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

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Best New Poet Nominations: Hunt & Macormic

Smartish Pace Editor Stephen Reichert nominated Laurel Hunt, and her poem "Glass," and D.M. Macormic, and his poem "Identity Theft," for Best New Poets 2017. SP nominations have won in ... [ read more ]

Writer’s Residency: Day Use (near Baltimore)

The Good Contrivance Farm Residency provides a 1200 square foot barn loft apartment on a small, historic farm in central Maryland, 25 miles north of Baltimore. It's run by our ... [ read more ]

Hayden Saunier, Smartish Pace Reading

Hayden Saunier 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 Gaylord Brewer

Loss has a constant presence in your new book, Give Over, Graymalkin. For you, where does the act of writing poetry fit into the process of losing, accepting, rebuilding, and regaining?That’s a significant question and a slippery one. The poems about my dog Jasper were ones in particular that I swore to myself I wouldn’t write—too private—and then ultimately wrote anyway. His death—slow and then sudden—was hard on us. I finally realized it would be those poems or nothing for a long while, and so I suppose in some ironic way the intimate nature of the subject that I was so wary of was also what finally compelled me to tackle it. I hoped through the personal to strike a resonant chord about loss. From responses I’ve received, maybe I got lucky, although it was damned costly luck. I’ve been writing poems for a long time, and that process obviously has important correlations to how I approach my life and what I am and believe. It’s not therapy, though, and it’s not a journal. The poems are intended for an audience to read and perhaps be moved or amused or appalled by. To recover from loss takes time, ... [ read more ]

The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife

Joan Kane’s visionary first collection, The Cormorant Hunter's Wife, renders the Alaskan landscape without imposing a human meaning on life in the wilderness; in the process, Kane succeeds, more successfully than many contemporary poets writing about the natural world today, in preserving that landscape's distinctive and often keenly unsettling otherness. In the opening poem, "The Sunken Forests": I recite the ice that has thrown The river over its banks And move through a terrain Of ... [ read more ]