The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"What to talk about to Ned Rorem? Frank O'Hara." Bill Berkson Poetry
"There are poignant metaphors for the rareness of a human birth. A needle thrown from the earth and a needle thrown from the sky. A blind turtle surfacing once a century and a yoke floating over the five oceans of the world. The needles meet mid air and the turtle lifts its head through the yoke. This is how we are all conceived." Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint • Territory

"Poetry can provide a necessary circular path, especially if you’re like me, where the page offers a place to think out loud. But poetry, simultaneously, provides a way OUT of the circularity and the spin. It can provide unexpected resolution—a quick turn, surprise, a daring jump, or rupture." Layli Long Soldier in conversation with Stephanie Sy-Quia • Review 31
"Saying that a poem always remains a question means that there will always be an infinite number of answers. Once there is an answer, the value of the question is a bit exhausted. But if a poem is constantly asking and constantly garnering different answers, different solutions, it remains something very fruitful. I think there can be many different answers to one poem, one question." Emily Jungmin Yoon in conversation with Lauren Kane • Paris Review
"[T]he issue of literary autonomy was among the deepest fault lines in the cultural cold war. Leftist thinkers, in the Arab world as elsewhere, formulated their own poetics and erected their own artistic canons, which emphasized the intrinsically political nature of literary activity. This helps explain why the tone of the Beiruti Modernists is so often embattled and even shrill. As opposed to their late-Modernist peers in Europe and America, the Arab poets could rarely afford the postures of polished certitude. Their anguish arose from the feeling that they had not only to preserve their museum of civilization but also to build one in the face of determined antagonists." Robyn Creswell • Paris Review
"Unlike most other contemporary writers, [Padraic] Fiacc had experienced life as a vulnerable emigrant, having been raised in New York in the 1920s and early 30s, and then uprooted from his family home and all its familiar securities. He embodied the diaspora condition in an intense and clearly unreconciled form. His work was often viewed with suspicion and, with equal measure, he was at times viewed as an unfathomable, unpredictable presence in the wider community." Gerald Dawe Irish Times
"[Aimee] Nezhukumatathil’s poems are like the ocean on a calm day: glittering, lovely, and eminently accessible on the surface. However, if you venture deeper into them they ask for all the dexterity and courage you can muster." Tamiko Beyer • Georgia Review
"People responded to [Martin Luther] King’s calls for peaceful protest not because they imagined they were invincible, [Nikki] Giovanni said, but because they knew they were imperiled. 'It was a dangerous time,' the poet recalled of the ’50s and’60s, especially for black Americans. 'You woke up everyday being surprised that you were alive.'" Emily Lordi • Atlantic
"Echoing [Charles] Olson’s metaphoric mapping of the social space of the magazine, Jack Spicer declared, in his lecture on 'Poetry and Politics' at the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965, that 'a magazine is a society.'" Mande Zecca • Jacket2
"[Y]our question makes me think about the difference between 'a walk' and 'walking'—something that this book project had me thinking about constantly as well. They are different. 'Walking' is goal-oriented, and I have a gait that I think of as 'transportation speed'—its purpose is to get you there, and it often does so faster than the metro or the bus. But when taking a walk, the walk and the walking are themselves the goals, and it's on those occasions that I incorporate chance or a constraint—though I'm often just led by whim." Cole Swensen in conversation with Maria Anderson • Rumpus
"People get to the easy line and they think that’s the end. But that’s actually the beginning. That’s where you know, 'Oh shit, now I gotta tell the truth because I just lied.'" Jericho Brown in conversation with Aaron Coleman • The Spectacle
"Guided by a mistrust of pastoral traditions which developed from this origin until they sentimentally omitted even the real conditions of a place or the material foundations of their tropes, [Nuala] Ní Dhomhnaill insists upon ‘the importance of literary activity in situ’ which can reclaim literary activity in Irish for popular culture rather than leaving it ‘to the devices of the scholarly elite’. In other words, place becomes vital here because it is quite literally accessible and tangible in a way that ‘tradition’ can never be." Hal Coase PN Review
"Despite being trans, [Ari Banias's] speaker is protected by whiteness, and by addressing this privilege, they can start working against white supremacy. The poem does the work of addressing other white people, and asking: Why are you complacent? Why do you feel safe?
" Eli Lynch-El Bechelany • EOAGH
"Maybe my favourite part of this story is when Hipparchia went with Crates to a dinner party. There she meets her nemesis: Theodoros the atheist. ‘Who is the woman who has left behind the shuttles of the loom?’ he asked, affronted. Anti-Penelope. Unnatural monster." Helen Rickerby • Turbine / Kapahau
"[A] writer needn’t think in rhyme and meter in order to produce a formal poem. If you make a habit of writing in form, however, you may begin to think in form." Elisa Gabbert • New York Review of Books
"It is when we consider the distance travelled between poems in terms of style, register and subject, that we realise how challenging Capildeo’s work is. The stark differences comprised between the two covers at times put the coherence and stability of the collection in danger. But thinking twice, who would want a book that thrives from radically embracing plurality to be fully unified?" Helena Fornells • The Scores
"[Ralph] Ellison --> Charles Johnson --> Robert Olen Butler --> Sam Lipsyte --> Wesley Stace --> Joshua Ferris --> [Eleanor] Catton[.]" Michael Maguire • Post45
"David Constantine’s elegant and moving translations are accompanied by a very useful set of annotations for most of the poems, and a glossary of the Greek names for those of us with post-classical educations. Holderlin has inspired a range of translators from Michael Hamburger, whom Constantine generously acknowledges at various times in the book, to Edwin Muir, John Riley and Daniel Bosch. This Selected clearly shows why. Holderlin’s endless search for the nature of that poetic truth seems as relevant to the baffled twenty-first century as it would have been to the young German at the end of the eighteenth century bathing in the heady waters of nascent German romanticism." Ian Pople • Manchester Review
"I have noticed that students, in reading and analysing literature, often gravitate toward symbols, and many of them, in writing fiction, strive to create characters and actions that can be elevated to a symbolic level. These inclinations come at a cost. Characters conscripted to serve, and to serve as, symbols are obliged to follow a more predictable script. In a chapter titled 'Symbolon', in Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, she writes: 'To give names to nameless things by transference [metaphora] from things kindred or similar in appearance' is how Aristotle describes the function of metaphor.' To approximate what cannot be achieved is a gesture of humility, but symbols, we often see now, serve too eloquently the already named." Yiyun Li • Guardian
"With prose, all I need is time to think and I can generate it pretty easily; a lot of my thoughts are already in prose. Poetry is harder. I feel like I have less material, and I can’t waste it, so it’s this delicate, concentrated operation not to screw it up. It feels like there’s some required resource I deplete. And I have to change my process entirely every three or four years if I’m going to write poems at all." Elisa Gabbert • Poets and Writers


New poems

Hugh Foley White Review

Jericho Brown Nation

Catherine Barnett Poets.org

Dorothy Chan Nightblock

Justin Quinn B O D Y

Alexis Almeida Apartment

Romalyn Ante Poetry London

George Abraham The Shallow Ends

Robin Blaser Floating Bear

Sean Singer Memorious

Adrienne Su Poetry

Joseph Lease EOAGH

Annie Freud The Scores

Louise Glück Threepenny Review

Jason Bayani World Literature Today



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