Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is June 23, 2020. And today's poem is by an American poet named Amy Clampett. She is somehow making her debut on this podcast. As far as I can tell, I went back and looked and didn't see that I had ever read or shared any of her poems here on the podcast, but she lived from June of 1920 to September of 1924.

And so this month is the 100th anniversary of her birth, and I thought, this is a good time to share a poem by Amy Klampet.

She earned a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 for her work and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1982 in the poetry category.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Linden Bloom.

It goes like this.

Before midsummer density opakes with shade the checker tables underneath in daylight unleashing lindens burn green gold a day or two no more with intimations of an essence i saw once in what had been the pleasure garden of the popes at avignon dishevel into half or possibly three-quarters of a million, hanging, intricately

tactile, blonde bell-poles of bloom, the in-mid-air resort of honeybees, here suit Cotillion,

teasing by the milligram out of those necklace nectaries. Aromas so intensely subtle, strollers

passing under, looked up, confused, as though they'd just heard voices, or inhaled the ghost of derelict splendor, and or of seraphs shaken into pollen dust, no transubstantiating pope or antipope could sift or quite precisely ponder.

So this poem kind of comes at you like a, what's the metaphor, a summer storm maybe?

It comes at you like an angry bee. I don't know, whatever it is. Angry is not the right

term, but it comes out you fast. There's a rapid cadence, a rapid pace to it, which can be hard

to keep up with. And in fact, there took me a couple of times to read it. It actually goes so fast,

you kind of have to slow down in a way, which is an irony that you'll find in many interesting poems.

Either they go so slow you speed up or you go so fast, you have to slow down.

But over at PoetryFoundation.org, they have a bio of Amy Clampett and have some of her work.

And there's this paragraph here, which I wanted to share with you.

So again, this is from the Amy Clampett bio over at Poetry Foundation.org, and it says

this, quote, critics praised the elusive richness and syntactical sophistication of Clampett's

verse.

Her poetry is characterized by a Baroque profusion, the romance of the adjective, labyrinthine

syntax, a festival lexicon, said New York Times book review contributor Alfred

...