The silence of AM Klein: an essay by Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino has written a fascinating essay on the important Canadian poet AM Klein, for The New Criterion, which you can read here: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/4/the-silence-of-a-m-klein

The essay is also extremely interesting for its exploration of the role of a poet in society and how this affected Klein and his work. Also, I must admit I was delighted to learn that Klein authored a spy thriller (apparently called That Walks Like a Man, about the Gouzenko affair in Ottawa which helped to start the Cold War) but saddened that it was never published.

AM Klein (1909-1972) was one of the Montreal Group of modernist writers whose literary innovations created radical change in Canadian literature from the 1920s on. He was an associate of poets such as FR Scott and PK Page. (My Montreal grandparents had some connections to FR Scott, while PK Page is one of my most important influences all the way back to my teenage years. She lived in Sidney, BC, near where I grew up in Victoria, and I was privileged to go to one of her readings and meet her some years before she died. I like to think that these slight connections give me a cool "degrees of separation" angle on AM Klein...)

More significant than those degrees of separation was the Canadian poetry class I took at UVic at the end of the 1990s, taught by another Canadian poet, Doug Beardsley. I have mentioned this class before on the blog; I took it rather reluctantly with much eye-rolling over a Canadian literature requirement. It turned out to be absolutely life-altering for me in a literary sense, particularly (but not only) in my discovery of PK Page. The great Al Purdy also came to speak and read to us, once. I loved AM Klein's poetry too.

You can read some of Klein's poetry here: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/klein/index.htm


Photo: AM Klein in the 1940s. Library and Archives Canada. Public domain

Poetic Encounters in Victoria, BC

While back for a few weeks' visit to my hometown of Victoria, BC, I stopped in at Russell Books, which is an amazing and iconic used bookstore. It also happens to be where I had one of my first jobs after university, which was pretty good for a book lover without much work experience at the time.

I was searching the poetry section and decided to buy a small bilingual collection of Émile Nelligan's poems, partly because I am planning to try some more translations of his work. (You can read my translation of his 'Soir d'hiver', and some information about Nelligan's sad life, here.) Much to my surprise, when I looked inside the book, I found an inscription by Doug Beardsley. It was inscribed "Montreal, Quebec, at the Hotel Nelligan", and signed with dates both in 2006 and 2009, which added a little to the mystery. He had also made a few notes in the Preface. Doug Beardsley is a Victoria poet who was also an instructor at the University of Victoria until 2006 - and he taught the Canadian Poetry course which proved to be somewhat life-altering for me (both in introducing me to extraordinary Canadian poets, and in helping to open up modern and contemporary poetry to me.) Finding a book inscribed by him at my old workplace was sort of strange and wonderful. 

I also bought Karen Solie's Short Haul Engine, one of her older collections which she wrote while living in Victoria. I've browsed through it but am really looking forward to reading it more in-depth, especially in the light of her brilliant recent work.

Finally, I came across a tidbit in a local Victoria magazine regarding poet Rudyard Kipling. He visited Victoria in 1907 and commented to a reporter for the Times Colonist (which I think was called the Colonist or British Colonist then): "I am going to take a motor drive to see the beauties of the place. But I really don't see why I should move away from here. In Victoria, it is a waste of time to look for beauty. It is always with you."

"A Size Larger Than Seeing": P K Page and West Coast Memories

AFTER RAIN (P K Page)

The above link will take you to P K Page's 'After Rain', a few of her other poems and some biographical information, from the University of Toronto Libraries website's section on Canadian poetry (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/index.htm).

Victoria, on Vancouver Island, was a beautiful place to grow up. I didn't fully realise it until I left, and probably not even for a few years then. I regularly get people telling me that I'm crazy because I left British Columbia, and especially the Island, to live in London. Well - Londoners tell me I'm crazy; Islanders, when I go back home, remind me incessantly that it's the most beautiful place on earth and tell me how much I must miss it. I do miss it, of course; I miss fresh air, the ever-present ocean, the parks and flowers, some of the most striking scenery in the world (the Olympic Mountains painted across the horizon on the Strait of Juan de Fuca) - the list goes on. Also "of course", I had to leave eventually, and I am not sorry that I ended up in London. But I wish that I could go back more often, most importantly to see my family and friends. I took the above picture on a visit home this summer (June 2011).

