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    The Daily Mirror
    The Daily Mirror
    The Daily Mirror
    Ebook164 pages1 hour

    The Daily Mirror

    By David Lehman

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    About this ebook

    Following in the footsteps of such poets as Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, and Frank O'Hara, David Lehman began writing a poem a day in 1996 and found the experience so rewarding that he continued for the next two years. During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998.
    For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes.
    A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJan 4, 2000
    ISBN9781439106266
    The Daily Mirror
    Author

    David Lehman

    David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

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    • 3/5
      I love everything about this book: the poem-a-day idea, the recurring themes (love, jazz, New York, pop culture), the playful experiments, the humor, the occasional pathos, the short length and skinny shape of the poems, the echoes of Frank O'Hara.... A really interesting, enjoyable book.

    Book preview

    The Daily Mirror - David Lehman

    Also by David Lehman

    POETRY

    Valentine Place

    Operation Memory

    An Alternative to Speech

    NONFICTION

    The Last Avant-Garde

    The Making of the New York School of Poets

    The Big Question

    The Line Forms Here

    Signs of the Times

    Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man

    The Perfect Murder

    A Study in Detection

    EDITED BY DAVID LEHMAN

    The Best American Poetry (series editor)

    Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms

    85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems

    James Merrill

    Essays in Criticism (with Charles Berger)

    Beyond Amazement

    New Essays on John Ashbery

    The Daily Mirror

    A Journal in Poetry

    DAVID LEHMAN

    SCRIBNER POETRY

    SCRIBNER POETRY

    1230 Avenue of the Americas

    New York, NY 10020

    www.SimonandSchuster.com

    This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

    Copyright © 2000 by David Lehman

    All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

    SCRIBNER POETRY and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

    DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Lehman, David, 1948-

    The daily mirror : a journal in poetry / David Lehman.

    p.   cm.

    I. Title.

    PS3562.E428D27   2000

    811′.54—dc21   99-37041

    CIP

    ISBN 0-684-86493-2

    eISBN: 978-1-439-10626-6

    INTRODUCTION

    In January 1996 I started writing a poem a day as an experiment. The initial results were hit-and-miss. Some poems didn’t hit the spot, and I missed some days altogether. But I kept at it. Chronicling the progress of days seemed particularly worthwhile as I was then living in New York City, where every street corner seems to promise an adventure. I was also traveling a lot. I shuttled frequently to Ithaca, New York, where I own a house, and spent half of every January and June in Bennington, Vermont. Daily poems were written in these places and in San Diego, Cincinnati, Tampa, Boston, Miami, Albany, and Tulsa. I wanted to capture the excitement of travel and rapid change of scene in my poetry, and the daily poem offered a way to do that. It satisfied the wish to write about the particulars of experience and observation—to keep a sort of record of events, opinions, enthusiasms, dreams, fantasies, cravings, and thoughts, as they succeeded one another. At the same time the project provided a means to note the continuities in one’s life. Many poems would be overtly about their specific occasions and implicitly about time and the calendar; the poem’s title—in each case simply the month and day on which it was written—would see to that.

    Toward the end of February inspiration hit big time. I began a consecutive day streak that reached 140. Writing a poem began to seem as natural as taking a walk. There were days when I wrote a sestina or a villanelle in addition to the official poem of the day. Waking up, I relished the thought that the day’s poem waited to be written, as if it already existed in some ideal realm and needed only the tip of my wand to bring it to life. Poetry was, as one of the poems reported, a renewable energy source: the more you do it, the easier it gets, and the more enjoyable. Inspiration was not something you needed to sit and wait for. It was something that came when you invited it.

    The practice of writing a daily poem has some of the advantages of keeping a journal but with a crucial difference: the desired end is an aesthetic product that asks to be read as a poem. The dailiness of the poems may act as a corrective to artificial poetic diction. It may keep the poem honest by rubbing its nose in the details of daily life. But however casual each poem may seem, however nonchalant, it has to work as verse—it must transcend the occasion of its making as only real poems do.

    As to the specific occasion, the more diverse, the merrier. Some poems were written while I was talking on the phone, others while waiting for dessert at a restaurant. Several were composed in the form of E-mail messages, or on-line in real time, like cybernetic epistles, a phrase that has the virtue of sounding like an oxymoron. I wrote a few while driving my car on the highway. All thirty poems written in April 1998 were posted one day at a time on the Web site of Poetry Daily, a venue as exemplary for my purposes as its name implies.

    After two years I had the idea of making a book of these. Mindful of what Samuel Johnson said about Paradise Lost (none ever wished it longer), I decided against including one poem for each day of the year. My book would be selective but would nevertheless aspire to convey a sense of the calendar, the months, the seasons, the diurnal spin and the annual revolution: the Super Bowl gets played on the last Sunday in January, the vernal equinox occurs precisely on March 21, and the clocks spring forward on the first Saturday night in April. In culling the poems of several years and shaping them into a unity of one, I had the great example of Thoreau’s Walden as my precedent.

    The title of the book didn’t occur to me until a few days after Frank Sinatra’s last birthday was celebrated on December 12. Earlier titles had been proposed by Robert Polito (The Best Days of the Year) and Archie Ammons (Days of My Days). On December 17, I told Donald Hall that I had finally

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