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

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Shara McCallum's book, Madwoman, Longlisted for 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Six books by writers from five Caribbean countries have been announced on the longlist for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. The group ... [ read more ]

Smartish Pace 2017 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Editor Stephen Reichert selected the following poems from Issue 24 (April, 2017):

Safia Elhillo: “Self-Portrait With No Flag”
Nausheen Eusuf: “Allegiance”
Jennifer Koiter: “The Messy Girl Feels at Home ... [ read more ]

AWP 2010 - Denver - Slideshow & Video

2010 AWP Denver from Smartish Pace on Vimeo.

Smartish Pace & friends at AWP. Thanks for hangin' with us, we had a super swell time!

Interview with Stephen Cushman

STEPHEN REICHERT: First off, thank you for agreeing to do this interview despite the busyness of your semester. I'd like to begin with your origins and influences. What was it about your upbringing that led to your life as a poet? STEPHEN CUSHMAN: I can think of two ways to answer this question. The first would be to reel off some autobiographical facts that might account for a love of language and literature. My father was a professor of American literature, my mother a librarian, so I grew up in a verbal household, one in which both talking and reading (or at first being read to) occupied a large share of my time. But these autobiographical facts only help to explain literacy; they don't explain why someone who grew up in such a household would choose writing in addition to reading, and they don't explain why such a person would choose to write verse rather than prose. To account for those developments is much harder. I know that I began to write poems in high school, and I suspect that I wrote them for much the same reason other people in high ... [ read more ]

Mayweed by Frannie Lindsay

“Grace,” one of the first poems in the collection, is a poem of praise. Here the speaker praises ‘my plain young mother for leaving/her husband’s bed/…’ ‘the caked galoshes drying beside/the basement door…’ ‘the steadfast ladderback chair…’ ‘the measure [my mother] counted aloud…/her calloused and lovely fingerpads…’ The etymological origins of praise speak to the source of Mayweed. From the Old French preisier ‘to praise, value,’ praise is also associated with the Latin pretiare ... [ read more ]