Hello and welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, July 6, 2023.

We're still celebrating American Independence here on the Daily Poem,

but whereas the week's earlier poems were earnest, heartfelt, searching reflections upon American ideals,

what America is, what America has been, what America could be.

Today's poem is a little more relaxed, and it is a portrait of American life at a particular American time in a particular American place.

It is Ox Cartman by Donald Hall.

Hall Hall It is Ox Cartman by Donald Hall. Hall, in addition to being an accomplished poet of the mid and late 20th century and early 21st,

I was a gifted literary critic editor. He was a one-time poetry editor for the Paris

Review. He also discovered and helped publish a number of notable poets of the 20th century.

And after the year 2010, when he swore off writing poems for good,

he also became a gifted and rather moving essayist. But to some, including most of the people living in my own home,

Donald Hall is best known and remembered for his children's book,

the Caldecott medal-winning Oxcart Man.

The book was based on a shorter poem about a man who lived on a farm with his family and would make a yearly pilgrimage on foot to Portsmouth and Portsmouth Market in order to sell his wares and collect the things he needed

to subsist for the following year. I'll read it once and then offer a few remarks from Donald Hall himself about the genesis of the poem

and the children's book that sprang from it and then finish by reading the poem a second time.

Here is Ox Cartman. In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed, counting

the cellars portion out, and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey in combs, linen, leather, tanned from deer hide, and vinegar

in a barrel, hooped by hand at the Forges Fire.

He walks by his ox's head ten days to Portsmouth Market and sells potatoes in the

...