The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is The Long Run by Linda Gregerson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I have to remain optimistic — cautiously optimistic, because these are difficult days — that as we know better, we will do better. That we will learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our forebearers, and that we will repair what we can, despite the harm we humans continu...

Today we’re excited to share a bonus episode: the first episode of "PASSAGES: On Morrison," produced by our friends at Random House Publishing Group. This new podcast takes reading on the road, as Namwali Serpell — novelist, critic, and Harvard professor — joins fellow writers and skilled readers in conversation to pore over excerpts of Toni Morrison’s prose. The show is the record of a traveling...

Today’s poem is You Try To Fix It by Liz Ahl. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “As a child watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I remember being amazed by the Everlasting Gobstopper — a candy that a child could suck on forever, and it would never get any smaller. One of them would last a lifetime! In real life, manufacturers seem to do the opposi...

Today’s poem is The New City by Hieu Minh Nguyen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “There’s a very specific pleasure in doing things alone. Going to the movies by yourself, sitting in the dark with your own drink and popcorn or candy that you don’t have to share, and sitting anywhere you want in the theatre without asking a companion where they want to sit....

Today’s poem is At the Entrance of a Love Poem, I Hesitate by Maya C. Popa. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Love poems are maybe the hardest poems to write. I speak only for myself here, but I have a feeling plenty of poets agree with me.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation and get access to the sponsor-fr...

Today’s poem is On Being Told I Should Write A Memoir by Jan-Henry Gray. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem excavates childhood memories in a way only a poem can — and it enacts the fragmentation, the piece-iness, of memory. I should also mention that the poem uses lines from one of my favorite bands, Built to Spill, as an epigraph. Because in o...

Today’s poem is Liquefying by Chloe Yelena Miller. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Poets use language the way an artist uses paint, the way sculptors use clay. It’s our material. We have to use it wisely, not only as craftspeople but as humans who care about others. The way today’s poem talks about vision — and vision problems — is original, and vulnerabl...

Today’s poem is Citrus Paradisi by Arah Ko. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem takes as its inspiration the grapefruit, which is fleshy and juicy and as bitter as it is sweet. I was drawn to this poem because it is so packed with sensory detail: smells, sights, and textures. The poem itself is delicious.” This show is supported by gifts from lis...

Today’s poem is True Story by Camille T. Dungy. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem examines the many possibilities of giving love in a temporary world.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation and get access to the sponsor-free version of The Slowdown today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is A Love Poem Will Not Save the World by C. Russell Price. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “We read and share poems in times of tragedy because they say something we need to say, or need to hear. That is certainly true of today’s poem. It speaks to something that feels unspeakable. It sings to us in the dark.” This show is supported by gifts...

Today’s poem is Climacteric by Kelly Gray. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Midlife is a strange season. I find myself both embracing the changes to my life and also grieving a little. Some doors are closing as others open. My kids are almost grown. I’m nearing the end of a long and much-loved era.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support T...

Today’s poem is Terra Vita by Lisa Hiton. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “It’s such a strange and dreamlike thing, the memory. Strange and dreamlike in the way it operates — what it picks up and what it leaves lying there, what it holds onto and what it eventually lets go of. I don’t know why I remember the dress I wore on my eighth birthday (ruffled and...

Today’s poem is Dispatch as Prologue or Epilogue by Megan Gannon. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I once heard the comedian Pete Holmes say, about his past, something along the lines of: “That life was the weird horse I rode to get to this life.” I think the speaker of today’s poem would like that imagery as much as I do. Here’s to weird horses, and to do...

Today’s poem is The Magicians at Work by Nicky Beer. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem reminds me of the trick that poetry performs, time after time. We can vanish into a poem and emerge whole, but changed. It’s magic.” We’re asking you, our community of listeners, to help us select poems to share on the show in an upcoming week of special prog...

Today’s poem is Something there is that doesn’t love by Armen Davoudian. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Fences and walls are human-made structures, and they are inevitably eroded by the landscape itself: the rocks fall or are worn down by wind and rain; the wood rots or topples. And what happens when the boundary between what one person owns and what ano...

Today’s poem is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Wayne Miller. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem shows us that even when we can escape the physical location of a painful situation, our mind can still try to free itself from what the body remembers.” We’re asking you, our community of listeners, to help us select poems to share on the sh...

Today’s poem is How to Dress a Star by Nicholas Goodly. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem reminds me to feel tenderness toward the earlier versions of me. It reminds me that we should acknowledge our past selves more. Just think of what earlier versions of you were able to endure. Bless them for that.” We’re asking you, our community of listene...

Today’s poem is You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “We spend so much money in this country on things we think will make us happier and more fulfilled, but presence isn’t a thing at all — it’s an action inside us. Being present costs us nothing. It requires no special equipment. No special location. We can all do...

Today’s poem is Queen of Collapse by Hadara Bar-Nadav. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Repeating the same word or phrase when we write opens something up, forces us to finish the thought in a new way each time. I always surprise myself. With each repetition of the phrase, the sentence goes in a slightly new direction.” This show is supported by gifts from...

Today’s poem is The Beginning by Katherine Gibbel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I have the worst spring fever every year, because the winters in Ohio are so long and so bleak and gray. When the landscape comes alive and turns green again, I’m nearly drunk with joy. I’m in noticing heaven: ‘Look at the buds on the trees!’ and ‘Breathe in that green smel...

Today’s poem is Cloud Hands by Arthur Sze. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem shows us that tai chi is not only meditation in motion, but also metaphor in motion.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation and get access to the sponsor-free version of The Slowdown today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is On My History of Kissing Everyone At Parties by Isabelle Correa. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem was introduced to me by a friend of mine, the playwright and director Moisés Kaufman. If you’ve seen or read The Laramie Project or Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, you know his work. Moisés read this poem to me re...

Today’s poem is at the baggage claim in JFK by Lo Naylor. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When I’m preparing for a multi-city book tour, I’m not nervous about reading in front of people or answering questions or finding my way around a strange place. I’m nervous about getting where I’m going. And with somewhat regular government shutdowns impacting TSA th...

Today’s poem is You believed only a girl born of dandelion can be ferocious by Purvi Shah. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Poems are meant to live in the air, to be read aloud, but I also know that form follows function. I want to see the choices the poet made when crafting the piece. Is the poem in couplets, tercets, or sturdy quatrains? Is it in one unb...

Today’s poem is Spring in War-Time by Sara Teasdale. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I’m sure you’ve also seen the news stories, or at least social media takes, theorizing on the potential for a military draft. I have a son, and surely many of you listening have sons, too. “Operation Epic Fury” is what I feel, as a mother, when I think about men like Trum...