Greenville author and poet Jayne Jaudon Ferrer says poems are like a spritz of cold water on your face on a hot day.
Most poems, she says, take a minute or two to read. It’s enough time to recharge and reset. It’s that positive motivation that is at the center of Ferrer’s latest book, a collection of poetry featuring the works of poets across the U.S., Canada, England and Ireland called “Poems to Lift You Up and Make Your Smile,” published by Parson’s Porch in July.
The collection showcases poems filled with inspiration, happiness and humor. It’s also an archive of poems that have been featured on the website Your Daily Poem, which was founded by Ferrer in 2009. Subscribers to the website also receive a daily email with an affirmative poem.
After the pandemic, Ferrer says she wanted to create an edition to make people smile and feel connected. “I’m hoping that this collection will kind of feed that need for belonging, you know, for familiar things that you remember being able to do.”
The former Floridian first fell in love with poetry when she was a child. She remembers reading Robert Louis Stevenson. Ferrer says she’s always liked poetry, but accessible poetry — poetry that is easily understood in one reading. She suggests that many people don’t enjoy poetry because of how they’re exposed to it as children.
“Teachers stick stuff in front of 13- and 14-year-olds who don’t have the life experience to appreciate it,” Ferrer says. People then believe that poetry just isn’t for them. “It’s not on their horizon at all.”
It’s that thinking that motivated Ferrer to begin Your Daily Poem. The concept came, she says, from an argument with her brother and brother-in-law that there was fun, interesting poetry out there.
“I started out doing a once-a-year thing in April, poetry month. And I would harvest 30 poems — the most entertaining I could find — and send those out,” Ferrer says. People enjoyed the poems so much that they asked if she could send them on a regular basis.
It still surprises her that the daily poems are still happening 12 years and over 4,000 poems later. Ferrer says that she has about 1,000 subscribers to the poems and her website hits about 20,000 views a month.
In feedback from subscribers, Ferrer’s discovered that many read the daily poem with their morning coffee.
“If you have a chance to set the tone of somebody’s day on a positive note,” Ferrer says,” I like that idea.”
