The Daily Poem

Today’s poem is a grand smorgasbord of poetical allusions from the unofficial patron of The Daily Poem. Happy reading!

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University.

Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other books of poetry include Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020); The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019); Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018); Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011); You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), and the forthcoming Grace Notes: Poems About Families. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children's Book Award in 1998.

Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s poem (from an oft-maligned poet) makes frequent appearances in poetry anthologies for children, but hides a satisfying subtlety.

Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 – 11 December 1757) was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling style. He wrote 25 plays for his own company at Drury Lane, half of which were adapted from various sources, which led Robert Lowe and Alexander Pope, among others, to criticise his "miserable mutilation" of "crucified Molière [and] hapless Shakespeare".

He regarded himself as first and foremost an actor and had great popular success in comical fop parts, while as a tragic actor he was persistent but much ridiculed. Cibber's brash, extroverted personality did not sit well with his contemporaries, and he was frequently accused of tasteless theatrical productions, shady business methods, and a social and political opportunism that was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far better poets. He rose to ignominious fame when he became the chief target, the head Dunce, of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.

Cibber's poetical work was derided in his time and has been remembered only for being poor. His importance in British theatre history rests on his being one of the first in a long line of actor-managers, on the interest of two of his comedies as documents of evolving early 18th-century taste and ideology, and on the value of his autobiography as a historical source.

Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was an influential playwright and poet. His poetry is collected in Poems 1913-1956 (1997) and Poetry and Prose: Bertolt Brecht (2003). He wrote a wide variety of poetry, including occasional poems, poems he set to music and performed, songs and poems for his plays, personal poems recording anecdotes and thoughts, and political poems. Poet Michael Hofmann commented, “In the course of a mobile, active and engaged life, the poems were the intelligent, compressed, adaptable and self-contained form for both his private and his public address.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is a walking song composed by Bilbo Baggins, reworked and repurposed at several key moments in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Happy reading!

Today’s poem is a piece of uncollected verse from one of the world’s most beloved children’s writers: Dr. Seuss.

Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American children's author and cartoonist. He is known for his work writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Dr. Seuss. His work includes many of the most popular children's books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death.

-bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem comes from one of America’s most beloved and decorated poets, Richard Wilbur. Don’t be put off by the title; no matter the subject, Wilbur’s poetry is always so marvelously companionable–desert island reading if ever there was.

For the day that only comes ‘round once every four years, we have a haunting poem about missed connections–and from a poet with a “Leap Day” birthday, no less.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29, 1920, in New York, New York. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U. S. Army Air Force. He married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book.

Nemerov was first hired to teach literature to World War II veterans at Hamilton College in New York. His teaching career flourished, and he went on to teach at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death.

In addition to a dozen collections of poetry, he was also an accomplished prose writer with several collections of non-fiction essays to his name.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard (1823-1902) was a poet, fiction writer, and essayist born and raised in Mattapoisset, Massachusetts. The daughter of a shipbuilder, Stoddard was educated at Wheaton Female Seminary.

She married poet Richard Stoddard in 1851 and together they had three children, two of whom died as infants. The Stoddards’ New York City home was a gathering place for local poets, and Elizabeth began to submit her own poetry, fiction, and social commentary to journals. From 1854 to 1858, Stoddard contributed a bimonthly column to the San Francisco newspaper Daily Alta California.Stoddard wrote three novels, including The Morgesons (1862), and many short stories, essays, children’s tales, and poems. Uncommon for her time, her work questions the conventions of gender roles and is rooted in an unsentimental, irreverent realism. Her poetry, gathered in Poems (1895), often examines a fragile domestic realm.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Happy Birthday to America’s great man of letters, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow!

Get to know Longfellow better through his own verse, or in the pages of Nicholas Basbanes’ excellent biography, Cross of Snow.