The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is In An Elevator with Ashbery, Crossing Stanzas, Bashfully by Alina Stefanescu. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem gently refuses to consign poetry to the world of philosophical musing, semiotics, and language games, which many have experienced in the difficult and wildly associative poetry of the great American poet, John Ashbery.”...

Today’s poem is Areyto for the Shipwrecked: The Case for Spanglish by Vincent Toro. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem celebrates the power of speaking multiple languages, of having options to fulfill poetry’s demand to achieve ever more expression of human emotion.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation m...

Today’s poem is from THIRSTY by Dionne Brand. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I love the beauty of natural spaces, and will never jettison the sense of sacred communion there, but cities serve as staging grounds for my feelings of agape, the benevolence I feel from and extend to fellow human beings.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown...

Today’s poem is Emptying by Aaron Zhang. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I know that when I cannot write, when the words fail to arrive, something intangible is obstructing passage to the areas of my brain and heart. It hijacks my ability to imagine, to really hear the poetry of the world around me.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown...

Today’s poem is Portrait of My Father With the Letter V by Bill Hollands. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Who we are today, and eventually, who we are in memory, grants our loved one’s access to modes of living. We can connect in remembrance of traditions of existence that affirm who we fundamentally are and what we could possibly become.” Celebrate the po...

Today’s poem is Burnt Plastic by Sean Singer. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is by Sean Singer, who, like me, is a teacher, but at a certain point he became a cab driver to support himself. In his poems about driving a cab, he experiences not a lilting relational arc of guiding students through a semester, but a stacca...

Today’s poem is Part by Phillis Levin. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem uses the form of a dictionary definition the way other poems use the form of the sonnet or villanelle. Instead of starting with a highly technical and specific word, like “irony” or “cardiovascular,” Phillis Levin starts with the seemingly simple wor...

Today’s poem is To the Friend Who Is Crying on the Phone by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “In today’s poem, the poet looks at what it means for things to change—what it means to live in the present and to plan for the future—and how painful and destabilizing it can be when what we expected, planned for,...

Today’s poem is in the dormitories after dark by James Fujinami Moore. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “In today’s poem, the poet revisits a childhood experience in which the youthful collective exerts its power by ganging up on another boy. Notice how the poem moves from observation, to complicity, and then to how a youthful wound m...

Today’s poem is Uh Huh: Hi, Hula Tooth by K. Silem Mohammad. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is part of a series that the poet calls Sonnagrams. He uses a program to rearrange the letters in each of Shakespeare’s sonnets to get a whole new poem, and then he makes a title out of the letters he didn’t use yet. Without kno...

Today’s poem is Simulation Theory by Leigh Stein. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “At the center of the Matrix is the idea that contemporary life is actually a computer simulation, and today’s whip-smart poem takes that idea as its starting point. The speaker looks at the oddly contemporary problem of people who can’t tell the differ...

Today’s poem is Short Talk on Waterproofing by Anne Carson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “In today’s poem, Anne Carson engages Franz Kafka, but not directly. Carson calls our attention to a small act of care, the tiny detail of a loving act taking place against a background of atrocity. It reminds us that sometimes the best way to...

Today’s poem is Sorrow Is Innate in the Human by Francesca Bell. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is about motherhood. The speaker focuses less on what it means to her to be a mother, than on what her child is experiencing, and what her child might know and might need.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slo...

Today’s poem is Where are the girls who were so beautiful? from “33” by Julia Alvarez. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Lately, I’ve heard many bemoan the end of movie stardom, but it’s comforting to remember that it’s an old argument. Three decades ago, we were already wondering what had happened to the glamor and melodrama of 1950’...

Today’s poem is Stereo by Anne Waldman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “‘Tis the season of weddings! In years past, I’ve poured libations; I’ve even read a poem, but this summer, I have the privilege and am hugely excited to officiate the nuptials of our friend and digital producer of The Slowdown, James Napoli and fiancé Britta Greene. Regarding, I’ll jus...

Today’s poem is Dear Past and Future Metastasis, by Chiyuma Elliott. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s fine poem makes delicate use of captured dialogue. The poem reveals our clumsy attempts to render legible who we are. Mostly we pass expected, typical speech between us but, occasionally, we make utterances so clear that they startle even ourselves....

Today’s poem is He Laughed With A Laugh by JonArno Lawson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Myka and I rescued today’s fun poem from the cutting floor of our children’s poetry episodes. We present it to you today. Enjoy!” 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 Extreme Close-up by Susan Rich. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Noticing and paying attention to my surroundings is more than for the purpose of writing poems. I’m trying to bring the world closer to me. To call up daily experience by zooming in, by locating language that is as lush as life yet elegantly sparse, well, then, that is an act o...

Today’s poem is The Pathology of Currency by Matthew Lippman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem humorously parodies the secret nature of money and the endless, if not stressful, cycle of working and spending.” 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 She Loves Me, She Love Me Not by Desirée Alvarez. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Why do we make bad decisions, whether reasoned or rash, when we know deep down that they are not sound? I don’t believe people when they announce they have no regrets. I find feelings of regret slightly useful. They help us muse over missed opportunities or ha...

Today’s poem is The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish by Joshua Weiner. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem dramatizes the hidden transaction of our obsessions. We are claimed by the world as much as we take in — sometimes, even more.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https:...

Today’s poem is For the Poet Who Is Your High School English Teacher by Gary Margolis. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem honors the teachers among us who are also poets, whose passion for poetry helps students to reimagine and change their world.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference:...

Today’s poem is This Is My Vow by Lucia Mae Pitts. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem, though written nearly one hundred years ago, knows that to live today is to heroically make a pledge of hope, to seek the positives, to practice the gospel of joy, and in doing so to defeat pessimism and stave off an all-consuming gloom.” Celebrate the power of...

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 Nowhere Else to Go by Linda Sue Park. This week’s episodes are for, and feature, young poets. Climate change is an urgent issue for everyone — and our best reminder of this is the young people who are pushing for action. Today’s co-host, Durete, is one of those young people who has marched on the front lines. Her story, and today’s poem, point out a critical factor of this fight: t...