The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is A Garden and a Street by Teresa Cader. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Poetry holds that place of both awakening and frustration, of perseverance against unimaginable violence and the flight away from the pains of our fragile world. Someday the bombs will stop falling. Someday the rhetoric of hatred will not have an audience. Isn’t this som...

Today’s poem is Big Purple Peonies by Margaret Ross. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s deeply satisfying poem arrives from an exacting eye. The poet’s kinetic imagination and mental roaming feel gorgeously reportorial and cinematic, mapping self-reflection through their portrayal of vibrant landscapes.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The...

Today’s poem is Telescope by Louise Glück. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “I live on a hill on the edge of a valley. I look out my window and watch cars creep by on the interstate that could take me a thousand miles to my birthplace if I so choose. This slice of Los Angeles – the one I look out over everyday – is odd to reconcile with the...

Today’s poem is Poem (“Instant coffee with…”) by Frank O'Hara. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Loren was the person I knew in New York who was the same kind of lost as me. There is a magic to how we find each other when we need each other. It seems like our souls sort of… orbit until they reach out. They land. They find ground and we find...

Today’s poem is Waiting for the Annular Eclipse by Rhoni Blankenhorn. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Rock bottom is a funny place. If anyone has been there, then I suppose we all end up in our own rock bottom at some point. The truth about nothing ever ending, nothing ever being final, is that things will be the same again, too. Just not...

Today’s poem is Aleppo by Hala Alyan. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Recently, I dreamt that my friend and I were moving into a big, old apartment. Once we got the couch in the living room, my grandmother appeared, sitting on it. I haven’t seen her in a decade. She died in 2015. I think my grandmother, a woman who witnessed and bore grea...

Today’s poem is Brooklyn is for Breakups by Chen Chen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “I have experienced a whole lot of life, and romance only forms threads of that life, woven into all the other moments. The threads are often short. They have loose ends. What I struggle with – what I’ve struggled with for years – is naming the importanc...

Today’s poem is Mother of the English Language by Nicole Arocho Hernández. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem has that kind of intimacy you only achieve by deciding to be weird together. When we forgo a tight grip on meaning, sometimes we get a little closer to the truth of feeling.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to T...

Today’s poem is My Father Flying by Jan Beatty. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Grief feels, sometimes, like a burden. A heavy one. But it is also a practice. People we love leave this earth, but they don’t leave us. We can find lightness in small rituals, small memorials to share with the world the version of the person that we have fold...

Today’s poem is Forgiveness Rock Record by Tawanda Mulalu. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem excavates the hard route to self-love, but it also shows us the trick: that self-love doesn’t happen all alone.” 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 Shadow Play by Jessica Fisher. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem speaks to someone who left marks on this earth hundreds of years ago. It asks what elemental — and metaphysical — forces moved through them, like wind playing the chimes. Just like those forces did then, and do today, and will tomorrow.” Celebrate...

Today’s poem is Letter to a Young Poet by Megan Fernandes. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem holds its epiphanies close. It lives in that space which grows from wholehearted obsession, specificity, and the knowledge that the act of returning is the kind of love that keeps us going.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to T...

Today’s poem is On Being by Ruben Quesada. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem captures our complex relationship with nature, how we experience the sublime of the seasons, but also, the way it is often mediated through our modern and mechanized era.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference:...

Today’s poem is Mami Told Me to Put Water under the Bed by Peggy Robles-Alvarado. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem professes the healing properties of water and the restorative powers of language to renew our connection to each other.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tin...

Today’s poem is Trans Loneliness by Rickey Laurentiis. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Society’s debates around gender identity boils down to this simple fact: people want others to see them as they see themselves. This is a pure, human need for affirmation from friends, parents, and peers. It builds self-esteem and mental stability.” Celebrate the power o...

Today’s poem is A House Called Tomorrow by Alberto Ríos. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I loved watching the volunteers at my polling place. They were cheerful. They lovingly bantered, though they certainly could have belonged to different political parties. They gave me a vision of selfless coexistence that felt like this defined us more than our public...

Today’s poem is Gala Noise by Diane Mehta. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem invites us to contemplate how language is not just what is heard, but what is conveyed beneath the surface. Underneath, it sees that we are interconnected with nature, linked to an existential restlessness which leads us to the act of making sounds.” Celebrate the power...

Today’s poem is Second Paradise by Chard deNiord. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s shrewd poem ardently shows how time shreds memories into a dreamlike sequence of events, yet we are preserved in our stories.” 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 Refugia by Traci Brimhall. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem knows some environments awaken us daily to the wonders. Maybe that is paradise, a place of first permission to go on loving the world.” ' 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 Shelf Life by Nathan Xavier Osorio. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “There’s something sad, sometimes, about taking in all of the country from the fringes. I used to view the highway as a symbol of escape and possibility. Now, I view the road as a complex portal to our great melancholy. Today’s poem exposes a thin veil of desolation on the s...

Today’s poem is Genetics by Sinead Morrissey. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The speaker in today’s poem professes an emotional and physical connection to parents who chose to go separate ways. Understanding the power of sacred love, the speaker in the poem invites a beloved to embark on a shared life together.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to...

Today’s poem is The Devouring Economy of Nature by Daniel Borzutzky. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I know there is no easy solution to economic inequality. I do wish that we channeled greater energy into figuring out the wealth gap, how to provide sustainable wages to working people. One of the corrupting aspects of our economic system is that it forces...

Today’s poem is After Vallejo by A.B. Spellman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Recently, I decided to be responsible and begin the process of creating a trust and establishing a will. I thought it morbid at first. Yet, planning the aftermath of my death empowered me. I don’t know when or where I will die. So having some say in that eventful day for me fee...

Today’s poem is Here We Are by Lauren K. Watel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem begins from the idea that we yearn for connection and healing, but that our conflicts feel irreconcilable — to the point that we do not trust a future free of our trauma, grief, and suffering.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every d...

Today’s poem is Between You and You by Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Writing can change the mind for the better. Poems shape our breathing, allow us to enter seas of consciousness that become part of the spontaneous energy of life. The improvised, spirited words in a poem are born out of a body free enough to let go.” Celebrate the pow...