The Slowdown

Today’s poem is Home Movies: A Sort of Ode by Mary Jo Salter. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “With so much of our treasured moments digitized on servers, it seems we’ve lost physical evidence of our lives. Yet, we own thousands more photos of ourselves than our parents and grandparents. Like many, I wonder what will happen to the virtual record of our existence once we depart the earth.” 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 Taking Stock by Elaine Equi. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem invites us to find the balance between deepening our self-awareness and actually living life. Sometimes our journey means not letting that journey inhibit our sense of 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 from "Elegy for the Times" by Adonis, translated by Robyn Creswell. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “For stateless people, writing poems, taking pictures, composing songs is precarious, but making art happens, nonetheless. Often, it is a counter insistence of one’s presence on earth. Today’s poem is a humanizing statement of profound sorrow borne of conflict and exile.” 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 Vulture by Ted Kooser. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem invites us to attune, to notice, to hear what’s communicated beneath our words and bodies, to read the signs, even if what is heard or seen or felt bears an ominous message.” 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 Abide by Jake Adam York. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem sees existence as a fleeting encounter of sublime immensity — one where we intertwine with the natural world, such that we have no other choice, but to awaken to all life around us.” 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 oracle by Duriel E. Harris. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem intrigues me for how it upholds the possibility of poetry as a terse, sacred voicing that emerges from within, where the inexpressible finds its way to the world as transcendent music, something far more compelling than the language of machines.” 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 Clearing by Jane Kenyon. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Dogs have a lot to teach us. Learning to care about the land and people is to live daily in the fullness of existence, such that we come to cherish and love those close to us and beyond.” 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 Grading Rubric by Antonio de Jesús López. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s brilliant poem speaks to the ordeal of enduring racial abuse and microaggressions in educational institutions. It slyly appropriates an academic assessment tool to point out that we are clearly failing in treating each other like whole humans.” 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 Pacific Power & Light by Michael Dickman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The beauty of poetry is its diversity and how it gives us an opportunity to feel language, rather than the poem acting only as a substitute for a Hallmark card or occasion for a punchline.” 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 Eureka! by Jessica Abughattas. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “To borrow a phrase, love calls us to the things of this world. But as today’s brilliant poem reminds us, in our search for happiness, we find our worth in relation to our freedom and societal expectations. We learn to self-affirm in our search for joy.” 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 Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack Gilbert. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Inadequacy is built into the enterprise of speaking; we struggle to say exactly what we need to say — if we even know what we need to say.“ 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 Negro Hero (to Suggest Dorie Miller) by Gwendolyn Brooks. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age. In this episode, Major writes… “When I last taught this poem, I asked a student to recite it. A Southeast Asian-American student could not mouth the once acceptable word “Negro.” Instead, without warning, she replaced the word with human, so that the title was “Human Hero,” and the black newspapers were “human weeklies.” It was heartbreaking. She simply could not say the word that, to her ear, sounded too close to the racial epithet with which we are all familiar. The class then discussed the nature of language and how context and time alter the meaning of words.” Celebrate the power of po

Today’s poem is Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age. In this episode, Major writes… “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is brilliant for how the speaker disproves the idea that his girlfriend could be compared to anything in nature. He takes aim at hyperbolic similes; he offers examples that deflate the notion of flawless physical perfection. Any poem either collapses or succeeds based on the originality of its vision. The substance of Shakespeare’s vision is that our imperfections are what make us truly beautiful and rare.” 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 Gravelly Run by A. R. Ammons. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age. In this episode, Major writes… “It is best if we come to know ourselves through its cycles and terrains, but without all the troublesome wrangling over questions of meaning. It is good simply to make peace with the rhythms of life and of death.” 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 from "Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age. In this episode, Major writes… “Time is the river that never dries up, that is always in motion. Yet, cycles of elections and global conflict appear as if we are going through the same debates and battles again. For sanity’s sake, it helps to remind myself that we are always moving forward, that change is real even if it seems elusive.” 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 Birches by Robert Frost. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age. \In this episode, Major writes… “I have long admired today’s poem by Robert Frost. “Birches” spotlights a young boy who makes his own fun in the outdoors. It’s a poem about self-reliant play. It is powerful for how it precisely describes a boy’s ascent up a tree then his launch onto solid ground. In that sense, the poem becomes an allegory for the speaker, who himself wishes to climb out of his adult world.” 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 Leaving by Madeleine Cravens. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem knows the world is enticing, seductive, full of possibilities. The hack is to consciously curate our pleasures — the slow, intentional cherishing of a life well-lived.” 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 Joseph Cornell App by David Roderick. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The great actor James Earl Jones departed this earth. His passing reminded me of a hilarious app idea I devised at a party. I called it the God App, where the great actor would simply recite the ten commandments. When I imagined a deity speaking, I thought of James Earl Jones, the rich baritone voice that gave us Darth Vader.” 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 This Living by Amber Tamblyn. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “In my mere five decades on earth, I’ve faced many challenges — thwarted dreams, failed friendships, career disappointments — that often left me feeling alone, stranded in the dry badlands, searing heat bearing down. And yet, of course, I wasn’t. A three-hour telephone conversation with a friend, an unexpected consoling note from a colleague, even a passing smile from that stranger who read signs of stress in my gait, all these could break down my self-involved isolation. