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

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

Archives:

Armen Davoudian at Poetry Daily

Wake-up Call by Armen Davoudian from Smartish Pace 26 featured today at Poetry Daily!
https://poems.com/ [ read more ]

Jason Gray Poetry Reading - June 9, 2019

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

Joy Jacobson, Smartish Pace Reading

Joy Jacobson reading for Smartish Pace Issue 18 party on 12-17-11 at KGB Bar in New York City. Intro by Smartish Pace Editor Stephen Reichert. 

Interview with Aaron Poochigian

Traci O’Dea (Associate Editor, Smartish Pace): How has translating Sappho affected your own poetry?

Aaron Poochigian: I had always wanted each line of my poetry to be songlike and ravishing. Now, after having lived with Sappho for about two years, I have a better sense of what that means. But I should be more specific about her influence. Many of Sappho’s poems give the reader the impression that he or she is eavesdropping on a private conversation, as in the following fragment:As you are dear to me go find a youngerBed as your due.I can’t stand being the old one any longer,Living with you.I now readily slip into the conversational mode in my own work. Sappho, in fact, is credited with pioneering the “personal” in poetry, partly because she gives the reader this window into the intimate. She also makes frequent use of what I call “choral” expression—that is, the speaker as a first person plural “we” representing a group of people. I now often write poems in “group voices.” Perhaps the poem “The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” is the best evidence of her influence on my work.     The Marriage ... [ 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 ]