Today's Featured Poet:
Eliza Gilbert is an undergraduate at Vassar College. She is the recipient of the 2023 Iowa Review Award in Poetry, as well as LitMag’s 2023 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. She was born and raised in New York City.
I was young here. Riding
the subway with my small book
as though to defend myself against
the same world:
you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.
—Louise Glück
Today's Featured Poet:
June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and was the author of 10 books of poetry, 7 collections of essays, 2 plays, a libretto, a novel, a memoir, 5 children’s books, and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.
Publishing: "Last month, at age 101, Sarah Yerkes released her first collection of poems, “Days of Blue and Flame,” published by Passager Books at the University of Baltimore." (The Washington Post)
#pdnews
Today's Featured Poet:
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, AL with her partner and several intense mammals. Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in BOMB, Poetry,
@pleiadesmag
, and others. She is currently working on a novel-like creature.
Today's Featured Poet:
Terrance Hayes is the author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award. He lives in New York City, where he is a professor at NYU.
Today's Featured Poet:
Wanda Coleman—poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist—was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Coleman was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Mercurochrome.
Today's Featured Poet:
Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010) was an award winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection, Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988-2000 (
@boaeditions
, 2000), won the National Book Award for Poetry.
Today's Featured Poet:
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.
I was young here. Riding
the subway with my small book
as though to defend myself against
the same world:
you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.
—Louise Glück
Today's Featured Poet:
Sally Wen Mao is the author of two collections of poetry, OCULUS (
@GraywolfPress
, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM (
@AliceJamesBooks
, 2014). She is a
@kundimanforever
fellow in both fiction and poetry.
someone told me he died
casually. like the world
swallowed his noise & gave
us the broth to recall him by.
—Aurielle Marie (
@YesAurielle
)
#fromthearchives
Today's Featured Poet:
Emily Dickinson was American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.
Today's Featured Poet:
Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is now a third year PhD student and Yates scholar at the
@uofcincy
, and an Assistant Features Editor for
@The_Rumpus
.
🎉We are very excited to announce that Dana Levin is joining Poetry Daily's editorial board! 🎉
Each member of our diverse board selects poems for our daily poem feature, and works with us to identify new outstanding, interesting publications for our thousands of daily readers.
Today's Featured Poet:
Nabaneeta Dev Sen (1938–2019) remains one of the most beloved, versatile & prolific Bengali writers of all time. Equally expressive in poetry & prose, fiction & nonfiction, she has over one hundred books to her credit.
Announcement: "Joy Harjo, 68, will represent both her Indigenous culture and those of the United States of America when she succeeds Tracy K. Smith as the country's 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry this fall." (NPR)
#pdnews
Today's Featured Poet:
Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (
@AliceJamesBooks
, 2024), selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. She is the poetry editor for
@WestBranchMag
and lives in the Bay Area, California.
Today's Featured Poet:
Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for her 3rd collection and served as Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the National Medal of Arts from President Obama—the only poet ever to receive both.
Today's Featured Poet:
Federico García Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet, was murdered by Fascist partisans in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain.
Today's Featured Poet:
Li-Young Lee is the author of five critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently The Undressing (
@wwnorton
, 2018). Lee’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed...
—Robert Hass
Read today's poem here:
All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state—
The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.
—Tracy K. Smith
Today's Featured Poet:
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) broke with tradition and was criticized for her seminal experiments with unorthodox phrasing, rhyme and broken meter, within concise verse forms, thus becoming an innovator and forerunner of modern poets.
Today's Featured Poet:
Jericho Brown's collection, THE TRADITION, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at
@EmoryUniversity
in Atlanta.
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.
—John Ashbery
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community.
We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality.
We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world.
Black Lives Matter.
Today's Featured Poet:
John Keats was born in London on October 31st, 1795. Before his death at twenty-five, he wrote some of the greatest lyric poems in English.
Today's Featured Poet:
Christina Rossetti was one of the greatest female writers of the 19th century. She was born in London into a remarkably creative family; her father was an exiled Italian revolutionary and her brothers were founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
In light of the current crisis, we are starting an impromptu series, What Keeps Us. For the next ten days we will post poems to sustain and uplift through trying times, starting with C.D. Wright's, "What Keeps."
#WhatKeepsUs
Today's Featured Poet:
Imani Davis is a queer Black writer from Brooklyn. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, they’ve earned fellowships from
@MellonFdn
,
@LambdaLiterary
,
@BOAAT_PRESS
, and
@StadlerCenter
. They’re currently pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies at Harvard.
