Daniel Halpern is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Something Shining, Selected Poems, Foreign Neon, and Air (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), and has edited several anthologies of both poetry and prose. The founder and publisher of Ecco Press, he has received many awards, including the Maxwell Perkins Award, which recognizes an editor or publisher who has discovered, nurtured, and championed writers of fiction in the United States. Halpern taught in the Columbia MFA program, which he chaired for many years. In 1978, with James Michener, he founded the National Poetry Series. He is an executive editor at Knopf.

What?

by Daniel Halpern

Why say it?
That turf’s been so
Trodden. Dusty.
If not novel
Reserve it for a thought
To oneself.

Can you repeat the overstated
And have it mean
Something
For the first time?
What’s not the first time
If each time is the first?


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