P. K. Page’s “Conversation”: a Dialogue between Painting and Poetry

Abstract

This work analyzes P.K.Page’s poem “Conversation”, which concerns the remembrance of a dialogue between the Canadian poet and the Israeli ambassador Arie Aroch, while both were engaged in painting a canvas in her studio on Estrada da Gávea, in Rio de Janeiro. By way of a stylistic approach – foregrounding the recurrence of a specific vocabulary related to painting, of formal and pictorial frames (the picture within a picture) and of images suggestively symbolical –, the analysis will reveal that, in spite of the informality of the dialogue enhanced by the use of free verse lines, the poem actually becomes a dialogue between the art of painting and the art of poetry. Keywords: Canadian poetry. Stylistics. Aesthetics.