The Daily Poem Goldberry Studios

Find somebody to watch the kids while you giggle through today’s poem. Happy reading.
Respected editor, publisher, writer and poet, Paul Ruffin often relied upon his experiences growing up in the South as a foundation for his stories. 
He was born in Millport, Alabama, and grew up outside Columbus, Mississippi. After serving in the U.S. Army, Ruffin earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at Mississippi State University. 
He took post-graduate courses at the University of Southampton in England and graduated with his doctoral degree from the Center for Writers and the University of Southern Mississippi in 1974. 
He accepted a position at Sam Houston State University where he founded The Texas Review—an international literary journal—and Texas Review Press, a member of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium.
Karla K. Morton, 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, said, “His work at The Texas Review Press elevated the whole of Texas Letters.” 
Throughout the years, Ruffin worked tirelessly to promote the press and its authors, once giving his views on university presses moving toward digital books as opposed to traditional ink-on-paper.
“We’re fulfilling the ancient role of the university press and that is to produce books. I don’t want to give up the book because it is an art,” he said.
During his extensive writing career, he published more than 1,500 poems, 100-plus stories, and more than 90 essays in magazines and journals.  His work also has appeared in numerous anthologies and textbooks. In addition, he wrote a weekly column that appeared in several newspapers in Texas and Mississippi. In 2009, he was named Texas State Poet Laureate.
In a 2009 article in SHSU’s Heritage Magazine, Ruffin was described as someone who “loves football, shooting, riding his tractor, maintaining his truck, and doing his own carpentry, electric, and plumbing work…not exactly the stereotypical image of a person who loves words and is a master of arranging them into beautifully crafted poems and other literary works.” 
-bio via Sam Houston State University


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Today’s poem ponders what love makes of language. Happy reading.
A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.
Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”
Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos. 
-bio via Poetry Foundation


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Today’s poem is inspired by one of our favorites here at the Daily Poem.
Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of ten poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.
His most recent book of poems, Lacunae, is available wherever books are sold.
-bio via Paraclete Press



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Ted Kooser, who worked in insurance for thirty-five years before becoming U.S. Poet Laureate, turns 85 today. Many happy returns of the day to him, and happy reading to the rest of you!


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Have you measured out your life in coffee spoons? Feeling like a pair of ragged claws today? Afraid to eat messy food while other people are watching? Or are you just channeling a little too much Polonius? If so, today’s poem–the classic modernist anthem of insecurity and isolation (and mermaids)–will feel very familiar. Happy reading!

(And for an even better reading of this poem, you should discover Jeremy Irons reading Eliot’s complete poems.)


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Happy birthday to the Bard!

NB: Anyone itching to dig deeper into Shakespeare’s plays should look no further than one of our sister podcasts, The Play’s the Thing!


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