Maurice Manning answered your questions. Carl Phillips did too. Enjoy!

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Charles Wright, New US Poet Laureate

Charles Wright will be the next Poet Laureate, kicking off his tenure with a Sept. 25 reading of his work.

Wright has 24 poetry collections and two books of ... [ read more ]

Smartish Pace 2013 Pushcart Prize Nominations

From Smartish Pace, Issue 20
 
Carson Cistulli: “Young People Will Have White Hair”
Leah Falk: “Westview Cemetery”
Andrea Henchey: “The Moon Is So Smart”
Timothy Liu: “The Garden of ... [ read more ]

Michael Collier, Smartish Pace Reading

Michael Collier 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.

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 ]

Off the Fire Road

Poet Greg Wrenn is classically attuned, but not in any classical sense. His first collection, the chapbook Off the Fire Road, is a brazen, electric collection of poems exploring clandestine desire and tracking said desire amid the AIDS pandemic. On the one hand these poems track discreet sexual encounters along a fire road—a set-aside stretch of dirt traversing unwanted land, a place meant only to give access to somewhere else. But then there’s the other ... [ read more ]