Reading P K Page's poems brings back a flood of memories from Canada. I discovered her in a summer Canadian poetry class at university, and simultaneously discovered that contemporary poetry was quite a wonderful world. I remember doing a presentation on 'Cook's Mountains', a brilliant description of how language and names alter our perception: "instantly they altered to become/the sum of shape and name." I somewhat irrelevantly raised the point that images in the poem reminded me very much of a scene in Watership Down, but Doug Beardsley, the instructor and a poet in his own right, seemed to like it. And I remember being captivated by 'Stories of Snow', one of the greatest Canadian poems. Page was born in England but moved to Canada as a small child and lived there for most of her life, so she was certainly Canadian. However, she also lived with her diplomat husband in other countries including Australia and Brazil. 'Stories of Snow' beautifully describes how people with one set of experiences, or in one environment - in this case, the tropics - fill in their emotional landscape by dreaming of places that are very different. Although I'm not sure where Page lived when she wrote that poem, a friend pointed out to me that there was something very West Coast about these lines:


And stories of this kind are often told
in countries where great flowers bar the roads
with reds and blues which seal the route to snow...


Smug West Coasters do love it when the cherry blossoms, tulips and daffodils flower magnificently in the spring, and they can call their relatives out East, who are still snowbound.

I believe it was in 2000 when I went one evening to Victoria's James Bay Inn to hear P K Page read. My mother, also a fan, came with me. Page was a beautiful and stately lady - she would then have been about 85. I was one of a queue of people who politely lined up to ask her if she could read a particular poem. I told her how much my Canadian poetry class had loved 'Stories of Snow' and asked if she could read it, but sadly she didn't have a copy with her. I had also loved 'After Rain', so asked her if she could read that instead. When she got up to read her poems, she graciously but laughingly told us that she'd had to significantly rearrange her program because she'd had so many requests. I remember that she read 'Poor Bird', and the relish with which she delivered the line "Poor bird, he is obsessed!". And she did read 'After Rain'. I remember so vividly the turn of her head and the brightness of her eyes as she read: "O choir him, birds, and let him come to rest/within this beauty as one rests in love". Page died last year at the age of 93. I wish that she had made it to 100, as so many senior citizens living in Victoria do.

'After Rain' also reminds me of the West Coast simply on its own: a garden drowned in chlorophyll, and Page delighting in the lacy creations of the snails all over her cabbages. It is a wet climate, and the outdoors can drip seemingly for days after a day or six of heavy downpours. The poem's sharp but delicate imagery, its ornate but pure tone, are typical of Page's best work. The lines "Keep my heart a size/larger than seeing" have echoed in my mind for many years now.

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I realised that I didn't quite say what I wanted to say about Celan in my last entry, but I will probably have to return to him. It occurred to me that his abstract but extraordinarily precise images are somehow like electrodes placed on the reader's emotional centres, to stimulate wonder and fear and grief. Then, when I was tracing some more information about Celan, I found out that he underwent electroshock therapy for his severe depression. That was quite unsettling.

I also learned that Celan and P K Page were both born on November 23; Page in 1916, and Celan in 1920. It is strange to think that had he lived, I could potentially have met Celan, as I did Page. I am not sure if Celan influenced Page (more likely than the other way around, given his much greater fame), but I have thought that if his life had been less ravaged by tragedy, there might have been some more similarities between their work. There is something that seems to link them for me, as well as the coincidence of their birthdays; something in the images that they choose. They were certainly both in love with flowers, and birds, and images of minerals, and broken glass, and the changing perspective of the eye.