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 ack...
Today’s poem is Brooklyn is for Breakups by Chen Chen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “I have experienced a whole lot of life, and romance only forms threads of that life, woven into all the other moments. The threads are often short. They have loose ends. What I struggle with – what I’ve struggled with for years – is naming the importance of the relationships I’ve had with people that don’t fit neatly into a category.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
--------
5:32
1240: Mother of the English Language by Nicole Arocho Hernández
Today’s poem is Mother of the English Language by Nicole Arocho Hernández. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem has that kind of intimacy you only achieve by deciding to be weird together. When we forgo a tight grip on meaning, sometimes we get a little closer to the truth of feeling.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
--------
5:24
1239: My Father Flying by Jan Beatty
Today’s poem is My Father Flying by Jan Beatty. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Grief feels, sometimes, like a burden. A heavy one. But it is also a practice. People we love leave this earth, but they don’t leave us. We can find lightness in small rituals, small memorials to share with the world the version of the person that we have folded up inside of ourselves.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
--------
5:44
1238: Forgiveness Rock Record by Tawanda Mulalu
Today’s poem is Forgiveness Rock Record by Tawanda Mulalu. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem excavates the hard route to self-love, but it also shows us the trick: that self-love doesn’t happen all alone.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
--------
5:59
1237: Shadow Play by Jessica Fisher
Today’s poem is Shadow Play by Jessica Fisher. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem speaks to someone who left marks on this earth hundreds of years ago. It asks what elemental — and metaphysical — forces moved through them, like wind playing the chimes. Just like those forces did then, and do today, and will tomorrow.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
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.
USA