The Daily Poem

In today’s poems-“The Inn at the End of the World” and “The House of Christmas”–Chesterton imagines Christmas as a cosmic waystation for weary pilgrims. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Don’t be fooled by the lack of Dickensian drama: melancholy, materialism, regret, a graveyard–today’s poem is A Christmas Carol for the modern man. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s selection is an ideal poem for Advent–a bittersweet shape poem that expresses the “hopes and fears of all the years.”Poet and critic John Hollander wrote of Merrill that he “was continually reengaging those Proustian themes of the retrieval of lost childhood, the operations of involuntary memory and of an imaginative memory even more mysterious.” Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Are home movies the grecian urns of the twentieth century? Today’s poem says, “sort of.”Poet, editor, essayist, playwright, and lyricist Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Michigan and Maryland, and earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. A former editor at the Atlantic Monthly, poetry editor at the New Republic, and co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter’s thorough understanding of poetic tradition is clearly evident in her work. Salter is the author of many books of poetry, including A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (2003), A Phone Call to the Future (2008), Nothing by Design (2013), and The Surveyors (2017). Her second book, Unfinished Painting (1989) was a Lamont Selection for the most distinguished second volume of poetry published that year, Sunday Skaters (1994) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Open Shutters was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Salter has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College. She is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem is, in may ways, the ode of odes. It has inspired volumes upon volumes of poetry and scholarship alike. And yet, it remains nothing more and nothing less than a humble and impassioned conversation with a work of beauty. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem for St. Lucy’s day is a remembrance of a light “too bright for our infirm delight” dawning in the deepest darkness of the year. The poem is collected in Waiting on the Word: a poem a day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. You can also hear a vastly superior reading of the poem by the author himself. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem–known to many as the musical setting, “In the Bleak Midwinter”–contemplates unprecedented act of loves in the darkest days of the year. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Ezra Pound had his own complicated relationship with fame, exercising a profound influence upon 20th-century literature but being tried for treason in the U.S. after broadcasting propaganda for the fascists during WWII. Today’s poem is a guarded reflection on the never-ending quest. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today is the birthday of Emily Dickinson, and to mark the occasion we have selected a poem that manages to sum up the entire paradox of the human condition in just two lines. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

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.Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives(Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).Strand’s honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem pays tribute to the great lover of children and the poor, whose day serves as a festive waystation on the journey to Christmas. Happy reading! Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem from Williams’ late collection, Pictures from Brueghel, is an ekphrasis on the painting by the same name, and a lesson in disciplined observation. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

“We only live, only suspire/ Consumed by either fire or fire.”…are not lines from today’s poem, but one gets the feeling Bradstreet understood their meaning as well as anyone could. Happy reading.Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of sixteen. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, immigrated to the American colonies with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her knowledge, and published in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.The Tenth Muse was the only collection of Bradstreet’s poetry to appear during her lifetime. In 1644, the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in 1672. In 1678, the first American edition of The Tenth Muse was published posthumously and expanded as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Bradstreet’s most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems titled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

New-fallen snow can be a kind of blank canvas for the poet. In yesterday’s poem, Stevenson wrote over it in whimsical metaphor and simile; in today’s, Longfellow finds the reflection of his own troubled heart. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem is a master-class in elementary poetic instruction. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Craig Arnold, born November 16, 1967 was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells (1999), was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell. He taught poetry at the University of Wyoming. His poems have appeared in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1998 and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, and in literary journals including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, The New Republic and The Yale Review. Arnold grew up in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Arnold’s Made Flesh won the 2009 High Plains Book Award and the 2008 Utah Book Award.In 2009, Arnold traveled to Japan to research volcanoes for a planned book of poetry. In April of that year, he disappeared while hiking on the island of Kuchinoerabujima. In the New York Times, the poet David Orr mourned the loss of Arnold, but noted it would “be a mistake to think of him as a writer silenced before his prime... His shelf space may be smaller than one would wish, but he earned every bit of it.”-bio via Copper Canyon Press and Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Anna Kamienska was a poet, translator, critic, essayist, and editor. She published numerous collections of her own work and translated poetry from several Slavic languages, as well as sacred texts from Hebrew and Greek.Astonishments, a selection of her poetry in translation is available from Paraclete Press. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem punctuates the precious value of time spent with family around food. Happy reading.Jacqueline Woodson received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor. She wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from college with a B.A. in English. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.-bio via Penguin Random House Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes a list is much more than a list. Happy reading.Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) was the pseudonym of Frédéric Sauser, the Swiss son of a French Anabaptist father and a Scottish mother. As a young man he traveled widely, from St. Petersburg to New York and beyond, and these wanderings proved the inspiration of much of his later poetry and prose. Settled in Paris in 1912, Cendrars published two long poems, “Easter in New York” and “The Transsiberian,” which made him a major figure in the poetic avant-garde. At the outset of World War I, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, losing an arm in the battle of the Marnes. A prolific poet, Cendrars was also an exceptional novelist, the author of Moravagine, Gold, Rhum, and The Confessions of Dan Yack, among many other books.-bio via New York Review of Books Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s poem opens a week of poetry about food. Happy eating reading.Bill Holm was born in 1943 on a farm outside Minneota, Minnesota. He received a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College in 1965 and an MA from the University of Kansas in 1967. Holm was the author of several poetry collections, including Playing the Black Piano and The Dead Get By with Everything. His collection The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems was published posthumously in 2009. He also wrote several essay collections, including The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland. A professor emeritus at Southwest Minnesota State until his retirement in 2008, Holm was known for his connection to Minnesota. In an article for the Minn Post, Nick Hayes describes him as “the quintessential voice of our small towns and prairies.” He goes on to note that Holm “was also our lost Icelander in Minnesota.” The grandchild of Icelandic immigrants, Holm spent most of his summers at his cottage in Hofsos, Iceland, and his writing was influenced both by the heritage and landscape of both of his homes. In 2008, Holm received the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. He died on February 26, 2009, in South Dakota.-bio via Milkweed Editions Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe