The Daily Poem

Today’s poem–perfect for a Friday–gives us a less familiar (PG-13) Emily Dickinson, dreaming of letting her hair down. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is a classic staple with Literature teachers for its expressive metaphors; it is a classic staple with me because it’s such a cracking-good poem. Happy reading.

Today’s poem captures one of the universal challenges of education: recognizing the distinctions and distances between all human souls, and then bridging them without erasing them. Happy reading.

As the school year begins, today’s poem goes out to all of those everyday saints performing the unseen and unsung acts of love that make life possible for rest of us!

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913, Robert Hayden was raised in the Detroit neighborhood Paradise Valley. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and lived, at times, with his parents and with a foster family. In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a scholarship, attended Detroit City College (later, Wayne State University). In 1944, Hayden received his graduate degree from the University of Michigan.

Hayden published his first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust (Falcon Press), in 1940, at the age of twenty-seven. He enrolled in a graduate English literature program at the University of Michigan, where he studied with W. H. Auden. Auden became an influential and critical guide in the development of Hayden’s writing. Hayden admired the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, Carl Sandburg, and Hart Crane, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. He had an interest in African American history and explored his concerns about race in his writing. Hayden ultimately authored nine collections of poetry during his lifetime, as well as a collection of essays, and some children’s literature. Hayden’s poetry gained international recognition in the 1960s, and he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for his book Ballad of Remembrance (Paul Breman, 1962).

Explaining the trajectory of Hayden’s career, the poet William Meredith wrote:

Hayden declared himself, at considerable cost in popularity, an American poet rather than a Black poet, when for a time there was posited an unreconcilable difference between the two roles. There is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of Black America, but he would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity.

After receiving his graduate degree from the University of Michigan, Hayden remained there for two years as a teaching fellow. He was the first Black member of the English department. He then joined the faculty at Fisk University in Nashville, where he would remain for more than twenty years. In 1975, Hayden received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and, in 1976, he became the first Black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later, U.S. poet laureate).

Hayden died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 25, 1980.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, sometimes a portrait of your last wife who died under suspicious circumstances is as good as a confession. Happy(?) reading!

Hopefully five days of limericks has made this week a little lighter and a little brighter. See you next week for more of our regularly programming. Till then, happy reading!

Today’s limericks are all about unexpected consequences. Happy reading.

Children’s poet and educator Constance Levy earned degrees at Washington University and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Known for its careful attention to external and internal rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and assonance, Levy’s work frequently takes encounters with the natural world as its subject. By drawing on her own childhood encounters, Levy re-experiences the world through verse in the fresh and exuberant ways that children perceive natural objects and phenomena, often for the first time. Reviewers have consistently praised Levy’s poems for their accessible yet creative language. Her books include The Story of Red Rubber Ball (2004), Splash!: Poems of Our Watery World (2002), A Crack in the Clouds and Other Poems (1998), A Tree Place and Other Poems (1994), and I’m Going to Pet a Worm Today and Other Poems (1991). School Library Journal’s Kathleen Whalin summed up the appeal of Levy’s verse best in her review of When Whales Exhale and Other Poems: “To read Levy is to see the wonder of the everyday world.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Things are getting hairy. Happy reading.

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!".

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