The Daily Poem

The author of several collections of poetry–most recently Life on Earth –Dorianne Laux was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award for her book Facts About the Moon . She has also authored several works of non-fiction including The Poet’s Companion and Finger Exercises For Poets . She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poet...

Today’s poem–#6 in Donne’s La Corona sonnet cycle–is an ideal consummation for many of the themes introduced in this week’s selections. Now go read the rest of his holy sonnets! 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

Today, Donne’s best-known poem, but maybe not his last word on death. 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

Today’s poem dramatizes Donne’s inner turmoil and conflicting desires, but is not without hope. 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

Today’s Holy Sonnet is the fourth in Donne’s underrated (if a poet as great as Donne can have underrated work) sonnet cycle, La Corona . The title translates to “crown” and the cycle’s opening line introduces the poems as a woven “crown of prayer and praise” offered to God, narrating and commenting upon significant events in the life of Jesus. Sonnet 4, “Temple,” centers on the sole recorded episo...

Today marks the beginning of a week of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” (interpreted generously to also include selections from his sonnet cycle, “La Corona”). In this first sonnet, he establishes the themes––human weakness, self-doubt, terrestrial anguish, and divine transcendence and consolation––that will return throughout the series. Happy reading! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this...

Today, one of our favorite living poets asks questions about one of our favorite poems. 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

In today’s poem Thomas Merton, 20th-century author and mystic, comes to an understanding of his monastic vocation through a contemplation of John the Baptist’s prenatal gymnastics. 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

Ted Hughes, one of the giants of twentieth-century British poetry, was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. After serving in the Royal Air Force, Hughes attended Cambridge, where he studied archeology and anthropology and took a special interest in myths and legends. In 1956, he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who encouraged him to submit his manuscript to a first-book contest run by th...

Mark Strand was born on Canada’s Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize. After receiving his BFA degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his MA from the University of Iowa. Str...

Today’s poem is a meta-reflection on the constraints of poetic form that has something to say about all of life’s formal constraints. 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

Today’s poem–perfect for a Friday–gives us a less familiar (PG-13) Emily Dickinson, dreaming of letting her hair down. 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

Today’s poem is a classic staple with Literature teachers for its expressive metaphors; it is a classic staple with me because it’s such a cracking-good 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

Today’s poem captures one of the universal challenges of education: recognizing the distinctions and distances between all human souls, and then bridging them without erasing them. 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

As the school year begins, today’s poem goes out to all of those everyday saints performing the unseen and unsung acts of love that make life possible for rest of us! Born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913, Robert Hayden was raised in the Detroit neighborhood Paradise Valley. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and lived, at times, with his parents and with a foster family. In 1932, he gr...

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, sometimes a portrait of your last wife who died under suspicious circumstances is as good as a confession. 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

Hopefully five days of limericks has made this week a little lighter and a little brighter. See you next week for more of our regularly programming. Till then, 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

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 ow...

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

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

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 an...

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, wh...

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

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

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 i...