The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is from FIXER by Edgar Kunz. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “In our old apartment, if it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Besides being old and hardly-maintained by management, the building was a living being, prone to moods. To fix her was an illusion. What we did was temporarily subdue, patch up, cover over.” Celebrate...

Today’s poem is Thirty-Fifth Year by Charif Shanahan. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “As each birthday arrives, what do we expect from our new age, its vantage point? Today’s poem unspools a wealth of questions, both practical and existential.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a diffe...

Today’s poem is Willing in the Orisha by Camonghne Felix. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “Do we reach for ritual to melt paralysis? Do we reach for ritual when our personhood is fragmented, or lost to us? Today’s poem explores the daring act of ritual. I love its decision to move toward incantation, toward worship.” Celebrate the power...

Today’s poem is Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “What makes someone famous? The dictionary says it’s the “state of being known or talked about by many people.” Today’s poet resituates our cultural obsession with stardom and flips on its head who gets to be fanatically revered.” Celebrate the power of poems wi...

Today’s poem is Crackerbell by Mary Ruefle. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “Today’s poem confronts the fork in the road where we are pushed to change. And though this push is ruthless and confusing and total, the speaker humbly persists. I learn a lot from that persistence, which could also be called self-love.” Celebrate the power of...

Today’s poem is The Jungle by Carrie Fountain. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “Today’s poet reflects on a girlhood lived in contrast to boys. What does it mean to be a girl, then a woman, then a mother to a son in this culture, this chaos, this jungle?” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation make...

Today’s poem is Sonnet written walking under the mess some magnolia made by Jay Deshpande. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “Today’s poem understands not just the bloom of romantic love, but the rot and mess and grit that’s just as worthy of our praise, of the glorious spending of our hearts.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to...

Today’s poem is The Dictator in Prison by Adélia Prado, translated by Ellen Doré Watson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “In one lifetime we’re tasked with bearing a range of horrors. It amazes me that underneath it all––the denial, dissociation, or rage––the heart keeps going. I used to think this gust of empathy was my weakness. I now...

Today’s poem is Very Large Moth by Craig Arnold. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Shira Erlichman writes… “Today’s poem teaches us that you can’t choose your holy moments. The poet is a sudden citizen of bewilderment. When it comes time to express a kinship across species, he finds himself bereft.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today....

Today’s poem is After We Buried the Dog in the Dark by Jin Cordaro. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “My family has a shelf of movies to test whether someone new to our orbit has a heart. At the top of this short list is the film Hachi: A Dog’s Tale. based on the true story of a white Akita dog named Hachiko. If said person is not bawling their eyes out by t...

Today's poem is Survivor by Geffrey Davis. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “These days, whenever I sit down to dinner with my kids or am fortunate to catch them in their busy lives, I wistfully recall the pleasures of becoming a father… and the shock of it. Not that Langston was an abstract idea for nine months, but when your child, pretty much a biological...

Today’s poem is A Guy in a Black SUV by William J Harris. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem, through use of hyperbole, voice, and tone, arrives at visualization as a form of retribution. Its strong cinematic action subverts and upends gender norms. The poem reminds me how we stretch our minds to manifest feelings and unknown states within—a powe...

Today’s poem is Sorcery by Jessica Hagedorn. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem cautions us to the bewitching, yet striking, perfection of art and beauty. We are susceptible to its magic, and even sometimes, to the magic of its maker.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyu...

Today’s poem is While Shaving by Alfredo Aguilar. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes "Today’s poem beautifully illustrates a startling recognition: parents provide us with the skills they’ll need us to perform when they are no longer independent, the lessons we will remember them by when they are no longer with us." Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to T...

Today’s poem is Voyeuristic Intentions by Adele Elise Williams. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “If the Yoruba proverb, character is beauty, is true, then, given the hostilities in the world and mass indifference, a bright spirit, full of warmth and compassion, is likely forged over time out of suffering. Such a soul exudes empathy and light. And thus, we a...

Today’s poem is Happy Campus by Rodrigo Toscano. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem of self-mocking irony makes the connection between our daily routines and the natural and artificial environments that we navigate—how we negotiate a dissonance that complicates our sense of what’s real and what’s unreal.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift...

Today’s poem is Labor Theory of Value by Angie Sijun Lou. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poet sees the field—or the writing of poetry—as a means of strengthening our bonds, our Platonic love. It’s a labor of seeing that transforms those fragmented moments, and unconnected objects in the world into an ever-expansive, idealized symbol of desire and...

Today’s poem is Penmanship by Allison Joseph. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem venerates the power of writing as an exchange with the world, how our thoughts travel outward, but then, in the end, bring us to the center of our own existence.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https...

Today’s poem is Letter to my sister by Trapeta B. Mayson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “My mother did not live long enough to read my poems about her. I like to think that she would have appreciated how I processed our shared history and relationships, even the difficult moments. I like to think she’d have granted me the latitude to craft the poems I nee...

Today’s poem is Epilogue by Robert Lowell. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem affirms the simple approach of narrating our lives as a means of shining a light on our complex era. Given our quick passage on earth, the poem argues that to tell our stories and name the people who populate our lives is noble and rewarding enough.” Celebrate the power...

Today’s poem is elegy for the moaner, 2016 by Airea D. Matthews. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Grieving the death of a relative, or friend, is hard work. Work made even more difficult by the sudden and complex task of interring a body and its belongings. The living are thrust into the minutiae of funeral proceedings, caterers, florists, lawyers, movers,...

Today’s poem is this is a library by Asiya Wadud. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s empathetic poem, which takes the tone of an elementary school primer, encourages a greater noticing of those who are leastwise among us, who fall outside the social fabric of our care. In doing so, hopefully, we might reverse prevailing attitudes toward the unhoused,...

Today’s poem is Prayer by Philip Metres. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem follows a long tradition of devotional poetry. In such poems, often a speaker asks for intervention, relief, and renewal. It is a human call out into the empty immensity of the universe. It is one of the things we do during quiet acts of meditation. We ask for help in dea...

Today’s poem is Via Politica by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Ani Gjika. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Everyday, people around the world are living through astonishing crises, both multi-generational and personal, vast and siloed. Today’s poem speaks to the all-encompassing and leveling despair we carry when we are survivors, or the descendents of su...

Today’s poem is from "The Garden of Limbs" by Cristina Pérez Díaz. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem, which alludes to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the first garden, celebrates the carnal sweetness of those chill days with a beloved. The poem brazenly proclaims the power (and maybe even recklessness) of sensuous mating that is its own...