The Daily Poem

Nâzim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902, in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece), where his father served in the Foreign Service. He was exposed to poetry at an early age through his artist mother and poet grandfather, and had his first poems published when he was seventeen.

Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish Independence in 1924, he returned to Turkey but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. He managed to escape to Russia, where he continued to write plays and poems.

In 1928, a general amnesty allowed Hikmet to return to Turkey, and during the next ten years he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. He left Turkey for the last time in 1951, after serving a lengthy jail sentence for his radical acts, and lived in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where he continued to work for the ideals of world Communism. After receiving early recognition for his patriotic poems in syllabic meter, Hikmet came under the influence of the Russian Futurists in Moscow, and abandoned traditional forms while attempting to “depoetize” poetry.

Many of Hikmet’s works have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (Persea Books, 2009); Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (Persea Books, 1975); The Day Before Tomorrow (Carcanet Press, 1972); The Moscow Symphony (Rapp & Whiting, 1970); and Selected Poems (Cape Editions, 1967). In 1936, he published Seyh Bedreddin destani [The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin] and Memleketimden insan manzaralari [Portraits of People from My Land].

Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963. The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Maybe you remember the experiences recounted in today’s poem—maybe you don’t. Happy reading!

T. S. Eliot is remembered as a great poet, but he is surpassingly underrated as a namer of cats. Happy reading.

Warren (1905-1989) was born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of California, Berkeley. Though perhaps best known for his 1946 novel All the King’s Men, he was the author of over a dozen books of poetry in addition to his prose work. He is the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction (in 1947) and poetry (in 1958 and 1979). Warren’s other honors include a Rhodes Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Medal of Arts. He taught at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis and co-authored several literature textbooks.

-bio via Library of Congress

Bruce Lansky is an internationally known poet and anthologist. He has a passion for getting children excited about reading and writing poetry. Lansky’s poetry books—including A Bad Case of the Giggles (2013), Peter, Peter, Pizza-Eater (2006), Mary Had a Little Jam (2004), If Kids Ruled the School (2004), and Rolling in the Aisles (2004)—are among America’s best-selling children’s poetry books. He is also the editor of the middle-grade fiction series Girls to the Rescue and Newfangled Fairy Tales. Lansky has performed in more than 300 schools from coast to coast. He enjoys returning to his peaceful home near one of Minnesota’s most beautiful lakes, just outside Minneapolis.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poems from Ogden Nash, “The Ant” and “The Ostrich,” are the perfect marriage of wit and attention. Happy reading.

Oliver Herford (2 December 1860 – 5 July 1935), regarded as “the American Oscar Wilde,” was an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator known for his pithy bon mots and skewed sense of humor. His obituary in The New York Times nicely sums up his unique brilliance:

"His wit…was too original at first to go down with the very delectable highly respectable magazine editors of the Nineties. It was odd, unexpected, his own brand. It takes genius to write the best nonsense, which is often far more sensible than sense. Herford's, the result of care and polish, looked unforced.…Intelligent, thoughtful, well-bred, what with his animals and his children and his artistic simplicities, he was remote from the style of the best moderns. No violence, no obscenity, not even obscurity or that long-windedness which is the signet of the illustrious writer of today. An old-fashioned gentleman, a painstaking artist, whose work had edge, grace and distinction."

Today’s poem begins with humble beasts but wings its way to the loftiest mysteries of existence. Happy reading.

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon (1947) and The Runaway Bunny (1942), both illustrated by Clement Hurd. She has been called "the laureate of the nursery" for her achievements.

Brown was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, the middle child of three children of Maude Margaret and Robert Bruce Brown. She was the granddaughter of politician Benjamin Gratz Brown. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. She was initially raised in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, and later attended Chateau Brilliantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923, while her parents were living in India and Canterbury, Connecticut.

In 1925, Brown attended The Kew-Forest School. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

Brown was an avid, lifelong beagler and was noted for her ability to keep pace, on foot, with the hounds.

Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher and also studied art. While working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City she started writing books for children. Bank Street promoted a new approach to children's education and literature, emphasizing the real world and the "here and now". This philosophy influenced Brown's work; she was also inspired by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose literary style influenced Brown's own writing.

Brown's first published children's book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers. Impressed by Brown's "here and now" style, W. R. Scott hired her as his first editor in 1938. Through Scott, she published the Noisy Book series among others. As editor at Scott, one of Brown's first projects was to recruit contemporary authors to write children's books for the company. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck neglected to respond, but Brown's hero, Gertrude Stein, accepted the offer. Stein's book The World is Round was illustrated by Clement Hurd, who had previously teamed with Brown on W. R. Scott's Bumble Bugs and Elephants, considered "perhaps the first modern board book for babies". Brown and Hurd later teamed on the children's book classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, published by Harper. In addition to publishing a number of Brown's books, under her editorship, W. R. Scott published Edith Thacher Hurd's first book, Hurry Hurry, and Esphyr Slobodkina's classic Caps for Sale.

-bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem, written in 1871, actually gave the name to the since-codified psychological phenomenon known as the “centipede effect” or “centipede syndrome.” Psychologist George Humphrey (for whom the condition is alternatively named “Humphrey’s Law”) said of the poem, "This is a most psychological rhyme. It contains a profound truth which is illustrated daily in the lives of all of us."