The Daily Poem

In today’s poems-“The Inn at the End of the World” and “The House of Christmas”–Chesterton imagines Christmas as a cosmic waystation for weary pilgrims. Happy reading. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Don’t be fooled by the lack of Dickensian drama: melancholy, materialism, regret, a graveyard–today’s poem is A Christmas Carol for the modern man. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s selection is an ideal poem for Advent–a bittersweet shape poem that expresses the “hopes and fears of all the years.”Poet and critic John Hollander wrote of Merrill that he “was continually reengaging those Proustian themes of the retrieval of lost childhood, the operations of involuntary memory and of an imaginative memory even more mysterious.” Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Are home movies the grecian urns of the twentieth century? Today’s poem says, “sort of.”Poet, editor, essayist, playwright, and lyricist Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Michigan and Maryland, and earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. A former editor at the Atlantic Monthly, poetry editor at the New Republic, and co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter’s thorough understanding of poetic tradition is clearly evident in her work. Salter is the author of many books of poetry, including A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (2003), A Phone Call to the Future (2008), Nothing by Design (2013), and The Surveyors (2017). Her second book, Unfinished Painting (1989) was a Lamont Selection for the most distinguished second volume of poetry published that year, Sunday Skaters (1994) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Open Shutters was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Salter has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College. She is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe