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

I'm David Kern and today's Monday, May 11th, 2020.

I want to apologize for the audio quality on this episode.

I am actually recording in my car on my iPhone,

due to the limitations of all the circumstances going on right now.

But there was a poem that I was reading when I came across it in Robert

Hass's book, A Little Book on Form. He's a section on the ode. And in that, he references this poem,

which is by Robert Pinsky, and it's entitled, Poem with Lines in Any Order. Robert Pinsky is an an American poet who was born in 1940. He is an

essayist, literary critic, and translator as well. And he was the poet laureate consultant in poetry to

the Library of Congress from 1997 to 2000. He's translated Dante's Inferno and also teaches at

Boston University. So he's quite a notable figure in American letters.

And what I want to do is read this poem to you that Robert Hass mentioned

and then read Robert Hass's comments because I think they're really interesting.

I ran across them and thought you might want to hear them as well.

So again, this is a poem called Poem with Lines in Any Order.

It goes like this.

Sonny said, then he shouldn't have given Molly the two more babies.

Dave's sister and her husband adopted the baby, and that was Babe.

You can't live in the past.

Sure, he was a tough guy, but he was no hero.

Sonny and Tuts went to live a while with the Braggers.

It was a time when it seemed like everybody had a nickname.

...