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Poet John Ashbery dies age 90

John Ashbery, American poet and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many others, died on September 3 at age 90. He published over thirty books since 1970 ... [ read more ]

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 ]

Ned Balbo Reading

Ned Balbo reading on April 16, 2011 for CityLit at the Pratt Library, Baltimore. Intro by Smartish Pace's 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 ]

Hardscrabble

Wanting in seriousness but not in any respects lacking for vivacious word-play, Kevin McFadden's Hardscrabble is an honest, agile, yet at times bulky debut. It's so ranging a collection that no handful of lines will summarize its intent. If the collection has a weakness, it is that it suffers from want of omission.Loosely, the book concerns itself with McFadden's birth home Ohio and current home Virginia, and their historical bedrocks. McFadden then shatters ... [ read more ]