Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is Tuesday, October 15th, which means that it is the launch day of a book of poetry

that I really, really like. You've heard a couple of poems from it. It is called Rail Splitter,

and it's by Morris Manning.

If you are subscribed to Forma, our magazine, this summer, you got an issue that has an interview

with Morris Manning.

And last week on the Forma podcast, we also shared a podcast interview that I do with him about

this book.

While I was with him, I asked him to record a poem that he really, really likes for this podcast.

And he obliged by reading a poem by one of his very favorite poets, Robert Penn Warren.

Warren was an American poet, novelist, and critic who lived from 1905 to 1989.

He founded the Literary Journal, the Southern Review, and he received the

1947 Pulitzer Prize for All the Kings Men, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in

1958 and 1979. Without further ado now, I'm going to turn it over to Morris Manning, who's

going to read one of his very favorite Robert Penn Warren poems. So here he is, Morris Manning.

I'm going to read a poem by Robert Penn Warren from Kentucky.

Often he wrote about landscapes and scenes in Kentucky.

This poem recalls a scene from his youth. The poem is called Boy Wandering in Sims Valley.

Through brush and love vine, well-blooded by Blackberry Thorn, long dry past prime under summer's late molten light, and past the last rock slide at

ridgetop and stubborn raw tangle of cedar, eye clambered, breath short and spit white from lung depth.

Then down the lone valley called Sims Valley still,

where Sims, long back, had nursed a sick wife till she died.

...