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Recent Media

Patricia Davis, Smartish Pace Reading

Patricia Davis reading for the Smartish Pace Issue 19 Party at the Copy Cat building in Baltimore on April 13, 2013. Music, in the video and live at the party, by The Great American Canyon Band. Intro by Stephen Reichert.

Recent Interview

Interview with Aaron Poochigian

Traci O’Dea (Associate Editor, Smartish Pace): How has translating Sappho affected your own poetry?

Aaron Poochigian: I had always wanted each line of my poetry to be songlike and ravishing. Now, after having lived with Sappho for about two years, I have a better sense of what that means. But I should be more specific about her influence. Many of Sappho’s poems give the reader the impression that he or she is eavesdropping on a private conversation, as in the following fragment:As you are dear to me go find a youngerBed as your due.I can’t stand being the old one any longer,Living with you.I now readily slip into the conversational mode in my own work. Sappho, in fact, is credited with pioneering the “personal” in poetry, partly because she gives the reader this window into the intimate. She also makes frequent use of what I call “choral” expression—that is, the speaker as a first person plural “we” representing a group of people. I now often write poems in “group voices.” Perhaps the poem “The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” is the best evidence of her influence on my work. The Marriage ... [ read more ]

Upcoming Events

Issue 20 Readings!

9/1/2013 (7:00pm) -- (8:00pm)

Baltimore, New York, Raleigh, Austin, Virgin Islands

We will have Smartish Pace Issue 20 readings in Baltimore (TBA), New York City (KGB Bar), Raleigh (Contemporary Art Museum), Austin (TBA) and Virgin Islands (TBA).

Dates to be announced here throughout the year.

Recent Review

Green Squall [Smith Review]

In his first full-length collection, Green Squall, Jay Hopler invites his readers into a Florida teeming with the light of a lush world where “the grass was lizarding,” (“In the Garden” 5), while mindful of the places where that light dims in “the stump-holes where the palm / Trees used to be” (“The Conjugal Bed” 8-9). The first third embraces the electric rush of open spaces and new life, seen here in the opening poem ... [ read more ]