The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is from “Requiem 1935-1940” by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “What is the role of poetry during war? Does it have a function? Then and now, poets and readers of poetry see language as the terrain where we find ourselves heard and affirmed in our beliefs. Poets protest, bear witness...

Today’s poem is In Love by Chloe Martinez. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The first time I was in love, I started missing baseball practice. Instead, I went to the library. Cherie spent afternoons doing her homework there. I could barely think about anything but her. What an immense feeling, to live with a perennial lump in my chest!” Celebrate the power...

En la rutina de nuestro diario vivir, nos vemos sumergidos en distintas situaciones que nos llevan a replantearnos la manera en como asumimos cada proceso que pone de manifiesto nuestra existencia.

Today’s poem is I Tune My Body and My Brain to the Music of the Land by Natalie Shapero. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I wonder how much of our authentic selves are lost in the belief that we are stronger collectively, when we adhere this way, to a set of civic virtues that may not fully align with our worldview. Is there a part of us that wishes to expr...

Today’s poem is Fuji, Ararat by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, translated by Eduardo Aparicio. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “Today’s exquisite poem infuses the Petrarchan sonnet with playful existentialism and self-soothing. It’s Nietzsche meets Anti-Eat, Pray, Love—and as a work of translation, it defies impossibility.” Celebrate the power...

Today’s poem is Agony's Rasp by Garous Abdolmalekian, translated by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “Today’s poem simultaneously inhabits the planes of presence and absence, conveying the suffering of avoidance from multiple perspectives. With restraint and disorienting beauty, we are at the mercy of the d...

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 y...

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 t...

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, class...

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.” Celebr...

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 w...

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...

Today’s poem is Hyperacusis by Santee Frazier. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “I find that I’m especially sensitive to sound. I also find that sonics drive my poetics. In my role as an editor, I gravitate towards writing that prioritizes rhythm, be it harmonious or unsettling, and I believe phonetics alone has the power to both eschew nar...

Today’s poem is When I Was in My Early Thirties I Saw Elton John in a Nightclub in Atlanta Called Tongue and Groove by Khadijah Queen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Leslie Sainz writes… “Today’s poem transports us to a night out worth remembering, not for its intoxicating music or the surprise of a celebrity sighting, but because our response to disappointme...

Today’s poem is Fish, Serpent, Egg, Scorpion by Kwame Dawes. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem highlights that cycle of hard truths and compassion passed between fathers and sons.” 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 Dolly Would by Julie E. Bloemeke. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “To build an image and reputation from dreams requires herculean efforts that often involve doubts, failures, and sacrifices, but as we hear in today’s poem, a devotedness to one’s art that transforms a passion into a stratospheric journey into the self. ” Celebrate the power...

Today’s poem is Orientation by Cindy Juyoung Ok. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Every poem is a bridge between nature and us, in that what lies hidden, what is below, is somehow familiar, and brought to consciousness.” 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 i have an irrational fear of spiders by Charlie Getter. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem smartly interrogates the role of fears and how they might unreasonably control our lives.” 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 Visible Light by Heidi Seaborn. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “As a child, on summer evenings, my friends and I ran through the neighborhood collecting lightning bugs. They were most visible in vacant lots, but we feared those dark places we sometimes entered. So, the hunt for them as ten-year-olds also felt like an adventure. We gently co...

Today’s poem is At the Rainbow Cattle Company by Bruce Snider. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem names the silent syncopated talk of the body that occurs when two people are in sync, in graceful movements, when they let each other lead.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://ti...

Today’s poem is Americans by Katie Peterson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Whenever I hear a person refer to people by their geographic or cultural or national association, I wince. In doing so, we falsely implicate everything from intelligence levels to physical appearances. This strikes me as crude, reductive, unintentionally demeaning.” Celebrate the...

Today’s poem is The Alien by Greg Delanty. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “However tight the team of parents, and family and community beyond that, supporting a child in utero, that baby is carried by one body alone. Their body is not only one of creation, of labor, of internal mystery, but one of a singular emotional gravity.” Celebrate the power of poems...

Today’s poem is Felonious States of Adjectival Excess Featuring Comparative and Superlative Forms by A. H. Jerriod Avant. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I am drawn to poets who, like the author of today’s poem, bring imagination and attention to sonic idioms of a poem. They make reading aloud fun.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown...

Today’s poem is How It Will End by Denise Duhamel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem illustrates how difficult it is to plot the fate of a couple, especially one whose ups and downs are played out publicly.” 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 Cy Twombly's Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor) by Javier O. Huerta. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Ekphrastic poetry sometimes pushes back against the idea of simple art made complicated in idea, born from an eccentric...