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Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.
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Recent News
Peter Campion Wins Levis Reading Prize
Peter Campion’s The Lions (Chicago) won the 13th annual Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University for the best first or second book of poetry published in 2009. Campion will receive ... [ read more ]
W.S. Merwin Name U.S. Poet Laureate
The Library of Congress announced that W.S. Merwin will follow Kay Ryan as the 17th Poet Laureate of the United States. The post comes with an annual salary of $35,000. Merwin is the author of seventeen ... [ read more ]
Recent Media
Bob Hicok on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Bob Hicok discusses economic hardship in Michigan and reads a new poem.
Recent Interview
Interview with Jeffrey Harrison
Jeffrey Harrison's Feeding the Fire is available from Sarabande Books (www.sarabandebooks.org). Harrison is the author of two previous collections, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival. Jacqueline McLean: Titling a book of poems seems like a difficult enterprise. I want to ask you to talk about the significance of your title, Feeding the Fire. In presenting this question, I have a few thoughts in mind. First, there is your marvelous line from Kafka which prefaces the collection: "What one writes is merely the ashes of one's experience." This is a particularly apt line for poetry, in which we relive or try to recover something of the essence of what once was. Yet I see a contradiction here or at least an intriguing complication. In a poem like "White Spaces," you recover (without bringing him back) a college professor who continues to compel you. The closing lines of the poem read: Gone now, known too briefly and too long ago for me to bring him back in a poem, though I'd like to think that what he was and what he gave me hover at the edges of ... [ read more ]
Upcoming Events
Michael Collier & David Gewanter Poetry Reading
9/26/2010 (2:00pm) -- (3:30pm)
The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21201
Free
The Smartish Pace Reading Series continues with poets Michael Collier and David Gewanter. Collier is the author of five books of poems, most recently Dark Wild Realm; and co-editor of A William Maxwell Portrait. Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001–2004, his poems appeared in Smartish Pace, Issue 17. Gewanter is the author of three books of poems: In the Belly, The Sleep of Reason and War Bird; and co-editor of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems. His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 9. Gewanter is a professor at Georgetown University.
http://thewalters.org/
Poe-apalooza
10/31/2010 (2:00pm) -- (3:30pm)
The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda, MD 20815
Free
The Writer's Center, in partnership with Pyramid Atlantic & the NEA's Big Read program, will host a reading featuring poets, including Smartish Pace's Clare Banks & Stephen Reichert, reading their favorite Poe poems & original Poe inspired work.
www.writer.org
Recent Review
Hummock of Malookas
Matthew Rohrer’s debut collection, Hummock of Malookas, bristles with wonder and vitality. The straight and simple subject/verb sentences gives off no highfalutin airs. With the repetition of luminous forks and conjuring up apocalyptic fire, Rohrer livens a scene by jumping to the unexpected angle when you feel most comfortable with the poem’s direction. Utilizing sentence length variation and consistent anaphora for pacing and rhythm, Rohrer breathes life into inanimate objects that now act and talk and ... [ read more ]
