The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"In sheer terms of semantic madness my favorite reality show title is Paris Hilton’s My New BFF." Kazim Ali • American Poetry Review
"Magrelli's effort to understand is clearly the product of a passion fired by wit, a passion honoured in the knowledge of its cost." Sean O'Brien on Valerio Magrelli • The Guardian
"A Prynne poem contextualises the subjective in a fragmented form and strands him at the periphery of the communicative framework." Matthew Hall on J.H. Prynne • Cordite
"[Larkin] assertively expressed his incomprehension and reveled in his disgust over the style changes [John] Coltrane initiated." John G. Rodwan on Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin • Open Letters
"This joyride isn't over and . . . we're all in this together." Nine poets and critics on the past decade in poetry: 2000-2009 • Poetry
"He was a poetry scholar who drank heavily and had a wide circle of friends. Not long after Da Huang was born, Meng Yuan walked into a Party propaganda session and announced, ‘These neophytes shouldn’t be leading specialists…’" Bei Dao • Granta
"John Ashbery may or may not be, as Rosenberg writes, 'the most eminent English-language poet alive,' but such eminence looks rather meager when compared to the distinction Jeremiah claims for himself." Adam Kirsch on the literary bible • New Republic
"He may be doing something magnificent; he may be trying to cease the withering." Ken L. Walker on the art of William Blake
"Then the clocks go haywire. Sometimes a day is like nothing at all and then right on its heels comes a night that is like . . . a thousand days." Rainer Maria Rilke • Paris Review
"The cream in the instant coffee is always 'slightly sour' (100), the ice in the whiskey melting (159), the lunch hour nearly over." Marjorie Perloff on Frank O'Hara • Lana Turner
"See what has become of me? I’ve never stopped desiring your attention." W.S. Di Piero • Threepenny Review
"Translation is a treasuring and guardianship of border/lines: a guardianship, in drawing and redrawing our attention to what is on either side of the border, and a treasuring, in ensuring that the lines stay open, permeable, porous." The Volta Project • The International Literary Quarterly
"The specific details – the half-empty trams, the cream tie, seem to struggle to press some vivid reality on a scene the poet seems to have half vanished from. " Peter Sirr on Luciano Erba • Poetry Ireland Review
"The libretto is a dying art." Michael Symmons Roberts • Wall Street Journal
"Ponsot’s own writing, like Ponsot’s version of Hopkins, can seem so self-consciously affirmative, so determined to look on the bright side, as to miss a great deal of what other people see." Stephen Burt • New York Times Review of Books
"I realized that what she had done was suddenly complete." W.S. Merwin on Deborah Digges • Brick
"[T]he essays demonstrate one hard way to live in language: through resistance, fidelity to attention, ethical suspicion of the drifts of mind flesh is heir to, and a tough-minded honouring of the example of the dead." Adam Piette on Geoffrey Hill's Collected Critical Writings • Blackbox Manifold
"We may have started making stylish poems as shallow, and reductive, as the sentimentality they presumably guard against" Ellen Bryant Voigt • Michigan Quarterly Review
"[T]his collectively drawn map of the ever-shifting territory[.]" Attention Span 2009 • Third Factory Also: No Tell 2009 best books
"Reference, brevity, self-restraint, attention outside the self, material objects as models, Williams and his heirs as predecessors, classical lyric and epigram as precedents: all these, together, constitute the New Thing." Stephen Burt • Boston Review
"Rooted as they are in the quotidian – in real things (often with settings in a historical past) – they always nonetheless seem deep and strange." Eamon Grennan on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin • The Irish Times
'The bane of language, for Ashbery as for Flaubert, is the “received idea.”' "Helen Vendler • New York Times Review of Books
"Pick up a newspaper and a sharpie, read carefully and start making your mark." Travis Macdonald • Jacket
“'Invent a dream in which you appear as a poet.' This might be the cleanest description of Spicer’s practice of poetry: inhabiting a dream, coming to believe it." Jared White on Jack Spicer • Open Letters
"Poetry in Serbia has managed to stay healthy despite the Serbian Association of Writers." James Sutherland-Smith • Poetry London
"Who are these mourners processing to the grave...?" James Fenton, Alan Jenkins and others remember Mick Imlah • TLS / Oxford Poetry
"[Stephen Rodefer's] act of creation is . . . constituted by the deliberate garbling of the standard signals of traditional form." Lindsay Kathleen Turner • Verse Online
"He once spoke of how being 'modern' meant displaying 'new neuroses and old furniture'." Paul Reitter on the selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal • Times Literary Supplement
"'An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.'" Patrick Kurp on Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems •The Quarterly Conversation
"She uses abstraction to zero in on a subject rather than to dodge it. When the poems work, the place or mood Wright has set out to capture appears in silhouette." John Cotter on C.D. Wright • Open Letters
"[I]ts editors have done more than resuscitate Romanticism. They've also made it part of a vital tradition, generative of much of the imaginative work that sustains us today." Joe Safdie on Poems for the Millennium Vol. 3 • Jacket "These are our poems as much as are the poems written yesterday." John Bloomberg-Rissman • Galatea Resurrects
"What do poets feel about this unsteady dance with commercialism?" Leo Hickman on the use of poetry in advertisements • The Guardian
"The central lyric dummy who speaks for all of us — that’s the lyric mode — doesn’t only speak for the sexed-up moments but for the ponderous click of a casket lid. " Mary Jo Bang on Byron • Verse Palace / Poetry Daily
"[L]iterature is commerce between adults who think well enough of themselves and others." Jordan Davis on poetry in translation • Boston Review
"Poetry is a bit like architecture or engineering. It’s really about holding things together or keeping them up." An interview with Paul Muldoon • Literateur Part two here
"It is a poetic economy of a kind that forbids, and leaves no room for, emotional overflow. Instead, Oppen's feeling for human endurance stays inside the words and understatement." Richard Swigg • Jacket
"It’s a bit young, noisy and yup for my taste." August Kleinzahler • LRB
"[J]ust as Eliot cobbled together a poem using quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, Hindu prayers, and Arthurian legend, we would use The Waste Land to make a comic book." Ben Powis • Gulf Coast
"As if learning new languages, by immersion." Peter Campion on Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin and Roddy Lumsden • Poetry
'"As we have already explained conclusively, the Writings of Ern Malley are utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry.'" Christine Wertheim • Cabinet
"A would-be poet with a thin education could do worse than enter into an affair with an intellectual fifteen years his elder." Ange Mlinko on Rilke • The Nation


