Séance in Daylight

When she put the petals of a hydrangea on my eyelids, I heard rain pattering behind them
Yuki Tanaka
from the book Chronicle of Drifting / Copper Canyon Press

For National Poetry Month this year, Poetry Daily decided to turn the spotlight onto readers of poetry: who we know are especially important, who, through the power of their attention, collaborate in the making of a poem’s meaning and worth. Which poem, we asked all of you—in our current archive of more than two thousand poems featured on the site since it moved to George Mason University in 2018—made you think, surprised you, moved you, or changed your world just a little? The resulting deep dives and bright finds, which we will feature in our Readers Write Back series across four Mondays and a Wednesday (April 30, the last day of Poetry Month) give some great recommendations on which poems to check out next, and reveal a wide cross-section of poetry in the contemporary mix. It showed us just how much we could learn from our readers, as well as how poems become an intimate part of lives, have far reaching and unpredictable effects on their readers and, at the least, offer a few minutes of thoughtful, serious reflection in each day.

Our Readers on Poems from Poetry Daily
Photo: Bill Brown
Arielle Hebert
Who can blame them for believing what they saw? Bodies holding each other in the night, against the darkness.
Mikael Johani
chapell hill hasnt got its own passaic look at its spine:
Grace Schulman
That night the wind-chapped table shouted, new peaches, bread, still warm, and consecrated by watery breezes on the shore
Rob Macaisa Colgate
The vinyl sling creaks, sings, and for a moment, above her powerchair, she levitates, which is usually magical, but today she is only pissing.
Jared Harél
My daughter is in the kitchen, working out death.

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Each member of our diverse board selects poems for our daily poem feature and works with us to identify new outstanding, interesting publications for our thousands of daily readers.