To start your weekend, a poem from Philip Levine.

Poem of the Day: "Today and Two Thousand Years from Now"
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"Hotel Bar," by J. D. McClatchy is part of a series of "Motets," each of which presents a scene of emotional crisis or revelation. "Motets" appear in the poet's most recent book HAZMAT, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Today's podcast features McClatchy reading a poem from his previous book, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and readers may also download a special broadside of his poem "What They Left Behind," designed by McClatchy's longtime companion, the award-winning book designer and author Chip Kidd.

Poem of the Day: "Hotel Bar"
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Podcast: Listen to a recording of J.D. McClatchy reading "The Ledger" from his book THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
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In TO REPEL GHOSTS, Kevin Young tells the story of Jean-Michel Basquiat's rise from the mock prophet and graffiti artist SAMO to one of the hottest painters of the 1980s. Today's poem from this collection, which is a "remixed" edition of Young's second book of poetry, is an example of his early spare jazz-like work. Then, in today's episode of the Knopf poetry podcast you'll hear a recording of Young reading from his more recent collection BLACK MARIA, a film noir in verse.

Poem of the Day: "The Fun House"
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Podcast: Listen to a recording of Kevin Young reading "The Grift" from his book BLACK MARIA
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Jane Mayhall is a poet of a now bygone bohemian New York. She wrote much of her first full-length collection, SLEEPING LATE ON JUDGMENT DAY, after she had already turned eighty. Throughout the work, we find insights into a life well-lived, especially in today's poem, "Never Apologize, Never Explain."

Poem of the Day: "Never Apologize, Never Explain"
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Podcast: Knopf's poetry editor Deborah Garrison reading "Untitled" by Jane Mayhall
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Here is "Colosseum," from SONO, a new book by Sarah Arvio, the prizewinning author of VISITS FROM THE SEVENTH. Composed during a long stay in Rome, the collection is made up of intimate and invigorating songs of the self.

Poem of the Day: "Colosseum"
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Podcast: Sarah Arvio reading "Colosseum"
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Meet Sarah Arvio: Please note that Sarah will be reading from her new collection this Thursday at Harvard University. The address for this event is:

Grolier Bookshop at Adams House
Entry C, Lower Common Room, 26 Plympton Street
Harvard Square
Harvard University
House Office: 1-617.495.2259  

View more tour dates for Sarah Arvio here.

We've asked Joan Didion, author of THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, to read a poem of her choice by the nineteenth-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins for today's podcast. In her book, as many readers will recall, Didion tells us how, in the year following her husband's death, she turned to the literature of grief in all its forms and immersed herself in it; poems, she writes, "seemed the most exact to me."

The poets whose lines she repeated to herself and returned to for solace included Hopkins as well as Matthew Arnold and W. H. Auden. So for today's email we have chosen Auden's "Like a Vocation." This poem takes place at the opposite end of the spectrum from Didion's experience of the loss of a lifelong partner: it was written in the early weeks of the poet's own lifelong relationship with his companion Chester Kallman. "The poem," explains Auden's literary executor Edward Mendelson, "is an address to a beloved, hoping that the beloved might enter the lover's life, not like the fantasy figure of an arriving conqueror ('all these depart'), but as someone who responds to 'The one who needs you,' the one—who may be inside in the beloved's self, not a real person—whose needs may become 'like a vocation,' something that the beloved may never abandon."

Poem of the Day: "Like a Vocation" by W.H. Auden
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Podcast: Listen to a recording of Joan Didion reading "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Today's poem by Dan Chiasson is number XX in a series called "Natural History," from the book of that name. The poems make up a compelling encyclopedia, a unique poetic compendium of mysteries and wonders inspired, in part, by the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder.

Poem of the Day: "Things I Saw With My Own Eyes"
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