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 ]

Alan Shapiro Reading

Alan Shapiro poetry reading from October 23, 2008. Mr. Shapiro has new poems in Smartish Pace, Issue 16.

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 ]

Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems

The poet inclined to write about the family dog had better manipulate language like a MOMIX contortionist or offer the truly unexpected if he hopes to create great poetry – and Robert Wrigley does. From the stolid boy who knows his dog is as good as dead when the farmer arrives with a gutted chicken to the quiver of the dog’s ears as the girl holds him down and commands the pet to say he ... [ read more ]