I used to be fond of time as it was a matter that helped us feel intelligent. Those days have gone to where days go, in their own cemeteries. Today I see eternity everywhere.
—Etel Adnan (1925 - 2021)
In our newest series What Sparks Poetry series, "What Translation Sparks," we’ve asked a group of poet-translators to share a seminal experience in translation. How does the work of translating poetry feel essential to the writing of one’s own poetry?
What Sparks Poetry?
We want to know what experiences and ideas spark new poems. What Sparks Poetry is a new, serialized feature that seeks to draw the curtain back on the mysterious process of poem-making.
Today's Featured Poet:
Poet, filmmaker, screenwriter, and painter, Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967) was in Mazandaran, north of Tehran. Drawn to reading and writing poetry as a child, she dropped out of high school to study painting and dressmaking at a technical school.
Today's Featured Poet:
Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010) was an award winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection, BLESSING THE BOATS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1988-2000 (
@boaeditions
), won the National Book Award for Poetry.
We love in silence
We keep our poetry
locked in a glass cabinet
Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep
—C.D. Wright
#WhatKeepsUs
Today's Featured Poem:
An excerpt from "Nomenclature for the Time Being" by Dionne Brand, from Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, published by
@DukePress
.
Read here:
Today's Featured Poet:
Maya Angelou was raised in Stamps, Arkansas. In addition to her bestselling autobiographies, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Heart of a Woman, she wrote numerous volumes of poetry, among them And Still I Rise. She died in 2014.
Today's Featured Poet:
Katie Farris is currently Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (
@AliceJamesBooks
, 2023) is her first book of poems.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
—Maya Angelou
Read "When Great Trees Fall" here:
Today's Featured Poet:
Diane Seuss was born in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1956 and raised in Edwardsburg and Niles, Michigan. Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including Four-Legged Girl (
@GraywolfPress
, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Today's Featured Poet:
Choi Seungja is one of the most influential feminist writers in South Korea. She made her literary debut in 1979 and shortly after became an icon of youth and freedom in Korean literature, being dubbed “the common pronoun of the 80s’ poets.”
Today's Featured Poet:
Brittany Rogers is a poet, mother, educator, and native Detroiter. She has work published in Vinyl Poetry and Prose,
@theoffingmag
, & elsewhere. She is Co-Editor in Chief for
@MuzzleMagazine
and a MFA candidate and Blackburn Fellow at
@randolphcollege
.
Today's Featured Poet:
Poet & literary scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Today's Featured Poet:
Kim Hyesoon, one of the most influential contemporary poets in South Korea, is the author of several books of poetry and essays. She has received many awards for her poetry, including the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Today's Featured Poet:
John Keene is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.
🎉🎉 Join
@Poetry_Daily
editorial board members Kaveh Akbar and
@ilya_poet
Tuesday, November 2 at 7:30pm ET for a FREE online reading and conversation about Akbar’s PILGRIM BELL 🎉🎉
Register here:
He was calling in the bulls from the street.
They came like a dark river,
a flood of chest and hoof.
—Natalie Diaz, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Announcement: "The poet Louise Glück has become the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in 27 years, cited for 'her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.'" (The Guardian)
#pdnews
Today's Featured Poet:
Chen Chen’s second book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is a best book of 2022 according to the Boston Globe, Electric Lit, NPR, and others. His debut was long-listed for the National Book Award.
Today's Featured Poet:
Threa Almontaser is the author of THE WILD FOX OF YEMEN (
@GraywolfPress
) selected by Harryette Mullen for the 2020 Walt Whitman Award from
@POETSorg
. She earned her MFA and TESOL certification from North Carolina State University.
Today's Featured Poet:
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets (forthcoming from
@fsgbooks
in February 2023). She is currently a senior editor at
@yalereview
and a lecturer in writing at Yale.
Today's Featured Poet:
Crystal Wilkinson is Kentucky’s Poet Laureate. She currently teaches at
@universityofky
where she is Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.
Today's Featured Poet:
Rumi, Molana, Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Balkhy, was born in or near the city of Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan. He is considered the greatest poet of the Persian language.
Announcement:"Ashley M. Jones has been chosen to be the first Black poet laureate for Alabama, according to the Magic City Poetry Festival."
()
#pdnews
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.
In the newest series, Life in Public, we ask our editors to examine how poetry speaks to different aspects of public experience.
Today's Featured Poet:
Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of five collections of poetry, including Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Today's Featured Poet:
Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.