The Page - poetry, essays, ideas

"I’ve learnt, I think, that one of the secrets of Haitian existence is the joy of creativity and the joy of being creative through this...

"To be sure, displacement figures in Mlinko’s work — her family is from Hungary and Belarus via Brazil; they left their home countries ...

"It was with great shock and sadness that I learned of the passing last evening of Steven Heighton. We knew that he was ill, though we ...

"In “Künstlerroman,” Vuong describes being in a room of “crystal chandeliers, waiters with plates of caviar spoons, flutes of champagne...

"If you are like me, you are always a 9-year-old standing still, all alone and yet not alone, because, look! there are so many drunks i...

"This is why poetry, unlike so much else our species has mastered, cannot be copied. It’s an artifact of introspection that can only be...

"These days, I approach books of poems about grief with personal as well as professional interest; in 2020, my husband died in hospice ...

"The poet Charles Wright once said he started to translate when he was in between poems, and I think that’s a really great way of putti...

"In contemporary America, not every poet is capable of appreciating or enjoying every kind of poetry being written. There are cliques o...

"I don’t understand writers (whether Instagram poets or prose writers) who dwell on seemingly untransformed personal minutiae—who choos...

"There was a growing awareness of the troubles in Europe. I remember being uneasy at talk of General Franco and the voice of Hitler on ...

"Yet the translation of a poet like [Najwan] Darwish, though inviting, involves a host of challenges and dilemmas for the translator. D...

“The arguments towards the end were passionate and thoughtful, but the choice of the judging panel is Joelle Taylor’s C+nto and Othered Poem...

"We know (that is, we were taught) that literature is nothing but a dialogue — continuing through time. And, allegedly, we can choose o...

"For many poets jubilat provided first print publication, for many others a good place to see their work reach jubilat's faithful r...

"One can freely feel that the Inuit imaginative sphere is faithfully and fearlessly represented. But if you were to ask of Price, “What...

" In ‘Space’ [Tim] Cumming folds the infinite, the unimaginably immense and the bewilderingly abstract into the somatic experience of c...

"The books, only a fraction of his personal library, with their annotations and bulging reviews of the period, create a sort of mystiqu...

" In 1965, during the ferment of the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War, she explains to Herko that “new times ...

"There’s so much writing in the world and a lot of it just seems like the same sentence." Anne Carson Interview

"These illustrations punctuate her energetic and (can one in this context say it?) ‘free’ translation of around half of Catullus’ poems...

"Silence is just another ableist metaphor, a mismatched name. Hearing poets load up silence with solitude and stillness , emptiness ...

"A poem’s politics can’t be neatly deduced from its formal surface, or a poet’s politics from her chosen verse style. Claims to the con...

"Like a lot of contemporary poetry, [Kaveh] Akbar’s work seems written to be performed by Method actors. " William Logan • Tourni...

"Instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, GPT-3 would produce several paragraphs in whatever style it intuited from your prom...

"Translating early Welsh poetry is an extreme sport, requiring match fitness. I find tracing [Gillian] Clarke’s reasons for her choices...

"Just as he took on the guise of sexual tough guy, self-deprecating poet became another of his poses: ‘I have been reading the proofs o...

"But I was already boxing and when I won the junior Ukraine championships I realised it might be a step to somewhere for me, so I decid...

"Even before Jaccottet’s passing in February of this year at the age of 95—and “passing” is an obvious euphemism, but perhaps a forgiva...

"In 1987, Poetry Ireland Review published an article titled, “Who is Ireland’s Most Neglected Poet – A Survey.” Though the introductio...

"But I do love research — if that was a job I would just do that, some kind of Walter Benjamin Arcades Project. And when I was research...

"But above all, it’s nature poetry that has the body and embodiment at the heart of it. Because when a black poet interrogates nature p...

"Of course, like most old poets, Anthony could feel washed up by the remorseless tide of new writers, and neglected. That comes with th...

"As in Anne Carson’s masterful long poem, The Glass Essay (“You remember too much,/ my mother said to me recently.// Why hold on to al...

"The Diaspora poets looked back on their homeland with a different gaze from the poets who were and are still living within Zimbabwe. T...

"While there is both the profound and the weighty in The Readiness , [Alan] Gillis does not squat Atlas-like before the reader, demandi...

"Ever the impoverished poet, Michael Horovitz rarely lost an opportunity to sell his books – often out of shopping bags. They include f...

"Something else happens when he “hears” Ezra Pound first. In 1963, he wrote to Tony Tanner: “am now working my way through Pound, for t...

"Mackay Brown despaired of modernity, and felt that the time-honoured worship of ‘the Word’ was now replaced by worship of ‘the Number’...

"Poetry anthologies aren’t famous for being inclusive; editors make their mark by being selective, and new selections make new debates....

"Had The New Yorker accepted “Remove,” would I have written this essay? In the first place, the odds were stacked against their accepta...

"He fell in with writers Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Gibson, who were living near Dymock, and moved his family into a little blac...

"James Keery’s selection of poems by the 1940s Apocalypse poets of the Second World War and by the host of poets influenced by that mov...

"In addition, and just as importantly, is the realisation that the poet has brought Ireland to every corner of the globe through the un...

"My favourite definition of a poem at the moment comes courtesy of Valéry: ‘A prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.’ I think po...

"[Ciaran] Carson’s gorgeous sequence Still Life ranks among his very best work. Written over the course of just a few months following ...

" I was so embarrassed when I read it, I decided to write you a letter of apology. I shuddered at my critiques of what I called your “l...

"There are also very few writers you will remember where you were, when you were, how you were, upon first reading. It is no exaggerati...

"The Ecuadorian poet, who has been hailed by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda as “the best Latin American poet of his generation,” has f...

"When I was nine years old, I stood onstage in front of the whole school and recited a poem by my mother, Jean Valentine, about the end...

"There is no greater tribute for a poet than for a composer to take from his work something for his own purpose. The others can keep th...

"Karen Solie is the freshest poetic voice I’ve encountered in a long while." William Logan • New Criterion

"To have not only survived thirty-one years, as Sylvia Plath did, but to have filled those years with works of staggering beauty, with ...

"A skinny man who carried a world of books within him, Adam Zagajewski was the kind of person who would offer to drop you off at your h...

"[Zoom] always puts you in a kind of hollow space. After some of these meetings, I feel very hollow in a way, because there’s really no...

"Martina Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable. As Bernard O’Donoghue has...

"There are, of course, dangers in that desire to include ‘us’ with the writer’s own views. These dangers are that making us all compli...

"Our eyes were opened and when, years later, I read Rimbaud I recognised like an augury his discovery of another entire dimension."...

"Although Troubles tourism is now a vital aspect of Belfast’s economy, you’d struggle to find an elected representative who’d live with...

"Returning to Proust is a little like meeting up with my former self. I’m surprised to find we like the same things. I thought she was ...

"So a new book arrives hoping to get reviewed. It’s glossy and embellished with superlative recommendations, as they all are. I’ve neve...