The Daily Poem

In today’s poem, Kenyon wrestles with the Solomonic thesis that “the end of a thing is better than its beginning.” Happy reading.

Noisy upstairs neighbors have been consternating mankind for as long as second-floors have existed. The all-too-familiar phenomenon has inspired novels, movies, Tom Waits songs, and even a poem or two–like today’s. Happy reading.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that it is impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat. Dickinson, on the other hand, claims to know what caterpillars care (or don’t care) about. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is the first half of Randall Jarrell’s reverie about his Los Angeles childhood–and one of the most effortless examples of terza rima in all of English poetry.

Today’s poem is the satirical saga of an anachronistic naval battle. Heave ho and happy reading!

Nothing feels better and hurts worse than nostalgia. Happy reading.

Today’s brief poem goes out to teachers everywhere as they return to work. Good luck and happy reading.

“Poet Seamus Heaney described Holub’s writing as ‘a laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art.’ In 1988 poet Ted Hughes called Holub ‘one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere.’”

“To die, to sleep.” Sometimes the space between the two seems as slight as that intervening comma. Happy reading.

I might say today’s poem is all subtext–if it weren’t for all the text. Ambiguous praise, sincere romantic angst, just the right amount of bitter wit: this sonnet has it all. Happy reading.

This special, live edition of The Daily Poem was recorded at the Close Reads 10th Anniversary celebration last weekend in Concord, NC. Happy reading!

Best known as the author of The Yearling and Cross Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings enjoyed a long side-hustle as an occasional poet. Happy reading.

Today’s poem comes from Guite’s excellent collection, Sounding the Seasons (now in a new edition with over 100 sonnets!). Blessed feast and happy reading.

Hayes has said he longs for a language that can circumvent idea and communicate pure emotion—in today’s poem that quest is dramatized in a powerful way. Happy reading.

Happy tenth birthday to the Close Reads podcast, and happy reading!

Today’s poem is one of “promises kept, and / promises / still to keep.” Happy reading.

Today’s poem looks forward to a long and prosperous “reign.” Happy reading.

This week’s poems are arranged around the themes of retrospection and anniversaries in honor of the Close Reads Podcast celebrating its tenth year. Today, we have Rhina Espaillat turning over rich soil. Happy reading!

Today’s poem is a little hopscotch down memory lane. Happy reading.

Weatherford is author of over seventy books including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry inspired, she says, by “family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles that center on African American resistance, resilience, remarkability, rejoicing and remembrance.”

Today’s bittersweet poem glimpses the life of Arthur Rowanberry across time and beyond. Happy reading.

Karina Borowicz was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She earned a BA in history and Russian from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. Borowicz spent five years teaching English in Russia and Lithuania, and has translated poetry from Russian and French. Her first collection of poetry, The Bees Are Waiting (2012), won the Marick Press Poetry Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry, the First Horizon Award, and was named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her second book, Proof (2014), won the Codhill Poetry Award and was a finalist for...

Today’s poem is a cautionary tale about achieving popular successes. Happy reading.

“Mark Ford summarized Graves’s ‘wholesale rejection of 20th-century civilization and complete submission to the capricious demands of the Goddess’ with a quote from The White Goddess: ‘Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.’”

-via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is an invitation to an encounter with the Real. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is neither the first nor last to mythologize America’s sixteenth president. What is it about Lincoln that makes him so attractive to artists of every succeeding generation? Happy reading.

Today’s poem–from British humorist Roger Woddis–is a witty-yet-withering sendup of double-morality. Happy reading.

Today’s poem comes from the largest surviving trove of Anglo Saxon poetry–the Exeter Book. Happy riddling!

Louise Imogen Guiney is known for her lyrical, Old English-style poems that often recall the literary conventions of seventeenth-century English poetry. Informed by her religious faith, Guiney's works reflect her concern with the Catholic tradition in literature and often emphasize moral rectitude and heroic gallantry. Today Guiney is praised for her scholarship in both her poetry and in her numerous literary and historical studies.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Happy 4th of July and happy reading!

Juliana Horatia Ewing (August 3, 1841 – May 13, 1885) was an English writer of children's stories. Her writings display a sympathetic insight into children's lives, an admiration for things military, and a strong religious faith.

Known as Julie, she was the second of ten children of the Rev. Alfred Gatty, Vicar of Ecclesfield in Yorkshire, and Margaret Gatty, who was herself a children's author. Their children were educated mainly by their mother, but Julie was often the driving force behind their various activities: drama, botany and so on. Later she was responsible for setting up a village library in Ecclesfield, and he...

Today’s poem is one of those perfect distillations of a concrete emotion. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is Chesterton’s ode to the silent majority. Happy reading.

Today’s poem marks a very special day. Happy reading.

Today’s poem, introducing the counterpart to “Songs of Innocence,” is a dialogue that immediately deepens the mood of the more “mature” lyrics that will follow. Happy reading.

Sweet is the home you leave. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is a somber, paternal retrospective from the Ancient Mariner poet. Happy reading.

Today’s poem kicks off a short trek through English poetry. Happy reading.

My friend Simon Curtis, who has died aged 70, was one of the small band of people who work tirelessly, for no pay and few thanks, to promote poetry. An excellent poet himself, he edited two magazines and helped many struggling writers into print.

His heroes were Wordsworth, Hardy and Causley. His own poetry, which rhymed and was perfectly accessible, was distinguished by, in his words, its "shrewd, ironic and Horatian tone". It ranged from accomplished light verse, which was often very funny, to deeply affecting poems about family bereavement. He appeared in the Faber Poetry Introduction 6 (1985).

Today’s poem grows on you. Happy reading.

David Wojahn grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. Ever since his first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1981, Wojahn has been one of American poetry’s most thoughtful examiners of culture and memory. His work often investigates how history plays out in the lives of individuals, and poet Tom Sleigh says that his poems “meld the political and personal in a way that is unparalleled by any living American poet.”

Wojahn’s book World Tree (2011) received the Lenore M...

A little light verse for anyone who wants to rise (far) above the noise for a moment. Happy reading.

Bert Leston Taylor (November 13, 1866 – March 19, 1921) was an American columnist, humorist, poet, and author.

Bert Leston Taylor became a journalist at seventeen, a librettist at twenty-one, and a successfully published author at thirty-five. At the height of his literary career, he was a central literary figure of the early 20th century Chicago renaissance as well as one of the most celebrated columnists in the United States.

-bio via Wikipedia

Death has been personified and analogized in myriad ways, but none perhaps so withering as today’s imagining of death as a fascist bureaucrat. Happy reading.