The Daily Poem

What do the world’s greatest playwright and Rome’s greatest mama’s boy have in common? Today’s poem–Volumnia pleading with her son in the final Act of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. 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, the lovable cad, Sir John Falstaff, explains the dismal state of his troops (and the extra silver in his pocket). The speech is from Henry IV, Part 1, Act 4, Scene 2. 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 the “anti-To Be or Not To Be” speech from Act 3, Scene 1 of the underrated Measure For Measure. 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 an example of poetry we forget is poetry. Written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), the opening prologue to Henry V calls the audience’s attention to the tension between the play’s grand and sweeping subject and the theater’s physical limitations. 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 comes from Honey and Salt, the last collection Sandburg published before his death.“Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg,” said a friend of the poet, “is like trying to picture the Grand Canyon in one black and white snapshot.” His range of interests was enumerated by his close friend, Harry Golden, who, in his study of the poet, called Sandburg “the one American writer who distinguished himself in five fields—poetry, history, biography, fiction, and music.” -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

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short fiction writer, critic, and accomplished editor known for his gloomy and sometimes grisly subjects. He pioneered the detective story and is remembered as a master of Gothic and Romantic literature. His works have inspired films, themed restaurants, football teams, and at least one bizarre ritual around his grave. 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 one of the most-anthologized works of light verse in the English language–and just plain fun.Frank Gelett Burgess was an American artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, The Lark, and association with The Crowd literary group. He is best known as a writer of nonsense verse and for introducing French modern art to the United States in an essay titled "The Wild Men of Paris." Burgess coined the term "blurb."-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

A singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter, award-winning children’s writer, and actor, Shel Silverstein grew up in Chicago. He started out as a cartoonist before turning to children’s books. Silverstein is the author and illustrator of numerous books, including The Giving Tree (1964), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), A Light in the Attic (1981), and Falling Up (1996). His books have been commended for their appeal to both adults and children.Silverstein’s poems are often darkly humorous, irreverent, and populated with invented characters, such as the “Bloath” in Where the Sidewalk Ends, who dwells “[i]n the undergrowth” and “feeds upon poets and tea.” Silverstein’s poems and stories are accompanied by his simple yet energetic pen-and-ink illustrations. The Giving Tree, a fable about a lifelong relationship between a boy and a tree, has become a classic in the canon of children’s literature and has sold over five million copies.-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

Kenyon published four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and Constance (1993), and, as translator, Twenty Poems of Anna Akmatova (1985). Despite her relatively small output, her poetry was highly lauded by critics throughout her lifetime. As fellow poet Carol Muske remarked in the New York Times when describing Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours, “These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats’s terms, is a capable poet.” Indeed, Kenyon’s work has often been compared with that of English Romantic poet John Keats; in an essay on Kenyon for Contemporary Women Poets, Gary Roberts dubbed her a “Keatsian poet” and noted that, “like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things.”The cycles of nature held special significance for Kenyon, who returned to them again and again, both in her variations on Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” and in other pastoral verse. In Let Evening Come [from which today’s poem comes], her third published collection—and one that found the poet taking what Poetry essayist Paul Breslin called “a darker turn”—Kenyon explored nature’s cycles in other ways: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death. Let Evening Come “shows [Kenyon] at the height of her powers,” according to Muske in a review of the 1990 volume for the New York Times Book Review, with the poet’s “descriptive skills… as notable as her dramatic ones. Her rendering of natural settings, in lines of well-judged rhythm and simple syntax, contribute to the [volume’s] memorableness.”-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 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti is another fitting meditation at the beginning of a new year. Happy reading (and listening)! 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