Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Tuesday, July 20th, 2021. And today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet Theodore Rutke. He lived from 2008 to 1963. He's widely regarded as one of the most influential and important 20th century American poets. He was also very well known and popular as a poetry teacher. Two of his students actually won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And almost all of his students said he was one of the best professors they ever had.

He himself won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1954.

He also won two National Book Awards.

So he's quite prestigious and well known.

His poetry is known for its vivid natural imagery, for his interesting use of form, and it's quite introspective. So today's poem is called the pike and this is how it goes. The river turns leaving a place for the eye to rest, a furred,

a rocky pool, a bottom of water.

The crabs tilt and eat leisurely, and the small fish lie without shadow, motionless,

or drift lazily in and out of the weeds.

The bottom stones shimmer back their irregular striations,

and the half-sunken branch bends away from the gazer's eye,

a scene for the self to abjure, and I lean almost into the water, my eye always beyond the surface reflection.

I lean and love these manifold shapes.

Until out from a dark cove from beyond the end of a mossy log, with one sinuous ripple than a rush, a thrashing up of the whole pool.

The pike strikes.

Little known fact about me. I am crazy about fishing poems. I've been fishing a couple of times, but it's not a hobby

for me, but I just really love fishing poetry and fishing stories too. Why you ask? Well, it's because

of the really interesting possibilities for symbolism and for reflection through

the use of water and kind of this idea of a creature, the fish emerging from the deep or coming

up or being sought after. I just think it's really interesting. It has this very mysterious and

primeval quality in my imagination, maybe in yours too.

Literature has long accepted waters. What's the word? You know, multitudinous symbolic value.

Water often represents both cleansing and death, which becomes this really interesting kind of paradoxical and contradictory, but somehow satisfying contemplation.

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