Stay ConnectedThe Daily Poem offers one essential poem each weekday morning. From Shakespeare and John Donne to Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, The Daily Poem curates a broad and generous audio anthology of the best poetry ever written, read-aloud by David Kern and an assortment of various contributors. Some lite commentary is included and the shorter poems are often read twice, as time permits.
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Find somebody to watch the kids while you giggle through today’s poem. Happy reading.
Respected editor, publisher, writer and poet, Paul Ruffin often relied upon his experiences growing up in the South as a foundation for his stories.
He was born in Millport, Alabama, and grew up outside Columbus, Mississippi. After serving in the U.S. Army, Ruffin earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at Mississippi State University.
He took post-graduate courses at the University of Southampton in England and graduated with his doctoral degree from the Center for Writers and the University of Southern Mississippi in 1974.
He accepted a position at Sam Houston State University where he founded The Texas Review—an international literary journal—and Texas Review Press, a member of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium.
Karla K. Morton, 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, said, “His work at The Texas Review Press elevated the whole of Texas Letters.”
Throughout the years, Ruffin worked tirelessly to promote the press and its authors, once giving his views on university presses moving toward digital books as opposed to traditional ink-on-paper.
“We’re fulfilling the ancient role of the university press and that is to produce books. I don’t want to give up the book because it is an art,” he said.
During his extensive writing career, he published more than 1,500 poems, 100-plus stories, and more than 90 essays in magazines and journals. His work also has appeared in numerous anthologies and textbooks. In addition, he wrote a weekly column that appeared in several newspapers in Texas and Mississippi. In 2009, he was named Texas State Poet Laureate.
In a 2009 article in SHSU’s Heritage Magazine, Ruffin was described as someone who “loves football, shooting, riding his tractor, maintaining his truck, and doing his own carpentry, electric, and plumbing work…not exactly the stereotypical image of a person who loves words and is a master of arranging them into beautifully crafted poems and other literary works.”
-bio via Sam Houston State University
Today’s poem ponders what love makes of language. Happy reading.
A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.
Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”
Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice(2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife(2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos.
-bio via Poetry Foundation
Today’s poem is inspired by one of our favorites here at the Daily Poem.
Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of ten poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.
His most recent book of poems, Lacunae, is available wherever books are sold.
-bio via Paraclete Press
Ted Kooser, who worked in insurance for thirty-five years before becoming U.S. Poet Laureate, turns 85 today. Many happy returns of the day to him, and happy reading to the rest of you!
Have you measured out your life in coffee spoons? Feeling like a pair of ragged claws today? Afraid to eat messy food while other people are watching? Or are you just channeling a little too much Polonius? If so, today’s poem–the classic modernist anthem of insecurity and isolation (and mermaids)–will feel very familiar. Happy reading!
(And for an even better reading of this poem, you should discover Jeremy Irons reading Eliot’s complete poems.)
Happy birthday to the Bard!
NB: Anyone itching to dig deeper into Shakespeare’s plays should look no further than one of our sister podcasts, The Play’s the Thing!
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021); Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), which won the National Book Award; Poems: 1962-2012 (2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Ararat (1990), which won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her other honors include The New Yorker’s Book Award in Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Glück was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999 and named the 12th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003. Glück has taught English and creative writing at Williams College, Yale University, Boston University, the University of Iowa, and Goddard College. She died in 2023.
-bio via Library of Congress
Francis Thompson was born in Northwest England in 1859. The son of Catholic converts, as a boy he was initially educated for the priesthood. When he was 18, at his parents' insistence, he entered Owens College in Manchester to follow in his father's footsteps and study medicine. But before long, he left for London hoping to pursue what he believed was his true vocation of being a writer. As a result of ill health and subsequent medical treatment, like many before him, Thompson became addicted to opium. He soon fell into a life of despair and destitution, sleeping on the banks of the Thames with London's homeless and selling matches just to stay alive.
Yet it was during this time, in the midst of all his hunger, deprivation and hopelessness, that he was most able to see the kingdom of Heaven. These devastating experiences honed his poetic focus and insights. In 1888, Thompson sent a tattered and torn manuscript to the Catholic periodical Merry England. Its editors, Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, devout Christians themselves, not only recognized Thompson's poetic ability, they took him under their care and gave him a home. They also arranged for the publication of his first book in 1893, simply titled Poems, which included The Hound of Heaven. The poem was immediately recognized as a masterpiece.
Thompson spent the years from 1893-1897 nursing his frail health in a monastery in Wales. He died of tuberculosis on November 13, 1907. He was 47. After his death, Alice Meynell wrote that no change in poetic tastes in the years to come could ever "lessen the height or diminish the greatness" of Thompson's profound accomplishment. In his eulogy for Thompson, G. K. Chesterton simply concluded: "He was a great poet." Among those who would be influenced by Thompson was the young J. R. R. Tolkien, who purchased a volume of Thompson's works in 1913, and later claimed that it had played an important role in his own writing.
-bio via HoundofHeaven.com
Today’s poem–benign anthem of the resilient human spirit or a hymn to radical autonomy?–has divided audiences for more than a century.
Born in Gloucester, England, poet, editor, and critic William Ernest Henley was educated at Crypt Grammar School, where he studied with the poet T.E. Brown, and the University of St. Andrews. His father was a struggling bookseller who died when Henley was a teenager. At age 12 Henley was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis that necessitated the amputation of one of his legs just below the knee; the other foot was saved only through a radical surgery performed by Joseph Lister. As he healed in the infirmary, Henley began to write poems, including “Invictus,” which concludes with the oft-referenced lines “I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” Henley’s poems often engage themes of inner strength and perseverance. His numerous collections of poetry include A Book of Verses (1888), London Voluntaries (1893), and Hawthorn and Lavender (1899).
Henley edited the Scots Observer (which later became the National Observer), through which he befriended writer Rudyard Kipling, and the Magazine of Art, in which he lauded the work of emerging artists James McNeill Whistler and Auguste Rodin. Henley was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who reportedly based his Long John Silver character in Treasure Island in part on Henley.
-bio via Poetry Foundation
What do John Donne, Paul Simon, and AC/DC have in common? Today’s poem. Happy reading!
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