"Out of the Painted Grove, My Buck": The Escape from Irony in Avison and Page

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2004 by Johnston, Gordon

This essay provides a gendered reading of the poetics of two of the most prominent female modernist Canadian poets. It begins with a close reading of the relatively early poems "Watershed" by Margaret Avison and "Arras" by P.K. Page, in which the appearance of living creatures (the buck and the peacock) within the aesthetic structures of a painting and an arras provides a model for an alternate and female version of transcendence, and a means of resisting the characteristic irony of modernism and its concurrent slide toward extreme groundlessness. It then explores this "transcendence of nearness" in more recent poems of "hid life" by both poets.

Cet essai propose une lecture sexuee de la poetique de deux des plus grandes poetesses modernes du Canada. Il s'ouvre sur la lecture attentive des poemes « Watershed » de Margaret Avison et « Arras » de P.K. Page, qui sont parmi leurs premieres creations et dans lesquels l'apparition de creatures vivantes (le chevreuil et le paon) a l'interieur des structures esthetiques d'une peinture et d'une tapisserie d'Arras fournit un modele pour une version alternative et feminine de la transcendance, de meme qu'un moyen de resister a l'ironie caracteristique du modernisme et a ses glissements simultanes vers une absence de fond extreme. Il explore ensuite cette relation entre « la transcendance et la proximite » qui figure dans les poemes plus recents de « hid life » des deux poetes.

The characteristic ironic voice of modernist poetry is generated in part by the collapse of orthodoxies, including the religious ones, and the concurrent doubt about absolutes; it is also in part a reaction against the hollow rhetoric of inflated pieties. P.K. Page and Margaret Avison both begin their careers in this mode: the garden in The Metal and the Flower is surrounded by industrialstrength barbed wire; the sun of Winter Sun can barely warm the things of this world. The progression in both their careers, however, is away from the ironies of a modernism largely masculinist in its agenda and towards a poetry that at least allows for transcendent vision. It is worth inquiring whether they are able to develop in this way because they are women, they have, as it were, an alternate conception of the creation of poems. Helene Cixous in her work writes about women's language arising from the female body and calls for recognition of woman's life-giving force through a new feminine language that would subvert binarism and patriarchy. Julia Kristeva writes about opposing phallocentrism with images derived from women's corporeal experiences (see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'Ecriture feminine" 361-77). Page and Avison both provide striking revelatory images of hidden life, of life appearing within another structure, and imply an understanding of the poem's having its origin outside the self but appearing first or being detected first within oneself. Their poetry is not resistant, or resistante, in the usual sense. Rather than expend its energies in an adversarial relation to patriarchy, their poetry uses an alternative mode of creation, indicated by their images of hidden or contained or detected life, and by their use of the poetic structures or formalism that Page and Avison see as functional rather than inhibitory, and as providing an adequate and familiar shape for the living substance of the poem.

Avison's ongoing interest in the germinating seed is not so much in the unconscious, intuitive and spontaneous dimensions of creation, but in the poem's taking shape, being shaped by its inner guidelines, its DNA as it were, and within a supportive structure. Then the poem is raised and disciplined as necessary, so that it conforms to the norms of accepted poetic behaviour, or at least to behaviour the poet-parent can bear. The lack of available drafts and variant versions of her poems gives the impression of poems not being raised but coming to full term - or, Athena-like, being horn adult. It also gives the impression of growth in the dark and eventual emergence, that is, of gestation and birth, rather than of craft. In Page, by contrast, the craft of the poem is often foregrounded. The filled pen in the poem of that title draws attention to the instrument of both her crafts, art and poetry.

For both poets, however, the substance of their poems seems to present itself to them. When Jacques Derrida says that there is no self-presentation of meaning or presence, he creates a dead end. Perhaps male transcendence has had its day, if it is bound necessarily to these doubts, this nihilism, this extreme groundlessness. The failure of male transcendence generates irony, but is not fatal. There exists an alternate tradition, of female transcendence. The goddess Nut, the overarching goddess of ancient Egypt, is horizontal and protective, is resplendent in stars; she embraces the earth. The figure of transcendence, however, will appear in many disguises, as Page says:

You, my Lord, were dressed in astonishing disguises: