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poetry, essays, ideas
"I think now though we will start to see better how these poems confront darkness (Wilbur was a soldier in WWII) and irrationality (there was a history of mental illness in the family) as a deliberate act, the subversive cultivation of civilization in the face of evil and entropy." A.E. Stallings • The American Scholar

"So who is this Seidel anyway?" Matthew Halliday • Wildcourt

"Because poets don’t make any money, he continued to write art criticism in addition to teaching, to make ends meet—a problem alleviated only by a five-year MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. His productivity increased with age: he published a new book almost every couple of years for his last three decades. He was lionized, imitated, studied, analyzed, enshrined, revered. He outlived nearly all his contemporaries, settling gently into eminence in his Victorian manse (bought cheaply and restored slowly) in Hudson. Now he joins the marble busts of American literature." Luc Sante NYRB
"What can one say? As a last resort, I ask my partner: what do you think is behind the poem? “Vanity,” she replies, “And a mid-life crisis.” Harsh, but I’ll let her have the last word." Colette Bryce The Poetry Review
"But where Stein wrote a novel called The Making of Americans, Trump has added a word to the making of contemporary Americans. Sad! And just as much as a time of Trump will have its effect on language, language will reveal the workings of the era of Trump, a whole new terrible layer added to the meaning of that word sad. This is because language will always renew itself. It’s what it naturally does." Ali Smith New Statesman
"Part of my poetic consciousness is embedded in the reality of the poetic self as other to functioning society. The poet as the last custodian of language, on the fringes of capital landfill, and somehow free of it." Chris McCabe the Wolf
"All cries are thin and terse; / The field has droned the summer’s final mass; /A cricket like a dwindled hearse / Crawls from the dry grass." Richard Wilbur NYT
"There are more poets than stray dogs in this country,’ Thitsar Ni, a leader of a Burmese poetic pack was heard to lament at a Yangon teashop. Burma/Myanmar, with its diverse literary and oral traditions, should not surprise you if it brags the highest density on earth of poets per square mile." ko ko thett Asia literary Review
"Challenging assumptions and definitions is important. Challenges also need to be made well, to be heard as anything other than ornery. A ‘book’ has coherence, yet might not make much sense or yield its pleasures and illuminations to a reader dipping in at random. A ‘collection’ may have been rearranged by mentors and editors and will comprise roughly equal, publishable or performable, stand-alone pieces." Vahni Capildeo PN Review
"As well as hunting for poems in at-risk languages, the National Poetry Library has commissioned four poets to write new poems in threatened languages, or languages lost to them personally. Joy Harjo will write in the language of her own Native American Mvskoke (Creek) Nation; Northern Irish poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn in Irish Gaelic; Iraqi poet Nineb Lamassu will use Assyrian, a language not officially recognised in Iraq; and Ugandan poet Nick Makoha in his mother tongue, Luganda, which he lost when he fled Idi Amin’s dictatorship as a boy." Alison Flood Guardian
"At a more basic level, however, literary community can have a deadly impact. The most obvious fatality: your critical faculty. It becomes harder to file an honest review of a book if you’re always rubbing shoulders. Not long after I first started writing criticism, I ventured out to a reading on the invitation of an editor—and almost immediately encountered a poet whose debut I’d recently been assigned to review. His poetry was dull, but he seemed decent enough. It took me months to file my piece, and even then I pulled my final punch—and I’m one of the few jerks in Canada willing to bloody a book of poetry. How are younger, less jerky writers ever going to develop the independent spirit required to lob a rotten tomato if they’ve committed themselves to nurturing the community garden?" Jason Guriel The Walrus
"Glibness will always be a risk in concrete poetry, and in particular the manipulation of found text can end up little more than a cheap joke, but the collages here maintain a mantic edge. Houédard wrote of Vatican II that it acknowledged the “SACREDNESS of ambiguity”, and the works here are not the sort of thing that can be paraphrased or explained. (Other, more well-known, pieces of Houédard’s, such as the reworking of Basho’s most famous haiku, “frog pond plop”, are.)" Rey Conquer Oxonian Review
"Reading this, I feel I’ve been imprisoned in a poetry theme-park." William Logan • Tourniquet Review

"It is to cultural policy what tweets are to literature, what LinkedIn is to poetry, what Facebook is to friendship. Canadian creativity will, of course, continue to thrive long after Creative Canada has been forgotten, and it will flourish in direct proportion to its capacity to resist the homogenizing, programmatic, and deadening future the policy imagines." Ira Wells The Walrus
"There are worse things to get horribly, almost unthinkably wrong than the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (The outcome of a presidential election, for one.) But there has definitely never been a worse time than 2016 to make bold predictions." Alex Shephard New Republic
"The hope, at least one hope, is that as a poet progresses in their career their sensitivity has not been shuttered and habit made them automatic in their own style: that the reach toward new subjects requires, in the reaching, a new hand." Chad Campbell The Manchester Review


New poems

Gerard Fanning Irish Times

Gerard Fanning Manchester Review

Kavita A Jindal Asia Literary Review

Derek Mahon Irish Times

Simon Haworth Honest Ulsterman

Sebastian Agudelo Scoundrel Time

Colette Bryce The Poetry Review



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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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