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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 ]

David Kirby Reading

David Kirby reading "Borges at the Northside Rotary" on June 3, 2004.

Interview with Natasha Trethewey

February 16, 2012Interview conducted in August 2011

Beyond Katrina blends personal and collective memories of an event that is not too long gone from the public eye, and is still current for those living on the Gulf Coast. What are the challenges of writing about something topical, even if it has personal resonance for you the writer?Natasha Trethewey: I think the biggest challenge that I faced with writing Beyond Katrina and that particular topic was that, as you said, it is in many ways ongoing for the people who are there, and it is also a thing of contested memory. Contested memory is the hardest part of it, because I found that I was dealing with people who wanted not only to be remembered, but people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who felt like their story was being forgotten or being subjugated beneath the other story of New Orleans and the levee break. But I was also dealing with narratives from folks who wanted to remember the aftermath in different ways, I think, for political purposes. And so there was often a narrative of Mississippi as ... [ read more ]

Poetry and Moral Vision: A Symposium

Aftereffects of downpour lingered as mist in the early autumn afternoon at Connecticut College, neo-gothic buildings looming in groomed lawns like a scene from "Dead Poet's Society." Ten 'til two and I stood in a queue that snaked out of the Ernst Common Room in Blaustein, where the student body had apparently arrived en masse to see Adrienne Rich, a legend in her own time, if the turnout from the student population of a small ... [ read more ]