#smartish pace

[these-summer-nights-in-december]

3 Poems Published in Smartish Pace!

I'm thrilled to hold my contributor copy of Smartish Pace, which contains my poems, "The Sky Always Blue Above the Clouds Useless To Us," "Please Let There Be an Ice Storm This Afternoon" and "Our Breaths Are Weather." It's an honor to share these pages with so many poets whose work I adore. Thank you so much to Stephen Reichert and the rest of the Smartish Pace crew! Dorianne Laux has a poem in it that begins "Under the blown out stars/ sounds the lone horn" and ends "smother my wet face/ with underwater kisses/ I miss you so much// I could drown" I mean, come on!

[bostonpoetryslam]

I think it's very important for poets, who need to tell their stories to continue, to do so and not worry about literary trends or fads.

Denise Duhamel, interviewed by Karla Huston for Smartish Pace

[bostonpoetryslam]

A poet has the chance to write a revisionist history of her own life, to have the last word. Of course, the haunting real memory is still the real memory, but playing with the memory is liberating.

Denise Duhamel, interviewed by Karla Huston for Smartish Pace

[bostonpoetryslam]

Poets who respond to news events often make the news more three-dimensional, more complex, and even more haunting than the headlines.

Denise Duhamel, interviewed by Karla Huston for Smartish Pace

[bostonpoetryslam]

I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading.

Denise Duhamel, interviewed by Karla Huston for Smartish Pace

[hillarykobernickpoetry-blog]

"On nights like these, we struggle to find new ways to say 'nights like these,' struggle to avoid the word struggle"

Loving this poem by Andrea Henchey today.

[bostonpoetryslam]

I’m always interested in an emotional truth, and staying very true to that. In personal poems, I think that there is a way to stick to an emotional truth even if facts are manipulated, molded, or shaped. And I don’t mean huge things; I mean if I’ve got to change the color of the dress my mother was wearing, because the color I can change it to gets closer to the emotional truth that I’m trying to convey than the actual dress she was wearing, I might do that. I’m not willing to make up events that didn’t happen, because then that to me feels like I’m playing with history. And so in writing about history, I do try to use the facts of history in order to shed light on the emotional truth of the personal experience.

Natasha Trethewey, interviewed by Jocelyn Heath for Smartish Pace

[bostonpoetryslam]

When that song came on the radio, you turned it up and said, 'Let this be the anthem for our bad choices' and I thought of Bad Choices as a place as in: Bad Choices, Montana and I wondered what it must feel like to be mayor there and then I remembered that I am.

Andrea Henchey, "The Moon Is So Smart," published in Smartish Pace