The Daily Poem

About the creative process itself, John Ciardi argued in the Writer that “it isn’t easy to make a poem,” adding, “It is better than easy: it is joyously, consumingly difficult. As it is difficult, too, though without joy, to face one’s failures.” Noting that the creation of successful verse requires definite skill, he wrote: “I insist that a poet needs at least as much training as does a concert pianist. More, I think, but that is already too much for the ignorantly excited.” Believing that “the minimum requirement for a good poem is a miracle,” he explained: “The poem must somehow turn out better than anyone—the poet included—had any right to expect. No matter how small the miracle, the hope of it is my one reason for writing.” He also felt the poem’s strength will lead the writer unerringly: “The poet cannot know where he is going: he must take his direction from the poem itself.”

-via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poems are all about the ineffable experience of spring. Happy reading!

The 17th-century Japanese haiku master Bashō was born Matsuo Kinsaku near Kyoto, Japan, to a minor samurai and his wife. Soon after the poet’s birth, Japan closed its borders, beginning a seclusion that allowed its native culture to flourish. It is believed that Bashō’s siblings became farmers, while Bashō, at Ueno Castle in the service of the local lord’s son, grew interested in literature. After the young lord’s early death, Bashō left the castle and moved to Kyoto, where he studied with Kigin, a distinguished local poet. During these early years Bashō studied Chinese poetry and Taoism, and soon began writing haikai no renga, a form of linked verses composed in collaboration. The opening verse of a renga, known as hokku, is structured as three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. In Bashō’s time, poets were beginning to take the hokku’s form as a template for composing small standalone poems engaging natural imagery, a form that eventually became known as haiku. Bashō was a master of the form. He published his haiku under several names, including Tosei, or “Green Peach,” out of respect for the Chinese poet Li Po, whose name translates to “White Plum.” Bashō’s haiku were published in numerous anthologies, and he edited Kai Oi, or Seashell Game (1672), and Minashiguri, or Shriveled Chestnuts (1683), anthologies that also included a selection of his own work. In his late 20s Bashō moved to Edo (now a sector of Tokyo), where he joined a rapidly growing literary community. After a gift of bashō trees from one student in 1680, the poet began to write under the name Bashō. His work, rooted in observation of the natural world as well as in historical and literary concerns, engages themes of stillness and movement in a voice that is by turns self-questioning, wry, and oracular. Soon after Bashō began to study Zen Buddhism, a fire that destroyed much of his city also took his house. Around 1682, Bashō began the months-long journeys on foot that would become the material for a new poetic form he created, called haibun. Haibun is a hybrid form alternating fragments of prose and haiku to trace a journey. Haibun imagery follows two paths: the external images observed en route, and the internal images that move through the traveler’s mind during the journey. Bashō composed several extended haibun sequences starting in 1684, including Nozarashi Kiko, or Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones (1685); Oi no Kobumi, or The Knapsack Notebook (1688); and Sarashina Kiko, or Sarashina Travelogue (1688). His most well-known haibun, Oku no Hosomichi, or Narrow Road to the Interior, recounts the last long walk Bashō completed with his disciple Sora—1,200 miles covered over five months beginning in May 1689. While their days were spent walking, in the evenings they often socialized and wrote with students and friends who lived along their route. The route was also planned to include views that had previously been described by other poets; Bashō alludes to these earlier poems in his own descriptions, weaving fragments of literary and historical conversation into his solitary journey. Bashō revised his final haibun until shortly before his death in 1694. It was first published in 1702, and hundreds of editions have since been published in several languages.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem–an unambiguous paean to spring–suggests Thomas Nashe and T. S. Eliot had very different feelings about the month of April. Happy reading!

Thomas Nashe (1567 - c. 1601) –English pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and novelist– was the first of the English prose eccentrics. Nashe wrote in a vigorous combination of colloquial diction and idiosyncratic coined compounds that was ideal for controversy. Among his works are the satire Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592); the masque Summers Last Will and Testament (1592, published 1600); The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), the first picaresque novel in English; and Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599). The play Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594) was a collaboration with Christopher Marlowe.

-bio via Britannica

Today’s poem is a more complicated take on spring. Happy reading.

E.E. Cummings, in full Edward Estlin Cummings, (born October 14, 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 3, 1962, North Conway, New Hampshire), American poet and painter who first attracted attention, in an age of literary experimentation, for his unconventional punctuation and phrasing. Cummings’s name is often styled “e.e. cummings” in the mistaken belief that the poet legally changed his name to lowercase letters only. Cummings used capital letters only irregularly in his verse and did not object when publishers began lowercasing his name, but he himself capitalized his name in his signature and in the title pages of original editions of his books.

- bio via Britannica.com

What started as an early spring is now not long for this world. In an attempt to stave off an early summer, we have a week of poems dedicated to the fairest of the seasons. Happy reading.

Phillis Levin (born 1954) is the author of four poetry collections, including May Day (Penguin, 2008). She also served as editor for The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001) and teaches at Hofstra University.

-bio via Library of Congress

Today’s poem is a Robert Frost classic of which everyone always remembers the wrong part. Happy reading!

Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a radical but became steadily more conservative as he gained respect for Britain and its institutions. Other romantics such as Byron accused him of siding with the establishment for money and status. He is remembered especially for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".

-bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem goes out to all the ‘pilgrim souls.’ Happy reading!

In today’s poem, John Keats isn’t worried about authenticity–and that’s just fine.