Welcome back to The Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

Today's poem is by Denise Levertov, who lived from 1923 to 1997.

She was born in England and died in Washington, but was an American poet.

She was a recipient of the Lannin Literary Award for Poetry. She wrote and published

24 books of poetry, criticism and translation, as well as was the editor of several anthologies.

She also won the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize,

a Catherine Locke Memorial grants, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts

and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In other words, she was one of the most prized and

awarded poets of the 20th century. The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Secret.

It goes like this. Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.

I, who don't know the secret, wrote the line.

They told me through a third person they had found it, but not even what it was, not even what line it was.

No doubt, by now, more than a week later, they have the secret the line the name of the poem i love them

for finding what i can't find and for loving me for the line i wrote and for forgetting it so that a thousand

times till death finds them they may discover it again in other lines, in other happenings, and for wanting

to know it, for assuming there is such a secret. Yes, for that most of all.

This is from a collection called O Tast and C, New Poems, which is from 1964.

I love this poem for the way that it playfully dives into the nature of poetry, the nature of experiencing poetry.

It doesn't take itself too seriously. It doesn't take the art of being a poet too seriously. It doesn't take

the artifact that poets produced too seriously. It takes them just seriously enough. I think it does

a really nice job living in that gray area between the poets, the poet's intentions, the

poets work, the poet's's experiments even, and the way

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