The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is What Good Is Silence by Phuong T. Vuong. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem illustrates returning to listening as a ventilation of the soul, sublimating the ego in the interest of interacting with more than just our thoughts.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https:...

Today’s poem is The Lifeline by Pádraig Ó Tuama. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “When natural disaster occurs, when catastrophe falls upon us, we humans lean into life. We need the counterbalancing force of creation and renewal to tilt the world back toward meaning and light. We pursue activities that resist a chaos of the mind and spirit, some endeavor th...

Today’s poem is The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Ailish Hopper. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “With great courage, writers, activists, and poets choose to speak for peace and the value of human life; yet they face being ostracized and harassed for their views. Today’s poem reminds me of the value of ethical resistance and the valor of asserting a fun...

Today’s poem is An Open Call to Single Daughters of Single Mothers by Katie Marya. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… "Today’s poem broadcasts a necessary remembrance and mapping of our mother’s physical selves, bodies that perhaps not only gave us life, but in all their manifestations served as the source of our stability and gains." Celebrate the power of po...

Today’s poem is Pleasure by Victoria Redel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem celebrates that maturing sensibility of being present and open, especially when your pleasures go beyond the pursuits of desire and the body.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4syn...

Today’s poem is The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The late poet Donald Hall said that “A poem is one inside talking to another inside.” We live chiefly in our own minds, but poetry allows us to make public our most intimate thoughts. Our true feelings struggle to find expression; our dreams are a valve. But poetry, too, a...

Today’s poem is Cliché by V. Penelope Pelizzon. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem makes use of the ocean as a paradoxical symbol of healing and regeneration yet, too, a site of debris and decay.” 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 On Meeting My Biological Father by Sarah Audsley. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “No adoptee’s experience is the same. Today’s poem portrays a meeting with a birth parent — the kind of encounter we seek to gain new information, but, it often does more to help us live, every day, with what we already knew.” Celebrate the power of poems with...

Today’s poem is Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me by Jane Hirshfield. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The clocks have struck another year. Soon, I will box up and archive 2023 in the mental basement of my mind, although I'm sure certain events of the past 365 days will reverberate in both predictable and not-so-predictable way...

Today’s poem is Objects in the Mirror are Closer Than They Appear by Alleliah Nuguid. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem reminds me of wildlife and humans who exist in our imagination as dangerous, how we eradicate or disappear those we fear, in our efforts to control our environments. Yet, their presence is magic, and can be irrepressible joy. ”...

Today’s poem is Fourth Wall Arpeggio by A. Van Jordan. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Sometimes, a speaker in a poem will acknowledge its own artificiality by addressing the reader directly or by making a self-referential remark, all to say, Hey, reader; I know you’re there, listening in. Breaking the fourth wall in poetry removes pretense and lays bare a...

Today’s poem is If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso by Gertrude Stein. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem is a touchstone example of art that altered how we hear words, but also, how we perform language to transform words into elements of our yielding and will.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every dona...

Today’s poem is Yet, the Loveliness by Michelle Bitting. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem reminds me of the power of granting forgiveness, of liberating each other from the confines of guilt, and of surrendering ourselves to each other’s humanity. That is its own ceremony of renewal and supplication.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to...

Today’s poem is The Memory of the Young by Maria Hummel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “With enough concentration, I can vividly recall my youth while writing. But lately, that mental time travel occurs even when I’m not at my desk. While performing the most mundane of duties, images overlay onto the present, like a form of augmented reality. Poems contai...

Today’s poem is Ode to Bones by Lynne Thompson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem riffs off a childhood name, to caravan us to all the possibilities of association which brings the speaker back to the uniqueness and individual nature of their being.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a differenc...

Today’s poem is I Am Trying to Love the Whole World by Jenny Browne. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “If only we viewed observations of the natural world and meditations on birds, mammals, and plant life as equally, critically urgent, we might awaken to the necessity of caretaking of our planet and each other. Birdwatching does not have to be a form of look...

Today’s poem is Ashes by Rahma O. Jimoh. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “As a poet, how can you write into that catastrophe? How can a poem artfully contain the struggle between the sanctity of nature and the unfettered business practices of corporations that put humans and the environment in harm’s way?” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slo...

Today’s poem is Hurrying Toward the Present by Suzanne Lummis. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “At a young age, I saw that the pain of rage and resentment is not just in your body. It can course through your actions, and send askew the course of your life. I’ve experienced my fair share of slings and arrows, wrongs done to me. As much as they hurt in the mo...

Today’s poem is Two Shadows by Maurice Manning. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I want someone in my daughter’s life who will sing to her when she is most full of doubts and uncertainties, when storms inevitably arrive. Today’s poem gorgeously anticipates the day ahead when our children will pursue their own loves, and what magic we might model for them.”...

Today’s poem is Making Things by Major Jackson. This moment of pause is a shortened version of an interview with Minnesota Public Radio’s Kerri Miller. The full version of this interview is available in the Big Books & Bold Ideas podcast feed, and as a video on our YouTube channel. Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyur...

Today’s poem is Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Harvard, Illinois is among a host of American cities and towns named for locales with more illustrious histories and associations: Paris, Texas; Rome, Maine; Athens, Georgia; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Today’s poem makes me think, first, of the city in upstate New York where some of my fa...

Today’s poem is Ambition by Sarah Wetzel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem illustrates the extent to which people will fabricate narratives to come off more gallant, more caring, more whatever, or simply not what they actually are. And yet, it unearths the human desires that show us why we lie.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The S...

Today’s poem is Cuffing Season by Lisa Fay Coutley. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Love is a force that reconciles what is, in contradistinction, wrong in the world. Because I know that love is real, and that love is right. But sometimes finding love is a journey that takes longer than some but is worth it. Today’s poem wrestles with the tentativeness by...

Today’s poem is Parallel Worlds by Lester Graves Lennon. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “In today’s poem, a harrowing car ride spawns questions of meaning and purpose, and the possibilities of our cosmic connections in the face of that which is unknown.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: http...

Today’s poem is In the Seam of Life by Rachel Galvin. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “A recent YouTube search for something else led me to an how-to video on land transference and group deeds . . . in the virtual world known as Second Life. Turns out, one can purchase everything from biscuits for their avatar dog, to a virtual silver-studded leather jacket...