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

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Maurice Manning.

He was born in 1966 and is a poet from Kentucky.

His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions,

was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award chosen by

W.S. Merwin, and his collection, The Common Man, was one of the two finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize

in poetry. The poem that I'm going to read today is actually a new poem, which is coming in a

forthcoming collection called Rail Splitter,

and I discovered it in the most recent issue of a magazine called Garden and Gunn,

where they do a feature on Maurice Manning.

And then they published this poem, which is called On Silence,

and I wanted to share it with you. So shout out to Garden and Gun, where you can find this particular poem,

and make sure you check out

Maurice Manning's new collection rail splitter and this is how this poem goes poetry is the

art of silence the art of knowing when to stop a word or phrase and let it hang like a sheet

billowing on the line and the sudden or unexpected silence goes hand in hand, with what is said in words, or the flowery,

natural phrase.

Beginning with the idiom and moving to the metaphor, while following the stark rhythms of

thought as they proceed and follow, is elegance.

A wave of the hand for dancers to come forth

and dance and give the scene a fluid movement. I see it all in a grand entrance, meaning I see it

...