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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 Reverse Requiem by Ina Cariño. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem inspired me to learn more about requiems — what they are, how they’ve evolved, and how we might think of them more broadly and metaphorically.” 

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

1480: Reverse Requiem by Ina Cariño

Today’s poem is After Dinner by James Ciano. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem reminded me of one of my father’s rituals when I was young, one of his ways of taking care of himself. He’d go to the driving range at the local golf center some evenings after dinner to, in his words, ‘hit a bucket of balls.’ When we return to our rituals, we bring whoever we are that unique day, and we link it with whoever we’ve been before. In our rituals, we can find our own wholeness in a fractured world.” 

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

1479: After Dinner by James Ciano

Today’s poem is If Night You Were a City by Adam Wiedewitsch. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I’ve always loved myths, legends, fables, and fairy tales. When I was young, the myth of Icarus was one that captured my imagination.”

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

1478: If Night You Were a City by Adam Wiedewitsch

Today’s poem is Surety by Anna Zumbahlen. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Writing is a way of memorizing moments. I know this. I do this. Because a poem can act as a portal, taking me back to a specific time and place. So often, mid-experience, I start to sense the poetic possibility of the moment. I find myself making a metaphor or grasping for imagery and descriptive language. I’m half living in the present, half processing this moment’s future on the page.” 

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

1477: Surety by Anna Zumbahlen

Today’s poem is The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Poets are known for making big moves in small spaces. We value brevity and compression, which go hand in hand. In a brief poem, maybe a poem with only a handful of lines, each word weighs a ton. We have to choose them carefully. An enormous amount of meaning — and possibility — is packed inside every word. I picture them as expandable suitcases, unzipped so that we can stuff even more inside them. That’s compression! The words themselves may be few, but they carry a great deal.” 

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

1476: The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

Today’s poem is Out of These Wounds, the Moon Will Rise by Jay Hopler. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem is about wishing, and in that way, I think it’s about hope. Even when a wish is farfetched and seems less than likely, hope is what allows us to make it anyway.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1475: Out of These Wounds, the Moon Will Rise by Jay Hopler

Today’s poem is Epistemic Distance by Emma Bolden. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I’m a poet, so I’m all for nuance. I embrace ambiguity, and I’m flexible in my thinking. But I refuse to believe that we’re living in a post-factual world. We might be tempted to call epistemology too abstract, too intellectual, too high brow, not relevant to the lives of real people. Who needs to know about this branch of philosophy when we’re just trying to get by, day by day? But if there was ever a time to think about what we know, and how we know it, it’s now.” 

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

1474: Epistemic Distance by Emma Bolden

Today’s poem is Solar Eclipse by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “The last total solar eclipse, my kids and I put on cardboard eclipse glasses and spread a big quilt in our backyard, where we could lay and look up. I could see neighbors in the yards around us doing the same thing. We were all ogling the sky. When totality happened, the sky got darker and the air felt cooler. Our patio lights, which automatically come on at dusk, lit up. It was so eerie. And at the same time, it was so nice to be looking up with everyone else, sharing the same experience.” 

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

1473: Solar Eclipse by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Today’s poem is The Road to Baghdad by Seth Brady Tucker. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Home is a mythic place as much as a real place. It’s different in our minds than it is on the map. And some of what we remember isn’t on the map at all — the way we felt when we were there, how we spent our time in that place, and who we were with. The emotional cartography of any place is different from its actual cartography.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1472: The Road to Baghdad by Seth Brady Tucker

Today’s poem is It Was Like This: You Were Happy by Jane Hirshfield. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “If someone asked you, at the end of your life, “What was your life like?” I wonder what you might say. How would you characterize your lived experience — the whole of it, cradle to grave? You couldn’t tell every story, or detail every friendship or romantic relationship. You couldn’t list all of your jobs or accomplishments in some sort of highlight reel. You couldn’t describe every place you visited and what you experienced there. So how would you summarize your life? Your tiny-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things-but-enormous-to-you life?” 

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

1471: It Was Like This: You Were Happy by Jane Hirshfield

Today’s poem is Common Denominators by Cynthia Arrieu-King. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “There’s one phrase toward the end of this poem that I keep coming back to: “The earth is a school.” The more I hear it, the more I agree. The earth is a school. The world is for learning and becoming, and we humans — we students — have so very much to learn.” 

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

1470: Common Denominators by Cynthia Arrieu-King

Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst

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