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Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Wislawa Szmborska Dies at 88.

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, died of lung cancer on Wednesday in Krakow, Poland.

The next issue of Smartish Pace (#19, April, 2012) ... [ read more ]

Frank O'Hara & Jan Cremer in Baltimore

Load of Fun Gallery (LOF/g), in collaboration with the i.e. Reading Series, hosts a silkscreen print exhibition and poetry reading. The exhibition combines silkscreen printed poems of Baltimore native Frank O’Hara, silkscreen illustrations ... [ read more ]

Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008)

A tribute to poet Reginald Shepherd who died on September 10, 2008. Mr. Shepherd's new work is in Smartish Pace, Issue 15 (2008).

Interview with Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison's Feeding the Fire is available from Sarabande Books (www.sarabandebooks.org). Harrison is the author of two previous collections, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival. Jacqueline McLean: Titling a book of poems seems like a difficult enterprise. I want to ask you to talk about the significance of your title, Feeding the Fire. In presenting this question, I have a few thoughts in mind. First, there is your marvelous line from Kafka which prefaces the collection: "What one writes is merely the ashes of one's experience." This is a particularly apt line for poetry, in which we relive or try to recover something of the essence of what once was. Yet I see a contradiction here or at least an intriguing complication. In a poem like "White Spaces," you recover (without bringing him back) a college professor who continues to compel you. The closing lines of the poem read: Gone now, known too briefly and too long ago for me to bring him back in a poem, though I'd like to think that what he was and what he gave me hover at the edges of ... [ read more ]

AWP

2/29/2012 (8:00am) -- 3/3/2012 (11:55pm)

Hilton Chicago & Palmer House Hilton, Table K21

Bookfair is Free on Sat

Please stop by table K21 for the new issue, t-shirts, one-of-a-kind SP merch & fun for all. The SP editors look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2012bookfair.php

32 Poems & Smartish Pace Reading

3/1/2012 (9:00pm) -- (10:00pm)

Topics Cafe, 2122 N Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60614

Free

A joint magazine poetry reading featuring 5 minute readings by: Todd Boss, Geoff Brock, Victoria Chang, Carolina Ebeid, Luke Johnson, Rebecca Lindenberg, Erika Meitner, Mary Quade, Natalie Shapero & Eric Smith.

The American Eye

One might be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate diagnosis of the Western world’s current malaise than Hoffman’s Emerson lamenting, on the Sicilian leg of his European journey:          ...perhaps it is humanity’s condition          To disown its past, to forget its implications –          The fountain of Aretheuse          Being used as a wash basin.We live in a culture in which the past, salable only to the nostalgic and the ... [ read more ]