New poems

Kristin Marie Kostick Open Letters

Emily Pettit Sixth Finch

Juliana Spahr Lana Turner

James Longenbach The New Yorker

Samuel Menashe Anderbo

Amy Beeder Poetry

Eugene Ostashevsky A Public Space

Kay Ryan Threepenny Review

Jose Perez Beduya Ploughshares

Conor O'Callaghan Southword

Max Jacob Open Letters

Vona Groarke Gallery

Heather Christle Boston Review

Susan B. A. Somers-Willett Virginia Quarterly Review

Patrick Rosal American Poetry Review

Bill Manhire The New Yorker

Lauren Haldeman Thermos

D. Nurkse Boston Review

Amy Gerstler Drunken Boat

Michael Palmer Turbine

Katie Ford The New Yorker

Arthur Yap QLRS

Kathleen Rooney Reading Between A&B

Bei Dao Poetry International

Rae Armantrout No: A Journal of the Arts

Ian Patterson The International Literary Quarterly

Bill Manhire Blackbox Manifold

Teresa Leo Painted Bride Quarterly

Valzhyna Mort Poetry

Sally Festing Magma Online



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The Page is edited by John McAuliffe, Vincenz Serrano and, since September 2013, Evan Jones at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. It was founded in October 2004 by Andrew Johnston, who edited it until October 2009.
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