Philip Appleman's "To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you can see “a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” what can you see in the trashcan at the curb? Apparently quite a bit, if you look closely. Today’s poem, a paean to the unsung heroes of the holidays, can help with that.
Also in today’s episode: a look at what’s new for The Daily Poem in 2025.
Happy reading!
Philip Appleman (1926-2020) served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and in the Merchant Marine after the war. He has degrees from Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Lyon, France.
His acclaimed books of poetry include Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie (W. W. Norton, 2009), New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996 (1996); Let There Be Light (1991); Darwin's Bestiary (1986); Open Doorways (1976); and Summer Love and Surf (1968). He is also the author of three novels, including Apes and Angels (Putnam, 1989); and six volumes of nonfiction, including the Norton Critical Edition, Darwin (1970).
Appleman has taught at Columbia University, SUNY Purchase, and is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has also served on the Governing Board of the Poetry Society of America and the Poets Advisory Board of Poets House. His many awards include a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and both the Castagnola Award and the Morley Award from the Poetry Society of America.
-bio via Academy of American Poets
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. |
| 0:08.1 | I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, January 3rd, 2025. |
| 0:13.9 | The more observant among you may have noticed that we brought back the original Daily Poem |
| 0:19.5 | intro music for the new year, courtesy of our friend Logan Green. |
| 0:24.6 | It's lovely and calming, and it's high time that it made it come back. |
| 0:28.8 | It's not the only thing that will be new to the Daily Poem in 2025 either, and at the end of this episode, |
| 0:36.7 | I will give you a brief rundown of some of the changes |
| 0:39.8 | coming to the show this year. |
| 0:42.8 | Speaking of being very observant, today's poem is by Philip Appelman, and it's called |
| 0:48.9 | To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the first pickup of the year. |
| 0:58.2 | This is a poem that I have come to really love a reading at this time of year. I featured it on the show last year, and it may |
| 1:02.7 | become an annual tradition. It's such a great poem. It makes mention of the ninth day of Christmas. |
| 1:09.4 | Today is the 10th, so we're a day off, but it was worth |
| 1:12.9 | it to get this poem on the schedule, and hopefully, after hearing it, you will agree. |
| 1:19.2 | This is a poem that is on the surface, just a kind of love letter to people who are extremely |
| 1:27.1 | important to our society, |
| 1:29.3 | though we often take them for granted. |
| 1:31.0 | Unless you're a child, children see and appreciate and have this kind of reverence for garbage collectors |
| 1:38.2 | that somehow we forget often as we grow into adulthood. |
| 1:42.5 | But children see rightly in this respect. So maybe this is a perfect |
| 1:47.9 | time of year for this poem to be set. Christmas is the time of the child. And so in the Christmas |
| 1:58.1 | season, the speaker of this poem has become like a child and learned to see, |
... |
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