The Page is on holidays. We will be back in September.

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"If I had to say what I love best about Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith, it would be the expression on her face, as if she is just disgusted at the mess Holofernes is making. The Uffizi houses the orange Judith, where it hangs near the exit of the building – the final point at the end of hundreds of marble busts and serious men and a sea of rust red floor – a large dark cloud of female fury you must walk past on your way to the door, and sunlight." Rebecca Perry Magma

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"Originally comprising 13 precocious poets with no common theme or style, the movement lacked definition but not enemies. When a young disciple was reprimanded by the school vice-rector, his definition was gleefully adopted: “I don’t know what nadaísmo is – only that it’s abomination.”" Mat Youkee Guardian

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"[Callimachus] felt poets should avoid the Homeric and concentrate on brief forms. He claimed to have been visited by Apollo, who advised him to “fatten his flocks but keep his muse slender”. The younger Appollonius, on the other hand, author of the Argonautica, the only surviving epic of the age, strongly disagreed. Evidence of a bitter feud between the two has come down to us and thanks to a fragment of papyrus we know that Ptolemy II passed over Callimachus and appointed Apollonius as chief librarian. It’s unlikely to have been the first time in history when rival poets slugged it out, or when worldly ambition and artistic vision mixed in a bitter potion, but at least the shade of Callimachus can find consolation in his livelier posthumous reputation." Peter Sirr DRB

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"The current show, based largely on the collection of Grolier member (and exhibition co-curator) Susan Jaffe Tane, presents a wealth of Whitmaniana: copies of every edition of Leaves of Grass published during the poet’s life; letters and manuscripts; many, many photographs (Whitman was by far the most photographed American poet of his century), including the famous frontispiece shot where he contemplates a cardboard butterfly perched on his finger; an array of Whitman-branded material (a cigar box, an Old Crow whiskey advertisement, an applesauce can, even a J. Peterman page describing their “Walt Whitman pant”); and a fascinating selection of artist’s books and multimedia presentations inspired by Whitman’s verse." Mark Scroggins Hyperallergic

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"That someone else is the poet we know as Carolyn Forché—the poet who spoke for those listening ears, who gave voice to those terrorized and disappeared." James K.A. Smith • Image

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"Recalling how wondrous it seemed that I identified so strongly with O’Hara’s poems, it’s this paradox I think of. The poems’ boundless interest in others is extended to the self, yet this self-interest is undercut with a suspicion of what the self thinks it knows, and is. He writes with a compassion articulated in the tension between the solitary and the social, and this is one of the reasons I look to him still." Karen Solie Magma

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"I shan't lose my temper. I’ll just record briefly what a dismal astonishment it was to find Michael Hofmann in his introduction trotting out a block condemnation of the 1940s in British poetry which has been around since the 1950s, repeated again and again by a succession of poet-critics without ever a shred of analysis or any kind of option." Peter Riley • Fortnightly Review

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"Tsvetaeva is obsessed with Rilke as he is dying, writing love letters in a three-way poetry orgy between her, him, and Boris Pasternak, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. She is also in love with Boris, (in a very relatable move, she’s kind of in love with everyone, all the time), and both she and Boris idolize Rilke, or Boris idolizes her idolizing, or something, and Rilke, in turn, allows this idealization and often feeds it back, enfeebled but still reflective. It makes I Love Dick look positively restrained." Audrey Wollen • Affidavit

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"I remember reading a Joseph Brodsky essay in college in which he wrote that at the heart of every poem is the desire not to give death the last word, even just in capturing a moment and holding it still until you can mine it." Tracy K Smith Observer

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