The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is Split by Paul Hlava Ceballos. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poet makes use of the poem as a repository of autobiographical facts, all while dramatizing larger questions of origin, citizenship, immigration, and nationhood.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://ti...

Today’s poem is If There Is Another World by Malena Mörling. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s compelling poem makes an implicit argument—that evidence of a parallel world might just be in front of our eyes. Instead of smashing atoms, we merely need to observe and record our daily singularities, which feel, at times, surreal and otherworldly. As with...

Today’s poem is Six for Gold by Kate Hanson Foster. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Confession: As a young parent, when my children barraged me with questions, so many times, I wanted to [poof] disappear. We’ve all experienced this moment (right?) when a child suddenly becomes a human question generator or a “you-think-you’re-smart-but-I’m-going-to-bring-y...

Today’s poem is Liturgy for Family Circles by Joanna Currey.

Today’s poem is Some Madness There by Charlotte Pence.

Today’s poem is Dear Future Me (#12) by Lena Moses-Schmitt. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Writing poetry is chiefly a search for language that makes a tidy explanation of both the present and the past, with the hope our mind grabs on so that the poem emerges also as a visceral experience of thinking, that is, thinking as an unfolding and awakening, both...

Today’s poem is A Ruin by Paul Muldoon.

Today’s poem is Family Court by Patricia Kirkpatrick. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s heartbreaking poem conveys those acute emotional feelings of failure and sheer disbelief that arrive when a marriage is irreparably damaged. Once again, poetry, in its restorative powers to name the inner life, sets us on a journey to restoration and rebuilding.”...

Today’s poem is Zelda Fitzgerald by Aria Aber. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “We have a long history in American poetry of dramatic monologues, of taking on a character in our own expression. Lately, however, I’ve had trouble working out the ethics of portraying someone other than myself. And yet, as one poet says, the dramatic monologue has been an impor...

Today’s poem is The Whole World is the Best Land I Ever Lived by Lynn Melnick. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I’m always looking for people who don’t want to retreat from the world, but to charge into it with gusto and love. I want to learn their secret. Today’s poet helps me learn. She meditates on being so devoted to the world that she decided to bring...

Today’s poem is Agoraphobia by Natasha Sajé. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-seven. It’s not because I’m a New Yorker—I finished High School in Maryland, and it’s not because I had a principled opposition to fossil fuels, though I wish I could say it was. It’s because I was in a car acciden...

Today’s poem is Pieta by Michelangelo: Marble, 1499 by Darrel Alejandro Holnes. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem considers an unpainted statue by Michelangelo, depicting Mary holding her son Jesus just after his removal from the cross. I remember seeing this statue when I was very young and being deeply moved both by the...

Today’s poem is The Truth by Natasha Rao. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “A pretty common response to loss is to encourage other people to cherish what…and whom… they still have. When someone loses a parent, they remind the people around them to call their own mom and dad more often, or they post on social media to exhort you to hold your loved ones a litt...

Today’s poem is Fire Destroys Beloved Chicago Bakery by Nathan McClain. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem starts with a conceit, an idea or premise that motivates the poem. The speaker misreads the word “fire” as “father”— and then proceeds along the twin lines of malapropism and Freudian slip. At times the usage is funny...

Today’s poem is A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck by Ilya Kaminsky. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is from a sequence of poems about a town that has been invaded by an occupying force. Both sides believe that they are on the side of right, and both sides justify their violence by calling it a response to the...

Today’s poem is "anyone can be beautiful: by Kay Gabriel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is from a sequence of sonnets celebrating Candy Darling. The poet starts her poems with a quote from Darling’s diaries, engaging her intellect, but never forgetting the beautiful surface she presented to the world.” Celebrate the p...

Today’s poem is Two Boys Ago by Kazim Ali. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “There’s something wonderful about having no context, about the first time you encounter an idea in art or life, that shock of recognition and that glimpse of a new world, but there’s also something wonderful about being able to see how that idea fits into a b...

Today’s poem is The Railroad Worm by Kimiko Hahn. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Night can be cozy or night can be sexy, and night is always spiked with a little bit of danger. Night has always felt full of possibility to me. In college, I loved coming back to the dormitories at night, seeing the lights on in my friends’ windows. W...

Today’s poem is The Illiterate by William Meredith. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is about taking time to turn over and over the mysteries of gratitude and the ways in which desire makes us strange to ourselves. The poet uses the mysteries of writing and the figure of illiteracy not to pin down what it meant for him t...

Today’s poem is Panama Hat by David Lehman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s instructive poem realizes that sometimes, simply saying what happened with accuracy is the poem, naming in such a way that we become enchanting to ourselves.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl....

Today’s poem is What's Been Caged by Jamaica Baldwin.

Today’s poem is Don't Touch by Sarah Carson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “When I hear of violent shootings in some part of the country, places of worship in Pittsburgh and Charleston, or a grocery store in Buffalo, concert venues and clubs, our schools, not only am I devastated and returned to early trauma, I think once again how we continually fail eac...

Today’s poem is Against Poetry by Diane Seuss. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The truth is, I have questioned poetry’s value, and my role in making it. I don’t know what to do when people ask “What kind of poetry do you write?” Picture me, wide-eyed blinking with a fake smile, like I was thrust onto a red carpet. Or what to do when someone states with mil...

Today’s poem is Naming the Waves by Alison Prine. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The love language in today’s poem can be classified as “words of affirmation” — in this case, words that describe the seaside, but also the world that the speaker and their love share. It models a spirit of full immersion, one in which the power of seeing becomes a vow of com...

Today’s poem is How by Heid E. Erdrich. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Isn’t it a pleasure sometimes to simply live in the ineffable? I have noticed lately that running to retrieve my phone to source answers short-circuits one of my favorite feelings in life: the evocative experience of being awed, encountering something vast and grand. Today’s poem is fu...