The Daily Poem

John Robert Lee was born, and lives in St Lucia. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Elemental, (2008), Collected Poems 1975-2015, (2017), and Pierrot, (2020). His poems are included in a number of international anthologies and periodicals including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Poetry Wales, Small Axe, and The Missing Slate. He has also published short stories in anthologies such as The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories, and Facing the Sea. He edited a St. Lucian anthology of poetry and art spanning fifty years, Roseau Valley and other poems, and with his younger colleague Kendel Hippolyte, he compiled and edited an anthology of reviews covering the history of St. Lucian literature and theatre, (Saint Lucian Literature and Theatre: an anthology of reviews. His reviews and columns appear widely, and he produced and presented radio and television programmes in Saint Lucia for many years. 

-bio via Peepal Tree Press

Today’s poem takes the peripheral and makes it the primary. Happy reading!

Today’s poem from Ezra Pound (a poet with his own colorful history of exile) is after the style of Li Po, featured last week.

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy, and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917.

In 1924, Pound moved to Italy. During this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during World War II. In 1946, he was acquitted, but was declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time), decided to overlook Pound’s political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (New Directions, 1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, on November 1, 1972.

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a Modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot.

Pound’s own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.

-bio via American Academy of Poets

Today’s poem answers the question you never thought to ask: ‘What do Macbeth and a buzz saw have in common?’

Some poets wind up writing prayers by accident; others do it on purpose. Today’s poems from Robert Herrick–“Grace For a Child” and “His Prayer for Absolution”–are of the latter variety.

Today’s poems–”The Hill Place” and “Day’s Diamond”–come from Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Coffin (1892-1955) grew up in Brunswick, Maine on a “saltwater farm.” He attended Bowdoin, Princeton, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar before, as well as after, serving two years in World War I. He taught at Wells College in Aurora, New York from 1921-1934 and eventually returned to Bowdoin College, where he was Pierce Professor in English from 1934 until his death in 1955.

Throughout his life, Robert Coffin successfully combined the roles of artist and teacher, poet and prose writer. He authored more than forty books, and was awarded many honors, including the 1936 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book, Strange Holiness. In 1945, Coffin was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters for “work of permanent value in American literature,” and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences granted him membership in 1949.

-bio via University of New Hampshire

As promised, Coffin’s essay, Night of Lobster

Today’s poem marks the ides (or idus) or March, a day classically associated with the settling of debts (and maybe old scores, too).

One of the foremost editors, literary critics, and anthologists of contemporary American literature, David Lehman is also one of its most accomplished poets. Born in New York City in 1948, Lehman earned a PhD from Columbia University and attended the University of Cambridge as a Kellett Fellow. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (2013), Yeshiva Boys (2009), and When a Woman Loves a Man (2005).  Two of his collections, The Evening Sun (2002) and The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (1998), were culled from Lehman’s five-year-long project of writing a poem a day. Yusef Komunyakaa called The Daily Mirror “a sped-up meditation on the elemental stuff that we're made of: in this honed matrix of seeing, what's commonplace becomes the focus of extraordinary glimpses....” Lehman has also written collaborative books of poetry, including Poetry Forum (2007), with Judith Hall; and Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (2005), a collection of sestinas he wrote with the poet James Cummins.Lehman inaugurated The Best American Poetry series in 1988. As series editor, he has earned high acclaim for his pivotal role in garnering contemporary American poetry a larger audience. In an early interview about the series with Judith Moore, Lehman noted “I want the books to have a lot to commend them beyond the poems themselves. The 75 poems are of course the center of the book, but we want also to have a foreword by me that can provide a context, that gives an idea of what happened in poetry this year, and an essay in which the guest editor propounds his or her criteria.” Lehman’s work as an editor also includes such volumes as The Best American Erotic Poems (2008), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), A.R. Ammons: Selected Poems (2006), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (1996). He was the director of the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry and the Under Discussion series from 1994 to 2006.A prominent literary and cultural critic, Lehman has published works ranging from an indictment of deconstruction, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991); to a history of the New York School of Poets, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998); to a meditation on the influence of Jewish songwriters in American music, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (2009). Lehman’s numerous honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. On faculty at both the New School and New York University, he lives in New York City.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is the work of an eighth-century poet whose reputation didn’t peak until the twentieth century. Li Po’s “The Solitude of Night” (translated here by Shigeyoshi Obata) resembles Japanese haiku in its atmospheric brevity and is heavy with the kind of common-to-man melancholy the modernists would feel so deeply more than a millennium later.

A Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, Li Po (also known as Li Bai, Li Pai, Li T’ai-po, and Li T’ai-pai) was probably born in central Asia and grew up in Sichuan Province. He left home in 725 to wander through the Yangtze River Valley and write poetry. In 742 he was appointed to the Hanlin Academy by Emperor Xuanzong, though he was eventually expelled from court. He then served the Prince of Yun, who led a revolt after the An Lushan Rebellion of 755. Li Bai was arrested for treason; after he was pardoned, he again wandered the Yangtze Valley. He was married four times and was friends with the poet Du Fu.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

"A master of forms, Merrill’s later poetry rarely feels formal. In the Atlantic Monthly, poet X.J. Kennedy observed that “Merrill never sprawls, never flails about, never strikes postures. Intuitively he knows that, as Yeats once pointed out, in poetry, ‘all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.’”

-via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is a master-class in snappy putdowns and the value of a fiercely-loyal and equally witty friend.

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870 – 1953) was a Franco-English writer and historian of the early 20th century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. His Catholic faith had a strong effect on his works.

Belloc became a naturalised British subject in 1902 while retaining his French citizenship. While attending Oxford University, he served as President of the Oxford Union. From 1906 to 1910, he served as one of the few openly Catholic members of the British Parliament.

Belloc was a noted disputant, with a number of long-running feuds. He was also a close friend and collaborator of G. K. Chesterton. George Bernard Shaw, a friend and frequent debate opponent of both Belloc and Chesterton, dubbed the pair the "Chesterbelloc".

Belloc's writings encompassed religious poetry and comic verse for children. His widely sold Cautionary Tales for Children included "Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion" and "Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death". He wrote historical biographies and numerous travel works, including The Path to Rome (1902).