399 episodes
The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily American Public Media
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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.
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1148: Urine Season by Niina Pollari
Today’s poem is Urine Season by Niina Pollari.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “When someone in my life—an acquaintance, a coworker, a friend or beloved—experiences a tremendous loss, I am acutely reminded of how language fails us. We give out heartfelt condolences such as “I’m sorry for your loss,” “My deepest sympathy,” or “Thinking of you during these difficult times.” But they do not resurrect the dead and rarely comfort the living.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp -
1147: A Book of Music by Jack Spicer
Today’s poem is A Book of Music by Jack Spicer.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “Today’s nimble poem inspires me to think about rope idioms in the context of romantic relationships. When did you show your lover the ropes? Have you given your lover enough rope from which to dangle?”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp -
1146: Lonely Women by Choi Seungja, translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong
Today’s poem is Lonely Women by Choi Seungja, translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… "I learned how to enjoy my own company while living in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. One evening, I decided to enter the Campus Theatre, an art-deco movie house known for showing a captivating mix of new releases, classics, and indie films. And it was there, sitting comfortably in a dark room, while staring at an anachronistically large screen, that my loneliness peeled off me in layers, alongside strangers coupled and lonely all the same."
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp -
1145: Love Poem by the Light of the Refrigerator by Alisha Dietzman
Today’s poem is Love Poem by the Light of the Refrigerator by Alisha Dietzman.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “Today’s poem, with its phantom-like repetition and delicate renderings of stereotypically gendered décor, demands our aesthetic attention. It is at once domestic and elemental, modest and suggestive, buoyant and exacting.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp -
1144: Horse by TR Brady
Today’s poem is Horse by TR Brady.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “Today’s deceptively simple poem is as provoking as it is spare. With parallel syntax and capacious anticipation, we witness the unbridgeable silences that exist between man and beast, man and earth, and, most immediately, between each other.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp -
1143: Screenplay by Harryette Mullen
Today’s poem is Screenplay by Harryette Mullen.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “Today’s poem performs the mundane in cinematic fashion. Through sharp auditory imagery, deliberate juxtaposition, and the suggestion of ritual, it reminds us that, though the musical scores of our lives are never not playing and not always pleasant, our job is, always, to listen.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp