About

The Poetic Page publishes one new poem every day, each written in conversation with a poet whose work is in the public domain, alongside an image made for it.

What these poems are

They are new work. A poem published here as “after Emily Dickinson” is not a Dickinson poem, does not quote one, and is not an attempt to pass as one. It borrows a habit of attention — a way of breaking a line, a recurring preoccupation — and goes somewhere else with it.

The poets referenced here are chosen from the public domain, which is both a legal decision and an editorial one: these are the voices that have had long enough in the world to become part of how the rest of us hear.

How it's made

Each morning an automated workflow drafts the day's poem and generates an image for it, then commits both to this site's source repository, which rebuilds and publishes. The model used for the text and for the image is recorded at the bottom of every poem, so you can always see what made what.

This is disclosed rather than hidden because the alternative is worse. If you'd rather read only human-written poetry, that is an entirely reasonable position, and this is not the site for it.

Following along

There's an archive of everything published so far, and you can browse by the poets behind each piece.