Our Purpose

Your Daily Poem launched in June 2009 with a single goal: to share the pleasure of poetry with those who may not have had the opportunity to develop an appreciation for that genre.

In 2001, poet Jayne Jaudon Ferrer accepted a challenge from her brother and brother-in-law to prove that poetry was not boring. A lifelong lover of poetry, Ferrer—while acknowledging that there is plenty of boring poetry out there—determined to showcase poetry that was anything but. During National Poetry Month (April) that year, she sent a daily e-mail to a small group of family and friends, calling it the "Poetry Parade." By the end of the 30-day onslaught, her brother and brother-in-law confessed that they had actually enjoyed many of the poems. Response to the poems was so positive, in fact, that the recipients begged Ferrer to repeat the parade. So, for the next seven years, Ferrer selected and e-mailed poems every April to a subscriber list that grew larger each year. Your Daily Poem was born when an insistent group of Poetry Parade subscribers coerced Ferrer into emailing a poem every day, rather than just in April.

Today, more than 5000 poems from more than 1000 poets are archived here for your edification and enjoyment. You will like some poems more than others, just as you like certain sports teams — and singers, and cars, and movies — more than others, because we all have different tastes and this, of course, is what makes life interesting. Your Daily Poem simply hopes to add a bit more interest to your life through these poems, which have been individually selected to irrefutably prove that poetry can be outrageous, inspiring, hilarious, heartbreaking, sobering, surprising and, yes, even boring—but you won’t find the latter here!

Thank you for visiting; enjoy!