzas, but represents the history of a particular reading process whereby the writer, Page says, must find what she "need[s]" (Hologram 10). This process, to which Page repeatedly refers, is at once poetic consumption and personal quest. I am struck by a parallel between the compositional demands of Hologram and Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence, which holds that the act of writing is, for the poet, only ever a way of reading - or misreading - his precursors. In this respect, the glosa could be seen as an almost literal embodiment of what Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence," a possibility Page herself raises when she prefaces her collection by remarking, "reading again the giants of my youth, I could not help wondering what their effect on me had been. Had I been influenced by any of them? And if so, how?" (12).