The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"[Jack Gilbert's] work is both a rebellious assertion of clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects." Neil Astley • Guardian
"And I am confident enough to say that in Latin America, the tortuousness of a line, or of a single image evoked by the peculiar juxtaposition of words, signals the inevitable memorability of something that, for Octavio Paz, dwelled in "the house of presence." Mario Murgia on Ben Mazer • Critical Flame
"Despite the ‘Habeas/Corpus of just wandering about’ described in ‘We do this, we do that’, [David] Herd relies on a prosaic depiction of the images he picks out, hoping that arranging them in various ways will provide poetic force. The subversion that this book seemingly desires would find its kindling in this act of seeing anew. To put it in Situationist terms, Herd denies himself a détournement fix." Thomas White • Stride
"Zuccato, the Milanese poet, might have been answering her question, when he made an impassioned attack on the whole concept of post-colonial literature. He suggested that those postwar writers in Africa and India who had chosen to write in English and French for the international community had not only given us a superficial and easily consumed exoticism; in doing so they had made it less likely that a Western public would make the effort to read those working in the local languages and offering something that would be genuinely “other” from the Western novel package we are used to." Tim Parks • NYRB
"In the catalogue text, the various artists speak of the connection between their work and that of the poets; Frances Lambe of how Derek Mahon’s poems comment on the difficult process of writing and the solitude required for this task, and how this resonates with her own experience of making sculpture; Cóilin Ó Dubhghaill on how he used Vona Groarke’s poetry as a starting point for new pieces, allowing the words of her poems to conjure objects and images in his head." Gerard Smyth • Irish Times
"'The aliens in that episode are just like us, only their lives go faster,' [Stephen] Burt said. 'Everything for them is sped up. That is like the pop scene. Trends go faster, new bands explode faster, die out faster. A year in pop is like many years in poetry.'" Mark Oppenheimer • NYT
"The MFA makes me most nervous when it claims to be a teaching credential. It makes me least nervous when I think of it as a short period of time in which people can get out of their cubicle and read some books and learn some shit in a way that their parents and grandparents see as aspirational rather than lazy." Juliana Spahr in conversation with Emily Carr • Argotist
"Late in life, Tennyson thought back on Hallam and said that he could have been anything, except a great poet. That role was Tennyson’s and he guarded it furiously. (There is an exceptionally funny account of Tennyson reading his own poems, and interspersing it with 'that’s good')." Stuart Kelly • The Scotsman
"A humanist of a post-Darwinian stripe and a defender of demanding forms, he makes it clear why someone might write because they are human as well as because they are supposed to be writing poetry. “This is a book for anyone”, On Poetry begins, and, accepting only a little poetic licence, it is." William Wootten on Glyn Maxwell and Fiona Sampson • TLS
"[Ezra] Pound also spoke of his Chinese studies and about the Confucian concept that in order to arrive at correct definitions and clarify one’s ideas, it is necessary to 'put order into words.' Mussolini did not really understand what Pound was saying and asked him: 'Why do you wish to put order in your ideas?'" Luciano Mangiafico • Open Letters Monthly
"On a tour in Nebraska I read poems to high-school kids, a big auditorium. When I finished, someone wanted to know how I got started. I said that at twelve I loved horror movies, then read Edgar Allan Poe, then… A young man up front waved his hand. I paused in my story. He asked, 'Didn’t you do it to pick up chicks?' I remembered cheerleaders at Hamden High School. 'It works better,' I told him, 'when you get older.' Donald Hall • New Yorker
"Just saying over and over, this is it. OK, so what is it. What is this that’s so important. So much depends. Something Urgent I Have To Say To You. Power phrasings. Life and death. Making aesthetic matters into life and death issues. Something you have to deal with Williams is, he’s telling you I wouldn’t be telling you about this if it weren’t incredibly important. And that’s an innovation in itself." Jordan Davis on William Carlos Williams • Constant Critic
"He wrote poems for readers who, like him, had no investment in upholding official verse culture. He never taught, so he had no flag to pledge allegiance to and no forum in which to separate the “right” way of doing things from the “wrong” way. If the question of how he wrote poems mattered to him, he rarely let on." William Corbett on James Schuyler • Jacket 2
"Keats fled from the egotistical sublime of Wordsworth’s generation. He suddenly became aware, in a Joycean epiphany, that 'What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelian poet.'" Thomas McCarthy • Irish Examiner
"It’s been nearly 13 years since Bruck’s last title, The End of Travel, and Monkey Ranch shows a grown craft and worldview, acting like a lens, magnifying and focusing her youthful, bright gaze on all things intellectual and domestic into a mature, white-hot point, the kind kids might use to kill ants or set newsprint ablaze." George Murray on Julie Bruck • Globe & Mail
"A good poem, Gilbert believes, should "detonate" inside the reader. In half a century of his poems, the reverberations are frequent and shattering" John Penner • LA Times
'"Poetry is necessary," he once wrote, "but is the poet?"' Ángel Gurría-Quintana on Carlos Drummond de Andrade • Guardian
"Reading through this book, some things immediately strike home. Most of all the remarkable consistency of craft—an underappreciated element of Rich’s work. For so many years Rich has been typecast as a poet of statement, anger, witness. " Eavan Boland • The Book
"A gifted dramatist could strip “Ararat” and the two excellent books that followed it, “The Wild Iris” (1992) and “Meadowlands” (1996), of their withering observations and nearly construct a play around them. You simply stand back and witness the carnage. “You should take one of those chemicals,/maybe you’d write more” is a not-untypical put-down. So is: “Your back is my favorite part of you,/the part furthest away from your mouth.” So is: “I expected better of two creatures/who were given minds.” Dwight Garner on Louise Gluck • NYT
"[JT] Welsch’s handling of time as a stacked thing, like a pile of year planners, is a very present pleasure of [Waterloo]." Andrew Bailey • Sabotage
"The landscape Miłosz presents here has been ravaged by scientific and industrial progress. But the cynical advice to regard man merely as an evolved animal is ironically undercut by a haunting echo of old beliefs." Andrew McCulloch • TLS
"[George] Steiner's own thought exemplifies its subject. His consistently unexpected connections possess all the power of poetic metaphor. You stroll with Steiner through the walls in your own mind." Amit Majmudar • Poetry Daily / Kenyon Review
"When reinventing, one must find another spin on the language: it’s more a renegotiation, perhaps, than a reinvention. Subject matter, Benjamin implies, is only one aspect of a text, be it prose or poetry: besides the music of the matter, there is the fact that words apparently similar, can carry different cultural gravities in different languages." Ciaran Carson in conversation with JP O'Malley • Spectator

