Page Hill Starzinger at KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry, NYC

INTRODUCEd by Jason Schneiderman

September 21, 2020

“I’ve been reading Allen Grossman’s The Sighted Singer—or more specifically, the Summa Lyrica—and while his discussion of the poetry of aperture and the poetry of closure had struck me as slightly bonkers when I was reading it, as I was reading Page’s work, Grossman’s ideas about the poetry of aperture kept returning to me, as though she was precisely what he might have had in mind. Here is Grossman: “In aperture, the self is characterized as identical or ‘flowing with’ the world… The speaker becomes the Beloved or divine utterer whose creative resource is not difference but participation.” In Starzinger’s work, that sense of being in the world while observing the world is a constant truth—that whether she is working in composition by field and spreading out over the page or working in traditional line, her work is not like the photo that shows you a moment in time, but rather like the open lens of the camera, letting in the light that shapes what we see. Starzinger’s work on the page highlights the silences around the words, bringing us into the process of speech, letting us hear her voice accumulate through palimpsests of memory, dialogue, hypotheticals, and image. In these poems there is a radical kind of opening, that we are all excited to hear. 

We are here to celebrate Page Hill Starzinger's second poetry collection, Vortex Street, which was published in June 2020. Her first book, Vestigial, selected by Lynn Emanuel to win the Barrow Street Book Prize, was published in fall 2013.”