NEW: Michael Collier PQA--read his insightful answers! Sherman Alexie has not replied to the questions, we're sorry and thank you for your patience.

Poet(s) currently taking questions: Carol Muske-Dukes

Archives:

David Franks Dies

David Franks, poet, artist, songwriter and prankster, died on Jan. 14 in his Baltimore apartment at the age of 61. The list of David Franks stories is long: he wrote Congressional speeches in the mid-1970s, conducted a musical composition ... [ read more ]

2009 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize Results

6th Annual Beullah Rose Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace; Clare Banks & Traci O’Dea, Judges

1st Prize: “Remember” by Miriam Bird Greenberg
2nd Prize: “When My Back Gave Out” ... [ read more ]

David Lehman Smartish Pace Reading

David Lehman, Smartish Pace Reading Series, Introduction by Assistant Editor John Martin, KGB Bar, New York, NY, October 4, 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 ]

AWP Bookfair & SP Party

4/7/2010 (7:00am) -- 4/10/2010 (5:00pm)

Denver, CO, Hyatt Regency, Bookfair Location: E5

Book Fair Free on Saturday; Party=FREE

Meet the SP staff! We love love love meeting our readers & poets & friendly strangers, & we'll have the usual FREE Smartish Pace AWP Issues, drinks, merriment, pirates & rides for the kids at bookfair location E5. And, if you ask us, we'll give you the location of our super secret Atlanta-Chicago-Baltimore style Smartish Pace party to be held Friday night in Denver.

http://www.awpwriter.org/

David Gewanter Poetry Reading

9/5/2010 (3:00pm) -- (5:00pm)

The Walters Art Museum

Free

This event date & time have not been finalized. The reading will happen on a Sunday in September & we will post confirmation here in the spring of 2010.

David Gewanter is the author of three books of poetry: In the Belly (1997), The Sleep of Reason (2003) and War Bird (2009), all published by the University of Chicago Press; and co-editor, with Frank Bidart, of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (FSG, 2003). His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 9. He is a professor at Georgetown University.

Hapax

A. E. Stallings’ poems in Hapax, her second full-length collection, are striking in form and subject. Many pair contemporary formalism with allusions to Greek mythology. This intersection of form and subject is pervasive and important in that it echoes the collection’s thematic thread: most of the poems deal with the liminal, in particular, the threshold between innocence and experience.This is most apparent in the several references to the myth of Persephone and Demeter. ... [ read more ]