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

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Charles Wright, New US Poet Laureate

Charles Wright will be the next Poet Laureate, kicking off his tenure with a Sept. 25 reading of his work.

Wright has 24 poetry collections and two books of ... [ read more ]

Smartish Pace 2013 Pushcart Prize Nominations

From Smartish Pace, Issue 20
 
Carson Cistulli: “Young People Will Have White Hair”
Leah Falk: “Westview Cemetery”
Andrea Henchey: “The Moon Is So Smart”
Timothy Liu: “The Garden of ... [ read more ]

Issue 15 Reading & Party Slideshow

Smartish Pace Issue 15 release party, May 31, 2008, at The Whole Gallery featuring Christopher Cunningham, Douglas Basford, Stephen Kampa, Lia Purpura & Terrance Wedin. Followed by music from Scout, Beans and Baby Venom (slideshow music). SP Editors in the house: Clare Banks, Traci O'Dea, Jared Fischer & Stephen Reichert.

Interview with Lia Purpura

Laura Klebanow: It seems you came to write poetry first, and prose poetry and essays next. Is this correct, or has your work in each genre developed less compartmentally? For example, do you ever start a poem and watch it become a prose poem or essay, or vice versa?Lia Purpura: The issue of how one discernible genre grows from another is utterly mysterious to me. I’m certain that I’m writing prose, though my essays are called “lyric essays.” In fact, I’ve just written an essay titled “What is a Lyric Essay?” for Seneca Review. In it, I’m making a plea for allowing the form to remain as mysterious as possible. I do mean “mysterious” though in the best way – challenging and magical and able to work on a reader and knit up above the page. I don’t mean at all “unclear” or “sloppy”. The language ought to be as precise as possible in order to affect the most unlikely moves. When I’m writing, an impulse makes itself known as a prose itch or poem-itch. Some failed poems have extended out into prose and found their musculature that way. I don’t think a derailed essay has ever turned ... [ read more ]

Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection

Not since Agamemnon and Menelaus tore down the walls of Troy have we been witness to such atrocities as Poch and Davidson inflict upon us in their new anthology Hockey Haiku: the Essential Collection. Essential! The hubris! Have they forgotten all the groundbreaking work of their forebears in the realms of hockey haikuology? Let us pause for a moment and remember some of the titans of the hockey haiku anthologies. Where is Jan Svedic's 1954 ... [ read more ]