The Daily Poem

The English writer and Anglican cleric John Donne is considered now to be the preeminent metaphysical poet of his time. He was born in 1572 to Roman Catholic parents, when practicing that religion was illegal in England. His work is distinguished by its emotional and sonic intensity and its capacity to plumb the paradoxes of faith, human and divine love, and the possibility of salvation. Donne often employs conceits, or extended metaphors, to yoke together “heterogenous ideas,” in the words of Samuel Johnson, thus generating the powerful ambiguity for which his work is famous. After a resurgence in his popularity in the early 20th century, Donne’s standing as a great English poet, and one of the greatest writers of English prose, is now assured.-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

Barbara Ras was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and has lived in Costa Rica, Colombia, California, and Texas. She is the author of The Last Skin (2010), winner of the best poetry award from the Texas Institute of Letters; One Hidden Stuff (2006); and Bite Every Sorrow (1998), which was selected by C.K. Williams for the Walt Whitman Award. Of Bite Every Sorrow, C.K. Williams wrote, “the book is a demonstration of what might be called a morality of inclusiveness, a Whitmanesque commitment to the wisdom of the individual case rather than the general type. And along with so much rich soul-work, there is a remarkable poetic skill. Ras structures poems with a zaniness and an unpredictable cunning, and her verbal expertise and lucidity are as bright and surprising as her knowledge of the world is profound.”Ras is the recipient of numerous awards including the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. She has taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Currently she directs the Trinity University Press in San Antonio, Texas. 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

Ayodeji Malcolm Guite (/ɡaɪt/; born 12 November 1957) is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and academic. Born in Nigeria to British expatriate parents, Guite earned degrees from Cambridge and Durham universities. His research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, and British poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a Bye-Fellow and chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, and associate chaplain of St Edward King and Martyr, Cambridge. On several occasions, he has taught as visiting faculty at several colleges and universities in England and North America.Guite is the author of Sounding the Seasons and four other books of poetry, including two chapbooks and three full-length collections, as well as several books on Christian faith and theology, and Mariner, a critical biography of Coleridge. Guite has a decisively simple, formalist style in poems, many of which are sonnets, and he stated that his aim is to "be profound without ceasing to be beautiful". Guite performs as a singer and guitarist fronting the Cambridgeshire-based blues, rhythm and blues, and rock band Mystery Train. 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

During his lifetime, Ogden Nash (born August 19, 1902; died May 19, 1971) was the most widely known, appreciated, and imitated American creator of light verse, a reputation that has continued after his death. Few writers of light or serious verse can claim the same extensive dissemination of their poems that Nash’s works enjoy, both with and without citation of the author. Certain Nash lines, such as “If called by a panther, / Don’t anther” and “Candy / Is dandy, / But liquor / Is quicker” have become bits of popular American folklore. As Nash remarked in a late verse, the turbulent modern world has much need for the relief his whimsy offers: “In chaos sublunary / What remains constant but buffoonery?” Nash’s peculiar variety of poetic buffoonery combines wit and imagination with eminently memorable rhymes.Any attempt to place Nash’s work in the context of other American humorous writing, or the humor of any other country, for that matter, tends initially to highlight his singularity. George Stevens notes this particularity. “Nash was not the only writer who could make frivolity immortal. But he was unique—not at all like Gilbert or Lear or Lewis Carroll, still less like his immediate predecessors in America: Dorothy Parker, Margaret Fishback, Franklin P. Adams. By the same token, he was and remains inimitable—easy to imitate badly, impossible to imitate well.”-bio via Poetry FoundationCharles-Camille Saint-Saëns (/sæ̃ˈsɒ̃(s)/ 9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and piano prodigy of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).-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

Remember, Remember – November 5 was Guy Fawkes Day, an occasion full of complicated remembrances. We mark the day with a traditional English lyric and a November meditation from Malcolm Guite. 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

We will turn the clocks back this weekend–in fact, many clocks will turn themselves back–and there is no better occasion to meditate with Robert B. Shaw on the ways we keep time and are kept by it. 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

Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., where he became vice president in 1934. He had also begun to establish an identity for himself outside the worlds of law and business. His first book of poems, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf), published in 1923, exhibited the influences of both the English Romantics and the French Symbolists, and demonstrated a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, and infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting. Today’s poem comes from that early collection.For the next several years, Stevens focused on his business career. He began to publish new poems in 1930, however. In the following year, Knopf released a second edition of Harmonium, which included fourteen new poems, but excluded three of the decidedly weaker ones.More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens spent his days behind a desk at his office, and led a quiet, relatively uneventful life.Though now considered one of the major American poets of the twentieth century, Stevens did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Knopf, 1954), just a year before his death. His other major works include The Necessary Angel (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), a collection of essays on poetry; Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (The Cummington Press, 1942); The Man With the Blue Guitar (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937); and Ideas of Order (The Alcestis Press, 1935).-bio via Poets.org 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

Billy Collins spent his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate launching the Poetry 180 initiative to increase American high school students’ exposure to poetry. In today’s poem he remembers what it was like to be young (and not so young). 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

Poet and critic Robert B. Shaw earned a BA from Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Lowell, and a PhD from Yale University. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin, Shaw’s wry and plainspoken formal verse is often grounded in, or sprung from, the debris of daily life. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Solving For X (2002), which won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; Below the Surface (1999); and The Wonder of Seeing Double (1988). His criticism appears widely in such places as the New York Times Book Review, and he has also published a critical study of poets John Donne and George Herbert, The Call of God: The Theme of Vocation in the Poetry of Donne and Herbert (1981). Shaw has received Shenandoah’s James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Since 1983, Shaw has taught at Mount Holyoke College as the Emily Dickinson Professor of English.-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

Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended the Cambridge Latin High School, where he studied Latin and Greek. Cummings earned both his BA and MA from Harvard, and his earliest poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. A typical Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using such words as “if,” “am,” and “because” as nouns, for example, or assigning his own private meanings to words. Despite their nontraditional form, Cummings’ poems came to be popular with many readers. “No one else,” Randall Jarrell claimed, “has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.” By the time of his death in 1962 Cummings held a prominent position in 20th-century poetry. John Logan in Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism called him “one of the greatest lyric poets in our language.” Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote in Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time: “Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless. Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time.” Malcolm Cowley admitted in the Yale Review that Cummings “suffers from comparison with those [poets] who built on a larger scale—Eliot, Aiken, Crane, Auden among others—but still he is unsurpassed in his special field, one of the masters.”-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