Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Monday, February 8th, 2021.

It's good to be back with you after a bit of an extended absence, and it is good to be bringing

you the Daily Poem once again. Thanks to everyone who has sent messages on Facebook and via

email and on Instagram and Twitter all over the place asking about this podcast.

Well, we are back. We're going to be bringing you four to five poems every week. I've got a few

people who are going to help me out so we can be a little more consistent. But hopefully I

will be bringing you poems four times a week personally and then a few people filling in

to kind of help with that load as we continue to get our bookstore going

here in Concord, North Carolina. With that, let me get into today's poem. Today's poem is by

Elizabeth Bishop, who was born on this date in 1911. She lived from February 8, 1911 to October 6th,

1979. She was an American poet.

She also wrote short stories.

And she was the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950.

And she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956, as well as the National Book Award in 1970.

So she is certainly one of the most decorated and most beloved poets of the 20th century.

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

It is a little bit long, so I'm probably going to only read it one time.

So before I do, I wanted to read something from the beginning of a essay on the work of Elizabeth Bishop from the Hudson Review. It's by David Mason, and it's called the durable art of Elizabeth Bishop. I'm going to read the first two paragraphs.

Quote, few recent American poets have found readers outside a coterie of like-minded devotees.

The good ones attract readers from multiple camps,

readers who can't deny a quality of experience richer than mere identity,

better than mere technique or fashion.

...