Hidden Out in the Open: Editing and Reading P.K. Page’s The Hidden Room

Abstract

“Hidden Out in the Open” details the provenance, and the collaborative process of editing, P.K. Page’s “collected poems,” The Hidden Room. It goes on to stress, in various phases of the argument, the usefulness of Page’s poetry, whether because of its compassionate embrace of society’s misfits and artists, or because of its passionate pressing of concern for the health of planet earth. The case for usefulness and relevance rests on a careful reading of the metaphors and symbols with which Page intermeshes the small and sublunary with the movement of the cosmos itself. In this she follows, and renders fully contemporary, ancient figures of microcosmic/macrocosmic wholes. Page’s poems are compact models of ecological integrity which are expansive and dynamic, whose open-hiddenness (enigmatic clarity), requires and cultivates extremely active readers.