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Staying Afloat in the Typing Pool: P.K. Page, Poetry, and the Modern Office
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| Author/collaborator |
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| Title |
Staying Afloat in the Typing Pool: P.K. Page, Poetry, and the Modern Office
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| Abstract |
In the first few years of the 1940s, poet P.K. Page (1916-2010) was employed as a filing clerk for Allied War Supplies, a Montreal-based war firm tasked with producing and distributing materials needed for Canada’s war effort. The author points out that during this time, Page joined the editorial committee of "Preview," a Montreal socialist poetry little magazine to which she contributed a number of poems about office work, workers, and managerial culture. The author reads Page's poems of this period through a double lens: he first explores their documentary and diagnostic value as an insider’s view of the office during what has been called the “administrative revolution”; he then shows how the socialist “work” of these poems is constrained by an aesthetic philosophy that defines the poet and poetry in opposition to labourers and labour -- a stance, he argues, that introduces a number of contradictions that account for the poems’ strangely ambivalent and patronizing tone.
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| Publication |
Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d'études canadiennes
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| Volume |
Vol. 52
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| Issue |
no. 2
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| Pages |
481-509
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| Date |
Spring 2018
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| Language |
en
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| Citation |
Stacey, Robert David. “Staying Afloat in the Typing Pool: P.K. Page, Poetry, and the Modern Office.” Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes Vol. 52, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 481–509.
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