Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, June 30th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Tracy K. Smith, and it's called The Good Life.

I'll read it once off for a few comments and read it once more.

The Good Life

When some people talk about money, they speak as if it were a mysterious lover who went out to buy milk and never came back.

And it makes me nostalgic for the years I lived on coffee and bread, hungry all the time,

walking to work on payday like a woman journeying for water from a village without a well,

then living one or two nights like everyone else on roasted chicken and red wine.

The longtime literary critic for the New Yorker, James Wood, has this concept he refers to as thisness.

The friend of mine calls it, having been thereness.

And it's this idea that the right detail, the perfectly selected little piece of information, can do more than 100, 200, 300 words of

description if it is the kind of detail that only someone who has lived the experience could possibly know about or recall

or think to bring up in their description of a particular place or scene or mood or event.

And the beauty of that right detail that conveys the thisness or the having been thereness is that it can

actually engage your reader or listener in such a way that they complete the description for you.

They bring to the table the emotional experience that's attached to this event that you're trying to

narrate. And Tracy K. Smith, I think, does that so well in this poem. There is some very

literal description and exposition. The years I lived on coffee and bread. There's the slightly metaphorical description in the opening lines.

People talking about money like they might speak about a mysterious lover who slipped out one night and never came back.

But it's the final lines that really complete the picture and open up this poem into a much wider world of the reader's own subjective experience,

but even for those who haven't shared the experience, the ability to enter into a fuller version of what's being described here.

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