The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"He had already thought through some thought that I was presently struggling with. He had thought it through carefully and had articulated, in a way that profoundly resonated with me, what it meant to be a poet from the Caribbean, what it meant to speak one language while committing another to the page." Kei Miller PN Review
"I admit, I thought that ‘writing what I knew’, in this case, was a complete cop-out. The reason why I hadn’t written about disability before, I reasoned, was because I was more than that. (Read that last sentence in the most pompous voice you have. I dare you.)" Kit Kavanagh-Ryan Cordite
"There is a corner of English poetry which is forever Georgian." Ian Pople The Manchester Review
"With ‘Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind’, there is no hesitation. As we accede to this boldly memorable, lapidary eloquence, we can see what Larkin has learned from Yeats, even as he turns instead to Hardy’s more modest example: ‘What will survive of us is love.’" Craig Raine Arete
"“The Nobel,” he says. “That I kept it in proportion – the way most of the world didn’t. But I have had to be very judicious answering questions about Seamus since he’s been turned into a kind of saint.”" Michael Longley Irish Times
"Churchyard was no less keen on the use of words as weapons. Woodcock finds that his “dominant character” is “Churchyard the complainant or petitioner”, adopted right from his first publication, Davy Dycars Dreame (1551). Emulating Langland and Skelton, he sets out the social and economic grievances of the common man (in this case a “dyker”, a ditcher or labourer) in a broadside poem which provoked a print controversy comprising sixteen further works by various authors." Helen Hackett TLS
"Well the sonnet is an obsessional form. Its intellectual skeleton is opposition, its form is imbalance, the impatient compression of its concluding section (whether six, four, three or two lines) always leaving a question only temporarily settled, so the writer is invited or compelled to return to the charge, as in a domestic argument: “ … And another thing”. Eilean Ni Chuilleanain DRB
"The curse poem is a well-known Irish literary genre, especially in the Gaelic tradition Hartnett inherited through his Kerry-born grandmother, one of the last native Irish speakers in west Limerick." Frank McNally Irish Times
"After the discovery of a cache of Boswell manuscripts in 1929, Woolf’s diary records her feelings about the find: “Think! There are 18 volumes of Boswell’s diaries now to be published. With any luck I shall live to read them. I feel as if some dead person were said to be living after all”." Rachel Bowlby TLS
"The most discerning portrait in The Bread of Time is the one of Yvor Winters, whom [Philip] Levine got to know after Iowa when he was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University in 1957. At one time a well-known poet and literary critic, Winters started out in the 1920s as an admirer and imitator of the Imagist poets, only to turn against modernism completely and propose a neoclassical poetics that was supposed to take its place." Charles Simic • NYRB
"When people ask me about writing poetry in collaboration, I tell them that writing collaboratively is a way to shake up your creative process, to make it new. Is this is true? I don’t feel any freer than I ever did, when I sit down to write. The most startling moment in my collaboration with Fowler came late, when we were revising the manuscript. We had gone through several rounds of revisions, rearrangements, and edits, tinkering with the manuscript. Suddenly, Fowler wrote to ask if he could attack the text and revise it radically—“be rampant,” in his words. Without a second thought, I said yes: this sounded wonderful. When Fowler’s revision arrived in my inbox, I was both horrified and embarrassed by my own horror. I couldn’t fathom what he had done." Ailbhe Darcy Critical Flame
"Unlike the word ‘O’, the word ‘Dear’ doesn’t offer the same echoes of Shelley or Blake or Horace. Yet more and more often it is being used to remarkably similar effect, as a way of ironising the act of waxing poetical while, at the same time, continuing to avail the poet of all the resources of the lyric." Anna Jackson PN Review
"It is interesting how evolution in one writer can win praise, and in another be disparaged. What I want to look at here is how, in her suite of three sermons on the warpland, we can see Brooks finding a way to adapt, rather than sacrifice, her mastery of prosody to her new sense of blackness; and across the three sermons, we can see, as well, an enactment of Brooks’s wrestling with, straddling, and ultimately reconciling the seeming conflict between English prosody and the language of black revolution." Carl Phillips Poetry
"While the crowd had listened politely to the assembled dignitaries, including the Bishop of Manchester, the Home Secretary, Jeremy Corbyn, and Andy Burnham, the new Mayor of Greater Manchester, it was Walsh’s poem – a celebration of the city as tough, defiant, welcoming – that drove the crowd, like a conductor, from raucous cheers to spellbound silence. In sharp contrast to Walsh’s poem, an academic study I recently read claims that terrorism “is first and foremost discourse”, which made me unsure about Auden’s assertion that “Accurate scholarship can / Unearth the whole offence . . . / That has driven a culture mad”." Douglas Field TLS


New poems

Debra Nystrom Blackbird

Keshia Starrett Honest Ulsterman

JT Welsch Honest Ulsterman

Michael Longley Forward Arts

Arthur Mortensen The Dark Horse

Elise Paschen The Hudson Review

Leanne O'Sullivan Irish Times

Ian Duhig The Punch

Luke Kennard Poems in Which

Andrew Jamison Poetry Ireland Review



ARCHIVES


Previous archives:

2005

2004

Powered by Blogger

The Page aims to gather links to some of the Web's most interesting writing.

Reader suggestions for links, and other comments, are always welcome; send them to thepage.name ät hotmail dõt com

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.
eXTReMe Tracker