Today’s limericks are all about unexpected consequences. Happy reading. Children’s poet and educator Constance Levy earned degrees at Washington University and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Known for its careful attention to external and internal rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and assonance, Levy’s work frequently takes encounters with the natural world as its subject. By drawing on her own childhood encounters, Levy re-experiences the world through verse in the fresh and exuberant ways ...
Aug 15, 2024•2 min
Things are getting hairy. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 14, 2024•3 min
While limericks can be plenty nonsensical, today’s are downright sensible–especially that of Leigh Mercer, famous for his mathematical wordplay and best known for creating the enterprising palindrome, “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!". This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe...
Aug 13, 2024•2 min
It’s another weekly gimmerick here on the Daily Poem. Edward Lear (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals, making coloured drawings during his journeys (which he reworked later, sometimes as plates fo...
Aug 12, 2024•5 min
Nâzim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902, in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece), where his father served in the Foreign Service. He was exposed to poetry at an early age through his artist mother and poet grandfather, and had his first poems published when he was seventeen. Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish In...
Aug 09, 2024•12 min
Maybe you remember the experiences recounted in today’s poem—maybe you don’t. Happy reading! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 08, 2024•6 min
T. S. Eliot is remembered as a great poet, but he is surpassingly underrated as a namer of cats . Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 07, 2024•5 min
Warren (1905-1989) was born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of California, Berkeley. Though perhaps best known for his 1946 novel All the King’s Men , he was the author of over a dozen books of poetry in addition to his prose work. He is the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction (in 1947) and poetry (in 1958 and 1979). Warren’s other honors include a Rhodes Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur...
Aug 06, 2024•9 min
Bruce Lansky is an internationally known poet and anthologist. He has a passion for getting children excited about reading and writing poetry. Lansky’s poetry books—including A Bad Case of the Giggles (2013), Peter, Peter, Pizza-Eater (2006), Mary Had a Little Jam (2004), If Kids Ruled the School (2004) , and Rolling in the Aisles (2004)—are among America’s best-selling children’s poetry books. He is also the editor of the middle-grade fiction series Girls to the Rescue and Newfangled Fairy Tale...
Aug 05, 2024•5 min
Today’s poems from Ogden Nash, “The Ant” and “The Ostrich,” are the perfect marriage of wit and attention. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 02, 2024•3 min
Oliver Herford (2 December 1860 – 5 July 1935), regarded as “the American Oscar Wilde,” was an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator known for his pithy bon mots and skewed sense of humor. His obituary in The New York Times nicely sums up his unique brilliance: "His wit…was too original at first to go down with the very delectable highly respectable magazine editors of the Nineties. It was odd, unexpected, his own brand. It takes genius to write the best nonsense, which is often far mor...
Aug 01, 2024•6 min
Today’s poem begins with humble beasts but wings its way to the loftiest mysteries of existence. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 31, 2024•11 min
Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon (1947) and The Runaway Bunny (1942), both illustrated by Clement Hurd. She has been called "the laureate of the nursery" for her achievements. Brown was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, the middle child of three children of Maude Margaret and Robert Bruce Brown. She was the granddaughter of politician Benjamin Gratz Brown. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. ...
Jul 30, 2024•3 min
Today’s poem, written in 1871, actually gave the name to the since-codified psychological phenomenon known as the “centipede effect” or “centipede syndrome.” Psychologist George Humphrey (for whom the condition is alternatively named “Humphrey’s Law”) said of the poem, "This is a most psychological rhyme. It contains a profound truth which is illustrated daily in the lives of all of us." This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episode...
Jul 29, 2024•5 min
G. K. Chesterton wrote: “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.” Perhaps Hopkins was anticipating that sentiment in today’s poem. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe...
Jul 26, 2024•8 min
Today’s poem is the fourth and final section of Tennyson’s Arthurian ballad. I have been reading his 1842 version and (I think) the final stanza is where it differs most from the 1832 original. You can compare both below to see for yourself how Tennyson’s alteration ramps up the pathos. Happy reading! 1832 conclusion: They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest. There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest, The wellfed w...
Jul 25, 2024•6 min
Today we come to the turning point for the Lady of Shalott. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 24, 2024•4 min
In part two, the “Lady” sits, weaving, in a world of images but pines for the world of solid realities. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 23, 2024•3 min
Today is the first of four in which we’ll wend our way through Tennyson’s tragic Arthurian ballad. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 22, 2024•6 min
Today’s poem is a shape poem dedicated to chefs, but (surprise?) it might be about more than cooking. John Hollander, one of contemporary poetry’s foremost poets, editors, and anthologists, grew up in New York City. He studied at Columbia University and Indiana University, and he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. Hollander received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Levinson Prize, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and the poet laureateship of Connectic...
Jul 19, 2024•10 min
In today’s poem, from Songs of Innocence , we meet William Blake struggling to sort out his theological analogies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 18, 2024•8 min
In today’s poem, also known as “Sonnet 19,” Milton offers a pious alternative to “raging” against the dying of the light. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 17, 2024•12 min
Today’s poem muses on the sweet and awful creation of the poet. Happy reading! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 16, 2024•7 min
Today’s poem is a song from Ben Jonson’s final play, The Sad Shepherd (1641). Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 15, 2024•8 min
Just when you thought you were out, The Daily Poem pulls you back in–to poems about movies. Today’s charming and earnest poem imitates the medium it describes (film) by swapping memorable images and sensations for linear propositions. Happy reading. Amy Clampitt was born and raised in New Providence, Iowa. She studied first at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and later at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York City. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Clampitt held...
Jul 12, 2024•9 min
Today’s poem–published in 1920–is one of the early intersections between poetry and cinema. Happy reading. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. H...
Jul 11, 2024•5 min
In today’s poem, written a century ago, cinema (and Charlie Chaplin) is already supplying metaphors for the work and experience of modern poets. Happy reading. Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets...
Jul 10, 2024•7 min
Today’s poem (from an art scholar and master of ekphrastic poetry) features another classic Hopper painting and a contemplative trip to the movies. Happy reading! Joseph Stanton’s books of poems include A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban O‘ahu , Cardinal Points , Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art , and What the Kite Thinks, Moving Pictures , and Lifelines: Poems for Homer and Hopper . He has published more than 300 poems in such journals as Poetry , Harvard Review , Poetry East , The Cortlan...
Jul 09, 2024•9 min
This week The Daily Poem heads to the movies. Cornelius Eady is the founder of the poetry group Cave Canem and his published collections include Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Omnation Press, 1986), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press,1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (G....
Jul 08, 2024•10 min
Today’s poem both responds to and carries on the work of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes. Happy reading! Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. Following former fieldworker retraining in the mid-1980s, the much-decorated poet began her writing and teaching career. She now serves as distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. - bio via UC Riverside This is a public episode. If you'd like to disc...
Jul 05, 2024•5 min
