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 Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.-bio via Academy of American Poets 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 (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 Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Bamboo Ridge, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Endicott Studio’s Journal of the Mythic Arts, and New York Quarterly. In 2007, Ted Kooser selected one of Stanton’s poems for his “American Life in Poetry” column.Stanton has edited A Hawai‘i Anthology, which won a Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for excellence in literature. Two of his other books have won honorable mention Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards. In 1997 he received the Cades Award for his contributions to the literature of Hawai‘i.As an art historian, Stanton has published essays on Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, and many other artists. His most recent nonfiction books are The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature and Stan Musial: A Biography. He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.-bio via Poetry Foundation 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

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.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008). 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 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 discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s (frequently-paired) poems form an antiphonal song between Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes on the complicated ideal of “being American.” Happy Independence Day and 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 lovely, dark, and deep. Loneliness, Americana, Edward Hopper, literary illusions, clams: it has it all. Happy reading!Poet and editor Grace Schulman (b. 1935) was born Grace Waldman in New York City, the only child of a Polish Jewish immigrant father and a seventh-generation American mother. She studied at Bard College and earned her BA from American University and her PhD from New York University. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and served as the poetry editor of the Nation from 1972 to 2006. She also directed the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center from 1973 to 1985. She has published nine collections of poetry, including Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2022 (Turtle Point Press, 2022) and Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins, 2022). Her collection of essays, First Loves and Other Adventures (2010), reflects on her life as a writer and reader.Typically written in a lucid free verse that occasionally reaches vatic heights, Schulman’s poems often take on subjects of art, history, and faith. Schulman’s history is usually that of her beloved New York City, where she has lived and worked as a dedicated poetry advocate all her life. Earthly moments and details of city life constantly suggest larger spiritual questions. Poet Ron Slate has described Schulman as “not only a poet of praise, but one who addresses the grounding questions of this mode. How and why do we find beauty in adversity?”Schulman names Hopkins, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, and Marianne Moore as her influences. When Schulman was a teenager she was introduced to Moore, who had a profound effect on her poetics. Schulman wrote on the poet in a critical study, Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement (1986), and edited The Poems of Marianne Moore (2004). Schulman has received numerous awards for her work, including the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, and Pushcart prizes. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been published in the Nation, the New Yorker, and numerous other magazines and journals, and appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1998.She lives in New York City and East Hampton.-bio via Poetry Foundation 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 from John Ciardi goes out to all of the dads who can cook, all of the dads who can’t, all of the children who have endured the latter, and all of the moms who deserve to sleep late more often. 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, Poe offers us an ode to the Homeric beauty that is also definitely giving some Stacy’s-mom vibes. 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

On one of her darker days, Emily Dickinson dreams of a fate worse than 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

Happy birthday to the trailblazing Paul Laurence Dunbar.For more meditations on “lawyers’ ways,” come join our discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird over on the Close Reads Podcast! 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