Mapping the Mind’s “I”:: Vision, Perception, and Complicity in the Early Poems of P.K. Page

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Mapping the Mind’s “I”:: Vision, Perception, and Complicity in the Early Poems of P.K. Page
Abstract
The author explains that vision, at once limiting and enabling, functions in P.K. Page's (1916-2010) poems to foreground her early concept of the limitations and subjectivity of perception, advancing her notion of an unmapped but intuited space of enhanced perspective. In her early poems, written when she was living in Montreal in the 1940s, Page explores the capacities inherent in the intuited well of visual potential behind the eyes, and touches on issues of subjectivity and the reconciliation of the social self with sensory experience. Ultimately, the author argues, Page is unable fully to close the subject-object distance to achieve the union she desires, to surmount an alienating limited perception, and to describe a whole experience without imposing upon it the subjectivity of language. Part of Montreal's "modernist" poetry movement. Page was one of the founders of Montreal’s little magazine Preview (1942-1945) and its 1945 successor, Northern Review.
Publication
Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne
Volume
Vol. 30
Issue
no. 1
Pages
181-197
Date
Summer 2005
Language
en
URL
Citation
Swann, Jane. “Mapping the Mind’s ‘I’:: Vision, Perception, and Complicity in the Early Poems of P.K. Page.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne Vol. 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 181–197. https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/scl/2005-v30-n1-scl30_1/scl30_1art09.pdf.
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