The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
Poet Major Jackson is your guide on the pathways to feel and understand our common journey – through poetry. In sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery. Join The Slowdown for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode, every weekday. Produced by APM Studios in partnership with The Poetry Foundation and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. Make us a part of your routine as you drink coffee in the morning, as you take a walk in nature, or as you wind down to go to sleep in the evening. With host Major Jackson, we collectively take a moment to calm, to inspire, to learn, and to engage with the best emerging poets and established writers of our time and generations past, from Emily Dickinson to Danez Smith, from Amanda Gorman to Mary Oliver. Listen to our back catalog for episodes by our previous hosts, Tracy K. Smith and Ada Limón, as well as guest hosts Jenny Xie, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tina Chang, Nate Marshall, Shira Erlichiman, and Jason Schneiderman. Our hosts and production team select poems that move them, and we hope they move you, too.
Episodes
Today’s poem is Uh Huh: Hi, Hula Tooth by K. Silem Mohammad.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is part of a series that the poet calls Sonnagrams. He uses a program to rearrange the letters in each of Shakespeare’s sonnets to get a whole new poem, and then he makes a title out of the letters he didn’t use yet. Without knowing that the poem is an ...
Today’s poem is Simulation Theory by Leigh Stein.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “At the center of the Matrix is the idea that contemporary life is actually a computer simulation, and today’s whip-smart poem takes that idea as its starting point. The speaker looks at the oddly contemporary problem of people who can’t tell the difference between life and art...
Today’s poem is Short Talk on Waterproofing by Anne Carson.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “In today’s poem, Anne Carson engages Franz Kafka, but not directly. Carson calls our attention to a small act of care, the tiny detail of a loving act taking place against a background of atrocity. It reminds us that sometimes the best way to see clearly is to look f...
Today’s poem is Sorrow Is Innate in the Human by Francesca Bell.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is about motherhood. The speaker focuses less on what it means to her to be a mother, than on what her child is experiencing, and what her child might know and might need.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donat...
Today’s poem is Where are the girls who were so beautiful? from “33” by Julia Alvarez.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Lately, I’ve heard many bemoan the end of movie stardom, but it’s comforting to remember that it’s an old argument. Three decades ago, we were already wondering what had happened to the glamor and melodrama of 1950’s Hollywood and Hollywood ...
Today’s poem is Stereo by Anne Waldman.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “‘Tis the season of weddings! In years past, I’ve poured libations; I’ve even read a poem, but this summer, I have the privilege and am hugely excited to officiate the nuptials of our friend and digital producer of The Slowdown, James Napoli and fiancé Britta Greene. Regarding, I’ll just say this: Love is an un...
Today’s poem is Dear Past and Future Metastasis, by Chiyuma Elliott.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s fine poem makes delicate use of captured dialogue. The poem reveals our clumsy attempts to render legible who we are. Mostly we pass expected, typical speech between us but, occasionally, we make utterances so clear that they startle even ourselves.”
Celebrate the power of...
Today’s poem is He Laughed With A Laugh by JonArno Lawson.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Myka and I rescued today’s fun poem from the cutting floor of our children’s poetry episodes. We present it to you today. Enjoy!”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
Today’s poem is Extreme Close-up by Susan Rich.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Noticing and paying attention to my surroundings is more than for the purpose of writing poems. I’m trying to bring the world closer to me. To call up daily experience by zooming in, by locating language that is as lush as life yet elegantly sparse, well, then, that is an act of love and reciprocity.”
...Today’s poem is The Pathology of Currency by Matthew Lippman.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem humorously parodies the secret nature of money and the endless, if not stressful, cycle of working and spending.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
Today’s poem is She Loves Me, She Love Me Not by Desirée Alvarez.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Why do we make bad decisions, whether reasoned or rash, when we know deep down that they are not sound? I don’t believe people when they announce they have no regrets. I find feelings of regret slightly useful. They help us muse over missed opportunities or hasty actions. Regrets remi...
Today’s poem is The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish by Joshua Weiner.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem dramatizes the hidden transaction of our obsessions. We are claimed by the world as much as we take in — sometimes, even more.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
...Today’s poem is For the Poet Who Is Your High School English Teacher by Gary Margolis.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem honors the teachers among us who are also poets, whose passion for poetry helps students to reimagine and change their world.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4...
Today’s poem is This Is My Vow by Lucia Mae Pitts.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem, though written nearly one hundred years ago, knows that to live today is to heroically make a pledge of hope, to seek the positives, to practice the gospel of joy, and in doing so to defeat pessimism and stave off an all-consuming gloom.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to Th...
Today’s poem is The Lifeline by Pádraig Ó Tuama.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “When natural disaster occurs, when catastrophe falls upon us, we humans lean into life. We need the counterbalancing force of creation and renewal to tilt the world back toward meaning and light. We pursue activities that resist a chaos of the mind and spirit, some endeavor that gives us a foothold on...
Today’s poem is Nowhere Else to Go by Linda Sue Park. This week’s episodes are for, and feature, young poets.
Climate change is an urgent issue for everyone — and our best reminder of this is the young people who are pushing for action. Today’s co-host, Durete, is one of those young people who has marched on the front lines. Her story, and today’s poem, point out a critical factor of this fight: that it is one we must tak...
Today’s poem is Olympians vs. Modernity by Adelaide Sendlenski. This week’s episodes are for, and feature, young poets.
Adelaide, today’s co-host, is a dedicated tennis player. She’s so busy with school and sports that she writes poetry in the minutes between, thinking up lines while in motion. Today’s poem is one of her own, a poem which deftly connects the power of the Greek gods to the power we aim to claim through con...
Today’s poem is Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This week’s episodes are for, and feature, young poets.
Ever since taking on the role as host of The Slowdown, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the importance of performance in poetry. An organization that teaches this art to young people is Poetry Out Loud, for which I’ve served as a national judge; today’s co-host, Cat, participated as a performer, winning her regio...
Today’s poem is Occasional Poem by Jaqueline Woodson. This week’s episodes are for, and feature, young poets.
Today’s co-host, Jasper, and I share an entry point to poetry – music. In the songs he’s written, he seeks an honesty and perspective in relationships, which reflects so many great poems. Sometimes, the best way to make sense of something is to bring sound to it – whether the spoken word, a guitar strum, or an ono...
Today’s poem is Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. This week’s episodes are for, and feature, young poets. Our producers met up with Nova at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens while the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. And as much as she loved the pink blossoms, the poetry she’s created there comes from more unexpected places. She is a pro at embracing the strangeness of the world, at finding the quiet places so she can really lis...
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