The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is Love Sits by My Father by Qutouf Elobaid. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re revisiting some of our favorite episodes on love. This episode was originally released on August 31, 2023. In this episode, Major writes… “People in love are complicated; no one knows this more than the children, who get a front row seat to how affection...

Today’s poem is Short Essay on Love by Sarah Manguso. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re revisiting some of our favorite episodes on love. This episode was originally released on February 6, 2023. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem understands to the core that love requires, even anticipates failure. But maybe, even too, that a commitm...

Today’s poem is Without Name by Pauli Murray. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re revisiting some of our favorite episodes on love. This episode was originally released on November 21, 2023. In this episode, Major writes… “Today, words lead me to pockets of understanding, which I've carefully cultivated through writing poetry. The journey to insi...

Today’s poem is Love and the Deli Counter by Jill McDonough. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re revisiting some of our favorite episodes on love. This episode was originally released on July 10, 2023. In this episode, Major writes… “I love the spaces we enter, in which we feel a rich sense of our differences, of our collective humanity, and a li...

Today’s poem is Perhaps by Wen Yiduo, translated by Arthur Sze. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem takes me to the ancient grounds of the imagination, and a cultivated wonder that brings us closer to its magic and possibility.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/r...

Today’s poem is Love and the Moon by Nan Cohen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Sometimes, every which way we turn, the world reminds us that we carry a wounded heart. Love is beautiful until it is not, and then we are handed a chainmail of armor along with our insecurities. When we stumble out of those woods, we bring along burrs and nettles, but also, to...

Today’s poem is The Dangers of Contemplation by Ron Slate. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Every poem is a map, a transcription of a contemplative and roaming mind. I am curious about the images that arise out of the poet’s subconscious and the associative thoughts that follow. I particularly delight in the poet whose brain works at scale, a mind that soar...

Today’s poem is Facebook Status by Adrian Blevins. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “It is human to be curious about each other’s lives, to celebrate our friends’ wins and mourn, along with them, their losses. To acknowledge our inevitable changes. Today’s poem hilariously explains why our internet connections are like electrical wires that thread the night,...

Today’s poem is Ghazal for Mothers & Tongues by Sahar Muradi. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s fine poem is gorgeous for many reasons, but one is the way the poet enriches our ears with the sounds of words. Poems that are designed like today’s poem turn language into more than just a tool of communication — and into a ceremonial and opulent form...

Today’s poem is Dancing at The Get Down by Cat Wei. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Recently, my seventy-three-year-old father called to tell me how much fun he had at a local dance club. I was envious. He used to swim daily, but after health challenges, getting on the dancefloor, beneath swirling lights among deep shadows, is his preferred workout. Physic...

Today’s poem is Hunger by Ryler Dustin. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem reveals how our appetites take us beyond considerations of the earth and its resources. What we leave in our wake is a record of our cravings and our misguided sense of a limitless world.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes...

Today’s poem is Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World by Katie Farris. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Art is unequivocal evidence of our sanctity, of our ability to feel, to go beyond forbidden precincts into the depth of our emotions. I wish we would put a moratorium on questions of relevance of the arts and realize the gift of beauty that artists gra...

Today’s poem is Body's Ken by Simon West. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Poets thrive in that energy between knowing and not knowing. They attempt to convey a sense of awakening by marking language and their experiences and thoughts as memorable, as sacred, while honoring the conditions that urged them into song.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift...

Today’s poem is Venus's Flytraps by Yusef Komunyakaa. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Some poems have a hold on us, their lines haunt, like the chorus from a favorite song. They cling to the mind like burrs. I’ve said them to myself lying motionless in bed at night, and while tying my shoes in the morning. They keep giving; they console when I need them to...

Today’s poem is To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “I think some poets will come at me for this, but for a lot of reasons, poetry is like the original meme. Memes are by definition a form, mu...

Today’s poem is [I wandered lonely as a Cloud] or Daffodils by William Wordsworth. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “Today’s poem is by a poet famous, in his time, for using what was called “plain language.” It still sounds a bit… formal today, but the images...

Today’s poem is You & the Donkey Cart by Rosa Alcalá. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “We carry stories across our individual realities. And, like our listener, Margaret said, we carry our family stories, our habits and practices. They live across generat...

Today’s poem is To The Stone-Cutters by Robinson Jeffers. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “Our listener, Morgan, found writing poetry to be a tool to connect not only with her father’s homeland, but to connect with the people in her life, with her poetic line...

Today’s poem is After, We Try to Switch Our Hearts Back On by Joy Sullivan. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “Today’s poem reads almost like a bullet journal, a rapid log of experiences in a day. Through that we hear the speaker take hold of small pleasures. A...

Today’s poem is Sonnet for Ochún by Leslie Sainz. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “In today’s poem, I hear a shared melancholy, a world-weariness where the edges of life fail to offer answers. Yet, I detect, too, in the presence of a deity, the transits and rituals of hope and renewal.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every d...

Today’s poem is Mixed Marriage by Nick Laird. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Some days, we bicker, nothing major (pun intended). Often, it’s minor: control of the thermostat, recycling duty, my general proclivity to forget. On very rare occasions, we hit upon a disagreement that requires work — where we need to figure out why we react so strongly. I have...

Today’s poem is from “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return” by CAConrad. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem inhabits the breathlessness and press of love, that is creatively generative, that is organic in its speed and purpose, that is feverish and holy in its corporeal intensity.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today....

Today’s poem is Ode to Badminton by Prageeta Sharma. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “If it were up to me, everything I love would have a poem in praise of it. I mean everything: homemade chocolate cookies, park benches, sinuous roads beside city rivers — even to that clear plastic cap on a newly purchased deodorant stick, that this morning I only figured o...

Today’s poem is By Then by David Rivard. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I love the clarity in today’s poem, in how it nurtures self-awareness in the wake of emotional turmoil and growth.” 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 The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “When a performer brings their whole self the planets align. Life magically makes sense. Today’s famous poem ponders one of those moments in which, through another’s expression, all agonies and confusions give way to a dignified stasis.” Celebrate the power of...