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 ]

Elizabeth Spires, Clare Banks & Christine Stewart, BMA Reading

Smartish Pace poets Elizabeth Spires & Christine Stewart, and Smartish Pace Associate Editor Clare Banks, read their ekphrastic poems at the Baltimore Museum of Art, January 16, 2009.

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 ]

Life in the Ordovician

In this excellent collection of poems, Robert Murphy’s language is elemental. The earth and his sense of the musicality of language are unparalleled: Murphy revels in language, and his reveling is a desire for revelation. Murphy handles our lexicon as a gardener handles seeds and plantings in a garden: placing words in perfect arrangement; and just as the gardener places certain plants in light or in shade, the poet places his words in arrangement of ... [ read more ]