Enjoy the old Q&As! Maybe we'll do this again one day, soon. 

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

Archives:

Jason Gray Poetry Reading - June 9, 2019

Jason Gray read for us and you can watch it here!  [ read more ]

Joseph J Capista Poetry Reading - May 12, 2019

Watch his reading here!  [ read more ]

City Lit Project 2008

Smartish Pace at City Lit Project, Pratt Library, Baltimore. April 19, 2008.

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 ]

The Darkness and the Light

Anthony Hecht's seventh collection, The Darkness and the Light, is a mesmerization by poetic prism. The light flashes, then goes dark, and we are under his spell. From love under a Florentine sunset to staring down the barrel of a NAZI rifle, there seems to be no subject on which Hecht cannot speak with passion and compassion.There is much about seeing in here. As with the title, the eyes in this collection both ... [ read more ]