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

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Shara McCallum's book, Madwoman, Longlisted for 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Six books by writers from five Caribbean countries have been announced on the longlist for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. The group ... [ read more ]

Smartish Pace 2017 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Editor Stephen Reichert selected the following poems from Issue 24 (April, 2017):

Safia Elhillo: “Self-Portrait With No Flag”
Nausheen Eusuf: “Allegiance”
Jennifer Koiter: “The Messy Girl Feels at Home ... [ read more ]

Maggie Glover, Smartish Pace Reading

Maggie Glover reading for Smartish Pace at the Issue 16 Release Party at Cyclops, Baltimore, on May 15, 2009. This was a joint party with the DC lit magazine, Barrelhouse. Intro by Stephen Reichert of Smartish Pace. Intro/Outro music by Pree.

Interview with Aaron Poochigian

Traci O’Dea (Associate Editor, Smartish Pace): How has translating Sappho affected your own poetry?

Aaron Poochigian: I had always wanted each line of my poetry to be songlike and ravishing. Now, after having lived with Sappho for about two years, I have a better sense of what that means. But I should be more specific about her influence. Many of Sappho’s poems give the reader the impression that he or she is eavesdropping on a private conversation, as in the following fragment:As you are dear to me go find a youngerBed as your due.I can’t stand being the old one any longer,Living with you.I now readily slip into the conversational mode in my own work. Sappho, in fact, is credited with pioneering the “personal” in poetry, partly because she gives the reader this window into the intimate. She also makes frequent use of what I call “choral” expression—that is, the speaker as a first person plural “we” representing a group of people. I now often write poems in “group voices.” Perhaps the poem “The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” is the best evidence of her influence on my work.     The Marriage ... [ read more ]

Lovely, Rasberry

The Comedic EffectA number of poets and critics, including Stephen Burt and Tony Hoagland, have recently sounded the death toll for what Burt has called "elliptical" poetry and Hoagland, "hip contemporary skittishness." Hoagland sees a return to autobiographical narrative of the 1980s, Burt, a renewed interest in the objectivism of Pound and Williams. Yet, while I think (and hope) that the worst of the elliptical poets will fade, others, whose work is less ... [ read more ]