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

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Smartish Pace Poem on Poetry Daily

Maurice Manning's poem "Going Back to Bimble" appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 20, and re-appears at Poetry Daily. Read the poem here. Thanks Poetry Daily! [ read more ]

Matt McBride & Amy Woolard Nominated for Best New Poets

Smartish Pace nominated Matt McBride's poem "Cities of Advertisers" and Amy Woolard's poem "A Girl Gets Sick of a Rose" for the 2013 Best New Poets anthology. SP is proud ... [ read more ]

Luke Johnson, Smartish Pace & 32 Poems reading

Luke Johnson reading for Smartish Pace & 32 Poems at Topics Cafe, Chicago, March 1, 2012.

Interview with Greg Williamson

Jessica Yoo: How did you come up with form of Double Exposures?Greg Williamson:  When I’d first written a few Double Exposures, I was reminded by a friend that I’d floated an idea like it back in school. I liked the notion of having this text on the page that interleaves and changes depending on how you look at it. But I never thought of an unhokey way of doing it. One day, years later, I was thinking about the effects of this photographic double exposure, and I thought I’d give it a shot. I figured it ought to be about 3x5, and I wanted the third, combined reading to bring the other two together into a complexified, and generally darker, coexistence.JY: What should poets keep in mind when attempting this form?GW: Quite a few people have written enviably good ones. The hardest part is maintaining the accuracy of the grammar, syntax, punctuation, and so forth when the two parts join in the middle, what I thought of as the estuary, what someone else called the zipper.JY: The subject matter of some of your poems seems to be inspired by everyday observations or ... [ read more ]

The Little Box

When my instructor Timothy Liu insisted I read Vasko Popa’s The Little Box (translations by Charles Simic), I dutifully looked it up online and was ready to buy. After I found out the cheapest copy was 40 dollars, I decided against. A year later, I’ve taken the plunge, and what an investment. Vasko Popa incites the reader with near-riddles and an indeterminacy layered by the full-bodied sequencing of a white pebble, a little box, and ... [ read more ]