Poetry is like love–easy to recognize when it hits you, a joy to experience, and very hard to pin down flat in a satisfying definition.–Marie Ponsot

The only poet I could find with a birthday today is Maya Angelou, Pulitzer prize winning author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, b. 1928, and I couldn’t post a sample of her poetry if I wanted to because it’s too recent, copyright protected. That’s the trouble with modern poetry; you can’t post it or link to it because it’s generally still under copyright and the authors don’t want to give it out for free. I don’t blame them, but it does limit the audience for their poetry–which is already rather small it seems to me. Anyway, I’ll try to stick to the poems that can be legally posted on my blog, like this one which may be Eldest Daughter’s favorite:

A Birthday by Christina Rossetti

MY heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

The Favorite Poem Project:

“Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post in 1997. Since its launch, the Favorite Poem Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry’s role in Americans’ lives.
During the one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems — Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, of diverse occupations, kinds of education and backgrounds.”

You can still submit your favorite poem at the website linked above for possible inclusion in a future project. By the way, what is your favorite poem?

Poetry is like ice skating: you can turn quickly. Prose is like wading. It also has a lot of good. You can see your toes, for example.–Robert Pinsky
A poem is not a laundry list or a legal document. Nor is it a novel or a letter, although these latter may have “poetic” moments when they share some of the distinctive qualities of poetry.–Gerald H. WIlson

So poetry is not prose. Poetry uses language and linguistic devices to produce an effect. Poems use paralellism and alliteration and assonance and rhyme. Poems use meter and rhythm, images and similes and metaphors. Yet prose can use some or all of these things and still be rather, well, prosaic. And a grocery list, if not a laundry list, can be poetic if it’s written by someone with a poet’s ear for language. Prose often tells a story, narrates; so does a narrative poem. Some poems don’t rhyme and have hardly any rhythm. A poem is a poem because it feels like a poem and it looks like a poem (usually) on the page and it reads like a poem, preferably out loud. A poem turns quickly.

Poem for Today: A Wreath by George Herbert, Christian poet born on this day in 1593.

A WREATHED garland of deserv’d praise,
Of praise deserv’d, unto Thee I give,
I give to Thee, who knowest all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherein I live,
Wherein I die, not live ; for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to Thee,
To Thee, who art more far above deceit,
Than deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know Thy ways,
Know them and practise them : then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give Thee a crown of praise.

I just discovered this poet, a contemporary of John Donne and of Shakespeare. If you liked the poem for today, you might also enjoy these poems by George Herbert.
A Dialogue-Anthem (between the Christian and Death)
Grief
Jordan (1)
Love (III)
Mortification
I am thinking I could spend a whole month just blogging about the poems of George Herbert.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.–Robert Frost

Last year on Frost’s birthday: A Prayer in Spring

And for this year:

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

Ah, yes, I can always stop whatever for a visit with a friend–for better or for worse.

Phyllis McGinley, poet and author, b. 1905. She won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry.

The thing to remember about fathers is, they’re men.
A girl has to keep it in mind:
They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues.
Scratch any father, you find
Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors,
Believing change is a threat-
Like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle
It took such months to get.

The other thing to remember, of course, is that fathers are often right. Change is often a threat. Daughters are sometimes not ready for high heels or for their first bicycle. Sometimes fathers see the sign: “Here be dragons.” And sometimes daughters are blind.