"He faults Pynchon, though, for projecting on the Afghan terrorists his own world view, since he represents them as anarchists resisting the influence of the centre by blowing up the railways. But it is difficult to imagine how even so accomplished a writer as Pynchon could avoid projecting his own view in imagining such a world. This is exactly what Milton had done, after all, in his moving representation of the blind and uncertain Samson, suddenly finding a way to fulfil the plan he thinks he was born for." Neil Forsyth on Feisal G. Mohamed • TLS
"I would stop in the middle of conversations or tasks at my job, at home, wherever, and scribble notes on scraps of paper. I would pull over while driving and jot down more effective wording or change a line break. I let everything else slide. I think my husband began to consider leaving me." Susanna Nied on translating Inger Christensen • Circumference
"I don’t read criticism just to read criticism, I don’t read anything to read anything at this point; if the desire isn’t there, why bother?" Maureen McLane in conversation with Adam Fitzgerald • Brooklyn Rail
"A Line of Sight is a provisional map of a hallway and staircase in Robert Kelly’s house with no address. If there are other hallways and other staircases in the house, they are, for the moment, the 'uncolored surround.'" John Yau on Robert Kelly • Hyperallergic
"For [Roy] Fisher, writing poetry is the work of finding himself in relation to the things around him and the ideas in his head." Patrick Morrissey • Chicago Review (pdf)
"What [Kerouac] wanted was to capture in words what everything is like. Ginsberg, who appears under pseudonyms in nine of his books, put the question that drove Kerouac during his productive years. As Carlo Marx in On the Road he interrupts Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), who is goofing around, to say: "‘I have an announcement to make.’ ‘Yes? Yes?’ ‘What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?’" Thomas Powers • LRB
"Although [Geoffrey] Hill admits that the concept of inherent, non-market value may be a metaphysical wraith, a “semantic relic to ward off the evil eye of commodity”, he nevertheless finds it useful when he comes to apply value theory to poetry, in particular elegiac poetry." Paul Batchelor • TLS


New poems

Robert Ostrom Guernica

Matthew Zapruder Blackbird

Frances Leviston Manchester Review

TR Hummer Blackbird

Gwyneth Lewis Manchester Review

Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers Cordite Poetry Review

Alison Stine Blackbird

Michael Symmons Roberts Manchester Review

Kristin Sanders The Offending Adam

H Rap Brown Lapham's Quarterly

Matthew Zapruder Blackbird

Ellen Cranitch Poetry London

Julie Bruck New Yorker

Frances Leviston New Writing (Norwich)

Amy Pickworth h_ngm_n

John Ashbery PN Review

Marie Naughton The Dark Horse

Cole Swensen Asymptote

Amit Majmudar Poetry

Jane Yeh Boston Review

CK Williams Cortland Review

Aigerim Tazhi, trans. J Kates Words Without Borders

Peter Sirr Poetry International

Medbh McGuckian Gallery



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