Enjoy the old Q&As! Maybe we'll do this again one day, soon. 

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

Archives:

Jason Gray Poetry Reading - June 9, 2019

Jason Gray read for us and you can watch it here!  [ read more ]

Joseph J Capista Poetry Reading - May 12, 2019

Watch his reading here!  [ read more ]

Sam Schmidt, Poetry Reading

Sam Schmidt reading at CityLit in the Poe Room of the Pratt Library in Baltimore. April 14, 2012. Intro by Smartish Pace Editor Stephen Reichert.

Interview with Harvey Shapiro

Harvey Shapiro's newest collection of poems, How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems, will appear in 2001. Born in Chicago in 1924, educated at Yale and Columbia, an Air Force gunner during World War II, Shapiro settled in New York and worked as a journalist, serving for eight years as the editor of the New York Times Book Review and eventually becoming a senior editor of the New York Times Magazine. In his Introduction to Shapiro's Selected Poems (1997), James Atlas, his colleague at the Magazine, observes the "rare unity" in Shapiro's life and work: "He has lived in the same place, Brooklyn Heights, for nearly his entire writing life; he has immersed himself in the rituals of his own neighborhood with an almost religious intensity." Mentored by the Objectivists but belonging to no one school, Shapiro is often regarded as a quintessential New York poet, tough but compassionate, jazzy and modernistic, but almost classical in his humane skepticism. His lyrics have the sound of chastened conversation-and his conversation produces a kind of punchy lyricism that is, for his interlocutor, both chastening and immensely pleasurable. This interview took place on March 17, 2000, at the home of Galen Williams ... [ read more ]

Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets

The folks who say you can't judge a book by the cover know that, much of the time, you can. Phoenix Rising, for instance, offers a cover image at odds with its title: a seagull with a big dead mullet washed up at its feet. How is this even remotely related to a phoenix besides that it's a bird with its wings in the air? There's also some sort of black line running through the ... [ read more ]