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

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Smartish Pace Poem on Poetry Daily

Maurice Manning's poem "Going Back to Bimble" appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 20, and re-appears at Poetry Daily. Read the poem here. Thanks Poetry Daily! [ read more ]

Matt McBride & Amy Woolard Nominated for Best New Poets

Smartish Pace nominated Matt McBride's poem "Cities of Advertisers" and Amy Woolard's poem "A Girl Gets Sick of a Rose" for the 2013 Best New Poets anthology. SP is proud ... [ read more ]

Dick Allen Reading Smartish Pace Poems

Dick Allen reads his poems that have appeared in Smartish Pace, Issues 3, 8, 10 and 16. Most images are of Mr. Allen and his home. Intro/Outro music by Editor Stephen Reichert.

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 ]

Issue 20 Readings!

9/1/2013 (7:00pm) -- (8:00pm)

Baltimore, New York, Raleigh, Austin, Virgin Islands

We will have Smartish Pace Issue 20 readings in Baltimore (TBA), New York City (KGB Bar), Raleigh (Contemporary Art Museum), Austin (TBA) and Virgin Islands (TBA). 

Dates to be announced here throughout the year. 

Mayweed by Frannie Lindsay

“Grace,” one of the first poems in the collection, is a poem of praise. Here the speaker praises ‘my plain young mother for leaving/her husband’s bed/…’ ‘the caked galoshes drying beside/the basement door…’ ‘the steadfast ladderback chair…’ ‘the measure [my mother] counted aloud…/her calloused and lovely fingerpads…’ The etymological origins of praise speak to the source of Mayweed. From the Old French preisier ‘to praise, value,’ praise is also associated with the Latin pretiare ... [ read more ]