The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"[Peter] Gizzi’s lines unravel themselves as they go, which is what all poetry does, whether this occurs from within — as in Gizzi’s verse — or is imposed from without, as the avant-garde prefers." Alan Gilbert • Hyperallergic
"Writers on America features fifteen American writers---among them are the expected, Poet Laureates Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins, and the less expected, such as Robert Creeley---writing about and celebrating being an American. With obvious nationalism, the writers featured in promote US freedoms. Much of the work omits the negative role that the US government plays in the lives of its citizens and does not reference the hugely detrimental impact that the US government has had on the lives of citizens of other nations." Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr • Jacket2
"In all this we begin to approach the central mystery of [Rosemary] Tonks’s life – her sudden decision, in her early 40s, to abandon literature and la dolce vita for poverty, seclusion, and silence." Jonathan Law • The Dabbler
"Lunch Poems is still popular with New Yorkers today: In 2012, when the Leonard Lopate Show asked listeners to vote on 10 objects that “best tell New York's story,” it came in at number six—just above the Brooklyn Bridge." Micah Mattix • The Atlantic
"We get pinned on a continuum, trapped in a single time, while all the dimensions of space stretch out freely before us. Yet ghosts possess a different relationship to time. To describe or define a ghost becomes tantamount to describing the relationship between space and time. A ghost is the articulation of the incommensurability of time and space." Cole Swensen in conversation with Andy Fitch • Conversant
"A British poet once said to me—we were talking about this U.S.–Canadian thing: “I prefer you to be Canadian.”" Molly Peacock • The Puritan
"[Jose Garcia Villa's] poems flaunted their un-Americanness; his image-repertoire of bright shores and skulls, of antique ant and spiritual centipede, Christs and terrible heroes, was abstracted from the landscape and history of the country he left behind. This landscape and this history were not forgotten in Villa’s poetry, but they were present only as the blurred, indistinct background to his figures. In turning to poetry, he had not only turned away from empirical observation, from history and social milieu: he had discovered ‘the bright / the beautiful the terrible Accost.'" Robert Nery • Cordite Poetry Review
"To a life shrouded in mystery (her shadow behind a curtain in the pre-dawn light, love letters, prescriptions for epilepsy), The Gorgeous Nothings propels the evolving image of the poet in late life (nearly fifty-six when she died), what we allow her to be--not the daguerreotype, not the virginal myth, not frustrated lover, not the impossibly tiny desk and chair. The possible 'flocks' give us a greater sense of an interior of a creative life, the other side to the image of poems and fascicles filed at rest in a drawer." Linda Russo • Jacket2
"Has C.K. Stead ever been a figure whom New Zealand letters bowed low to as its great authority?" Nick Ascroft • Landfall Review
"The awful thing about the apparent success of Milton’s unyielding stretches of leaden erudition was that the plumbing of English poetry was affected far into the future." Clive James • TLS
"Rhyme is famously tricky, liable to lapse into jingle-janglery; I also find it a remarkable lure—teasing the ear and the mind forward as well as back. It can function disjunctively as well as conjunctively, giving you pause as well as moving you along." Maureen McLane in conversation with Ariel Ramchandani • More Intelligent Life
"A sickly blend of faux naivety and smug knowingness, it’s [Mark Strand's] tacked-on mock profundity that rankles most, one the reader knows as well as the poet is nothing but an emotional and intellectual cul-de-sac." Ben Wilkinson • Poetry Review
"[Marianne] Moore actually wrote a novel, called The Way We Live Now, that [Linda] Leavell describes as utterly lacking in plot and character development and for which, even at the height of her acclaim, Moore could not find a publisher. 'The reader winces in embarrassment,' writes Leavell, noting that the book’s most memorable character is, of all things, a kitten." Bruce Bawer • New Criterion
"While I think irony is useful as an immediate practical response, I doubt its efficacy as an ongoing trope and critique, and so I think about the possibility of sincerity but outside the romantic and simplistic notions of I, am, writing and truth. So there, initially talking about attention, I find my way digressing (!) to sincerity." Raymond de Borja in conversation with Carlos Quijon, Jr. • transit
"Language poetry is indeed more poetic than other sorts of verse: confusions of kind bloom like roses and roses and roses, each with fold on fold, folding in on itself indefinitely: it’s a chain of implication which binds everyone in the language-game; the language-game which is the dream in which begins responsibility." Joshua Clover • Fence
"The act of imagination that puts disparate things together, that plays the believing game to join them across rupture, is a profoundly ethical act. What kind of world does it show us? What kind of world does it build? [Susan] Howe writes, 'In poetry all things seem to touch so they are;' [Muriel] Rukeyser, 'The world of the poet is the scientist’s world.' Where Rukeyser presumes, Howe trespasses." Stefana Heim • Jacket2
"[FT Marinetti] has a long amazing piece . . . called 'The Electrical War,'” in which he says, among other things, that soon we’ll have chairs that are lightweight, made out of metal and that we can carry around. And lo and behold, we do!" Marjorie Perloff in conversation with Charles Bernstein • Jacket2
"The New Gnostics present a more inconsistent, contradictory set of worldviews: yet they hold to these views with a passionate embrace." Henry Gould • Coldfront
"Each margin needs, so produces, its own image of the centre, of power. The most acutely disruptive poetics yearn for, as they demote, the comfort and tenure of a broad audience. Sullen mavericks cherish their trophies. With minimal phonemes, [Peter] Culley's poems show importantly that this cultural decadence, this precarious balancing, this tender hybridity 'of near bile lodged in what humour' is in fact the middle, and is description." Lisa Robertson
"Just as the bourgeoisie knows that everything has its price, and preoccupies itself with finding and spending the appropriate amount, it similarly knows that, sooner or later, every artistic product finds its ideal museum." Edoardo Sanguineti, trans. Joel Calahan • Lana Turner
"Everyone who ever swore to cling to typewriters, record players, and letters now uses word processors, iPods, and e-mail. There is no room for Bartlebys in the twenty-first century, and if a few still exist they are scorned." Adam Kirsch • New Republic
"[Vancouver’s Non Partisan Association's] 'community' seems to refer to immediate neighbourhood, a sort of grass-roots co-responsibility bounded by a specific site or district. But at the same time, community means those with purchasing power, social visibility, expansionist potential. In the paper-rock-scissors game of civic politics, the second version persists when the first is marginal. Community has become a soft term for capital. Cash is style." Lisa Robertson
"Hugh Kenner used to call that the Jane cord. He said you could learn something about any text by looking at the first and last word." Jennifer Ashton • Jacket2
"Someone should count the appearances of the moon—that old bone—in Dickey’s poetry. Even now he is crouched beneath it, wrapped in a bearskin and stoned on glory, trying to shape-shift into a wolf." Michael Robbins • Poetry
"'Lateral Argument' is specifically no kind of argument—its aim is not to negate or affirm, but merely to be interesting. Yet here, as in much of Davies' work, we are given the sense that political change does come from somewhere." Amy De'Ath • Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
"In the grand major chords that swell for the grandeur that is Rome, the poet strikes unsettling dissonances." A.E. Stallings on Robert Fagles's Virgil • American Scholar
"Michael Donaghy's reading of postwar American poetry, championing Wilburesque formalism and downplaying experiment, proved influential on his fellow New Generation poets, but has had an inhibiting effect on Ashbery's reception in this country." David Wheatley • Guardian
"Philip has just pulled Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Pound out of the shelf and read to me the passage in which the biographer muses about Omar’s paternity. The following day he tells me that he thinks Omar’s father may have been Basil Bunting. Their eyebrows were remarkably similar, he reminds me." Michael Glover • Encore

