The Daily Poem

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 animals, making coloured drawings during his journeys (which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books) and as a minor illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.-bio via Wikipedia 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

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 Independence in 1924, he returned to Turkey but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. He managed to escape to Russia, where he continued to write plays and poems.In 1928, a general amnesty allowed Hikmet to return to Turkey, and during the next ten years he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. He left Turkey for the last time in 1951, after serving a lengthy jail sentence for his radical acts, and lived in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where he continued to work for the ideals of world Communism. After receiving early recognition for his patriotic poems in syllabic meter, Hikmet came under the influence of the Russian Futurists in Moscow, and abandoned traditional forms while attempting to “depoetize” poetry.Many of Hikmet’s works have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (Persea Books, 2009); Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (Persea Books, 1975); The Day Before Tomorrow (Carcanet Press, 1972); The Moscow Symphony (Rapp & Whiting, 1970); and Selected Poems (Cape Editions, 1967). In 1936, he published Seyh Bedreddin destani [The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin] and Memleketimden insan manzaralari [Portraits of People from My Land].Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963. The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century.-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

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 include a Rhodes Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Medal of Arts. He taught at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis and co-authored several literature textbooks.-bio via Library of Congress 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

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 Tales. Lansky has performed in more than 300 schools from coast to coast. He enjoys returning to his peaceful home near one of Minnesota’s most beautiful lakes, just outside Minneapolis.-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 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

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 more sensible than sense. Herford's, the result of care and polish, looked unforced.…Intelligent, thoughtful, well-bred, what with his animals and his children and his artistic simplicities, he was remote from the style of the best moderns. No violence, no obscenity, not even obscurity or that long-windedness which is the signet of the illustrious writer of today. An old-fashioned gentleman, a painstaking artist, whose work had edge, grace and distinction." 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