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

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

Archives:

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 ]

Sam Schmidt, Poetry Reading

Sam Schmidt reading at CityLit in the Poe Room of the Pratt Library in Baltimore. April 14, 2012. Intro by Smartish Pace Editor Stephen Reichert.

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 ]

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 ]