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American Public Media

Host Maggie Smith is your daily poetry companion. Poetry is one of the greatest tools we have to wield our own attention — to consider our own lives and the lives of others, to help us live creatively and compassionately, to use that attention to lean into wonder, and joy, and truth, and to find hope — to keep hoping. The Slowdown community knows that reflecting on a poem, every weekday, can connect us to our inner world and the world around us. Listen as you make your morning coffee, as you go on a walk in your neighborhood, as you pull away from the to-do list, as you resist the dismal, endless scroll to share five minutes of perspective through the lens of poetry, from poets old and new, well-loved and emerging onto the scene. Brought to you by American Public Media, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is Local Mission by Kai Carlson-Wee. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I’m someone who likes to read a book without having read any reviews or think pieces about the book or the author. Sometimes I prefer to engage with art—to listen to a record or see a film—without expectations. With a relatively clean slate. I want you to have that experience with today’s poem, a longer one, so I’m going to get out of the way. Listen and let its many pleasures find you.”

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1392: Local Mission by Kai Carlson-Wee

Today’s poem is Never-ending Birds by David Baker. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem is one I’ve carried around in my mind for years, one whose language I flash to instinctively when I see a flock of birds, especially a murmuration of starlings. I think of the phrase “never-ending birds”—a phrase coined not by the speaker of this poem, but by the speaker’s child.” 

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1391: Never-ending Birds by David Baker

Today’s poem is The Poem Climbs the Scaffold and Tells You What It Sees by Natasha Oladokun. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “There is power in naming, as today’s poem reminds us. Once you’ve seen the violence tucked inside the place name Lynchburg, barely hidden at all—hidden in plain sight—I don’t think you’ll be able to see or say the word the same way again. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Nor should you.”

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1390: The Poem Climbs the Scaffold and Tells You What It Sees by Natasha Oladokun

Today’s poem is Sehnsucht by Michael Dumanis. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem introduced me to a new word for longing or yearning—and it showed me a way to use that expansive desire as a frame for the magic of everyday life.”

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1389: Sehnsucht by Michael Dumanis

Today’s poem is When I Learn Catastrophically by Martha Silano.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem unexpectedly merges the playfulness of anagrams with the gravitas of a terminal diagnosis—the weight of reckoning with the end of one’s life. But when you think about it, an anagram isn’t just play. It’s a way of making a thing out of something else entirely. A way of seeing—and creating—other possibilities. A way of containing multitudes.” 

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1388: When I learn Catastrophically by Martha Silano

Today’s poem is Different Kinds of Sadness by Jenny Molberg. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When I lost my joy, my generous friends were there. It can be so hard to accept help from others, especially if you pride yourself on being self-sufficient, but I took them up on their offers of meals, and company, and advice. And I’m so glad I did, because these things were all lifesaving. All of these things, in their own ways, helped me close some wounds. All, in their own ways, restarted my heart.” 

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1387: Different Kinds of Sadness by Jenny Molberg

Today’s poem is Night of the Living, Night of the Dead by Kim Addonizio.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “It might surprise you to know that one of my favorite genres is the zombie movie. I like my zombies fast, like in ‘Train to Busan’ and ‘28 Days Later,’ and I like my zombies slow, like in the old classics directed by George Romero. In ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ the zombies shamble so slowly, people can run right by them. They seem unable to figure out doorknobs and fence latches and cars. It’s black-and-white, so the gore isn’t that gory: the blood and guts are gray, after all! It’s still scary, though—because the zombies are seemingly uncontainable. They just keep coming at you. Today’s poem has been a favorite of mine for years, and it seemed like the right choice for Halloween.” 

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1386: Night of the Living, Night of the Dead by Kim Addonizio

Today’s poem is At Night by Stanley Plumly.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes, “Today’s poem is by one of my favorite poets, the late Stanley Plumly. Maybe more than anyone else in my life, Stan understood the double bind of deep solitude: that for the poet, for the artist, it’s as lonely as it is necessary. It’s both.” 

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1385: At Night by Stanley Plumly

Today’s poem is I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows by Julia Kolchinsky.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Children are so talented at asking unanswerable questions. Questions that cut you to the quick. I remember driving around with my daughter Violet when she was in preschool—three, four years old—and she would ask me these enormous, existential questions from her booster seat behind me.”

 Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1384: I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows by Julia Kolchinsky

Today’s poem is The Situation in Our City by Ciona Rouse.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “This poem has me thinking more and more about chance, and about our circumstances. It also has me thinking about the ways we take care of one another, and how we can—and must—do BETTER. As James Baldwin famously wrote, 'The children are always ours.'"

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1383: The Situation in Our City by Ciona Rouse

Today’s poem is Fragment 31 by Sappho, translated by Christopher Childers.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “If you listen close enough to a poem, especially to the very best of them, you can hear on their surface, the poet’s breathing and silences shaped by the pace and noise of their age. You can hear a voice fastened to the page, the speech of the era in which the poem was written, along with images that float into our mind’s eye which are also of a period like red wheelbarrows, pool players, frigates, and 8-track cassettes.” 

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1185: Fragment 31 by Sappho, translated by Christopher Childers

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