"True story: I was interviewing for a visiting professorship. The interview went well. When I didn’t get the job, I asked the program director, in the interest of improving my chances for future jobs, if there was anything I might have handled differently. Well, the director said, you mentioned you have a young child. We wanted someone who will be in the department all the time, who will be in her office in the evenings, not just during office hours. We wanted someone who will be completely devoted to her students. We wanted you to be their Literary Mama." Joy Katz • American Poetry Review
"Basil Bunting’s first performance of Briggflatts signified his long overdue return to poetry, a revival instigated by a series of readings organised in the Morden Tower by Newcastle poet Tom Pickard and his wife Connie." Annabel Haynes • READ


New poems

Brian Bartlett Véhicule Press

Julie Bruck Hazlitt

Stephen Connolly The Honest Ulsterman

Maung Day Guernica

Joshua Mensch The Collagist

Laynie Browne Conjunctions

Miriam Gamble Lifeboat

Guy Mathers Areté

SS Prasad Otoliths

Lucie Brock-Broido Gulf Coast

Jesse Nissim Spoon River Poetry Review

Marcella Durand Conjunctions

JT Welsch Poems in Which

Saskia Hamilton Graywolf Press

Kateri Lanthier Green Mountains Review

Paul Muldoon Poetry Review

Diana Marie Delgado Reading Between A&B

Joshua Clover Lana Turner

A.E. Stallings The Atlantic

Ken Chen AGNI



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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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