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

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, February 17, 2025, President's Day.

And so, to mark the occasion, I'm reading from one of my favorite presidential collections.

The poem is by Maurice Manning,

and it comes from his 2019 collection, Rail Splitter, featured poems from this collection on The Daily Poem Before. I also have to include the collection's subtitle, which is both

entertaining and explanatory, reflections on the art of poetry

composed in the posthumous voice of Honest Abe Lincoln, former president of the United States.

And that's what we get today in this poem, A Plank from the Platform.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

A plank from the platform.

Interesting to use the metaphor of carpentry, as if designing a country is merely building a stage for the artistry, by some rough magic freely to occur.

Some metaphors like me are dead. What's more to have one handy to sling is sophistry, a little

twig, but broken from the tree, as useful as a patch of briars and burrs.

But falling short of the figure is perfect failure.

And I learned more from failing than I learned from occasions when the words fell into place.

And finding a rhyme for failure?

No tailor could stitch one neatly in the sleeve.

They're earned. The rhymes, I mean, like neatly in the sleeve. They're earned.

The rhymes, I mean, like wrinkles in a face.

Some really great wordplay in this poem, even in the title.

A plank from the platform.

A doubling of that carpentry metaphor that is mentioned in the opening lines, but also obviously a play on the idea of a political platform, and immediately then drawing our mind to the

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