Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, December 17th, 2024.

Today's poem is by contemporary poet Mary Joe Salter, and it's called Home Movies, A Sort of Ode.

And this is a poem very much in conversation with yesterday's ode on a Grecian

urn. Salter gives us a work of art with an added dimension where Keats imagines the figures

on the Grecian urn moving, she describes and narrates for us moving figures or the moving stillness of her father's more

contemplative shots. And she tests the thesis of Keith's poem by taking as her subject her own

familiar memories. And near the end of the poem, even inverting Keats thesis by insisting that there are

some features of her childhood memories that are inscrutable to those who did not live through them.

But in the end, I think, confirming and amplifying what Keats himself contended for in his his ode because she finds even in the films of

familiar and memorable experiences a kind of inscrutable story within a story the relationship of

her parents which she cannot penetrate fully into and and ultimately giving us this poem, which, even though

the speaker's relationship to the work of art in question is much closer and more familiar,

more intimate, the poem still achieves this kind of universal quality that allows us to enter into

it, the same way that we can enter into Keats'

ode and even into the Grecian urn itself. Finally, I love this poem because this poem loves poetry.

One of the indispensable tasks of poetry is to give words to our experiences, to our emotions, And Sauter here borrows the words of one poem

to perform that same task in a poem of her own, not ironically, but as a sincere recognition

of her own relationship and place in the tradition.

Here is home movies, a sort of ode.

Because it hadn't seemed enough, after a while to catalog more Christmases,

the three-layer cakes ablaze with birthday candles,

...