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Poet Major Jackson is your guide on the pathways to feel and understand our common journey – through poetry. In sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery. Join The Slowdown for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode, every weekday. Produced by APM Studios in partnership with The Poetry Foundation and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. Make us a part of your routine as you drink coffee in the morning, as you take a walk in nature, or as you wind down to go to sleep in the evening. With host Major Jackson, we collectively take a moment to calm, to inspire, to learn, and to engage with the best emerging poets and established writers of our time and generations past, from Emily Dickinson to Danez Smith, from Amanda Gorman to Mary Oliver.
Listen to our back catalog for episodes by our previous hosts, Tracy K. Smith and Ada Limón, as well as guest hosts Jenny Xie, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tina Chang, Nate Marshall, Shira Erlichiman, and Jason Schneiderman. Our hosts and production team select poems that move them, and we hope they move you, too.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. Make us a part of your routine as you drink coffee in the morning, as you take a walk in nature, or as you wind down to go to sleep in the evening. With host Major Jackson, we collectively take a moment to calm, to inspire, to learn, and to engage with the best emerging poets and established writers of our time and generations past, from Emily Dickinson to Danez Smith, from Amanda Gorman to Mary Oliver.
Listen to our back catalog for episodes by our previous hosts, Tracy K. Smith and Ada Limón, as well as guest hosts Jenny Xie, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tina Chang, Nate Marshall, Shira Erlichiman, and Jason Schneiderman. Our hosts and production team select poems that move them, and we hope they move you, too.
1065 Episodes
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Today’s poem is Fish, Serpent, Egg, Scorpion by Kwame Dawes. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem highlights that cycle of hard truths and compassion passed between fathers and sons.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
1Today’s poem is Dolly Would by Julie E. Bloemeke. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “To build an image and reputation from dreams requires herculean efforts that often involve doubts, failures, and sacrifices, but as we hear in today’s poem, a devotedness to one’s art that transforms a passion into a stratospheric journey into the self. ” 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 Orientation by Cindy Juyoung Ok.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Every poem is a bridge between nature and us, in that what lies hidden, what is below, is somehow familiar, and brought to consciousness.” 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 i have an irrational fear of spiders by Charlie Getter.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem smartly interrogates the role of fears and how they might unreasonably control our lives.” 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 Visible Light by Heidi Seaborn.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “As a child, on summer evenings, my friends and I ran through the neighborhood collecting lightning bugs. They were most visible in vacant lots, but we feared those dark places we sometimes entered. So, the hunt for them as ten-year-olds also felt like an adventure. We gently coaxed them into glass mason jars then sat on the stoop counting their lights to see who had the most. Their underbellies lit up and cast a glow onto our faces. Later, beneath a sheet in bed, I stared into the jar as the fireflies crawled the glass and emitted their light.” 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 At the Rainbow Cattle Company by Bruce Snider. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem names the silent syncopated talk of the body that occurs when two people are in sync, in graceful movements, when they let each other lead.” 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 Americans by Katie Peterson. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Whenever I hear a person refer to people by their geographic or cultural or national association, I wince. In doing so, we falsely implicate everything from intelligence levels to physical appearances. This strikes me as crude, reductive, unintentionally demeaning.” 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 Alien by Greg Delanty. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “However tight the team of parents, and family and community beyond that, supporting a child in utero, that baby is carried by one body alone. Their body is not only one of creation, of labor, of internal mystery, but one of a singular emotional gravity.” 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 Felonious States of Adjectival Excess Featuring Comparative and Superlative Forms by A. H. Jerriod Avant. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I am drawn to poets who, like the author of today’s poem, bring imagination and attention to sonic idioms of a poem. They make reading aloud fun.” 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 How It Will End by Denise Duhamel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem illustrates how difficult it is to plot the fate of a couple, especially one whose ups and downs are played out publicly.” 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 Cy Twombly's Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor) by Javier O. Huerta. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Ekphrastic poetry sometimes pushes back against the idea of simple art made complicated in idea, born from an eccentric personality. Inspired by another famous Twombly painting, one that itself is inspired partly by a poem, today’s poem realizes the frenetic sense of the artist’s canvas is a conceptual product of a sophisticated and sometimes frustrating mind.” 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 Hagar in the Wilderness by Tyehimba Jess.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Today’s poet pays homage to an artist who, with her own hands, made art out of heroic, mythical, and biblical figures, whose visions were worthy of the substance of stone.” 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 Post-Industrial Society Has Arrived by Vidhu Aggarwal.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Poets possess an expansive intuition, a proclivity towards image-making that meets head-on the most difficult of artists. In responding to works of art, poets perform the gift of interpretation. By turning language into a critical practice, they find pathways into paintings and teach us how to see what they see. They make the paintings speak.” 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 Two Paintings Seen Again by Rachel Hadas.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Today’s ekphrastic poem makes a compelling assertion that to fully register the power of art, we must take our time to take it in.” 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 Not So Much an End as an Entangling by Linda Gregerson.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. The vision of birds stilled in motion at the center of Tom Uttech’s paintings invite similar speculations. Today’s poem reads an exodus of earth’s species as an ominous commentary, I surmise, on the decimation of the environment.” 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 English by Janel Pineda. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem brilliantly figures the psychological complexities of adopting a new language, and a way of thinking, while losing another.” 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 What Good Is A Castle by Linda Susan Jackson.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Those signs are back; a favorite restaurant near campus suddenly closed. My network news show has a new host; my local bagel shop removed the best breakfast sandwich this side of cream cheese from its menu board. These are reminders that nothing is permanent. Is anything sacred? Of course not. The only constant in life is change.” 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 In the House With No Doors by Sarah Kay.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem speaks to the intimacy roommates share, how sometimes we start off as strangers then, as we enter into each other’s routines, become the best of friends.” 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 Childhood by David Baker.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I enjoy today’s poem immensely for how it makes its opening comparison, then leads us to the sweet conclusion, one about an experience we all share. Yet, it individualizes through the power of metaphor.” 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 Empire of Light by Michael Dumanis.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem reveals how poets distinctly process the world. A fragmented mix of images might reflect how we naturally think. Spontaneity defines our lyricism, and its pleasure is its speed.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
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Part of my morning routine. Thank you for your time and passion.
Yay first to comment! I use this podcast for a quick little meditation after my morning workout. it's fantastic.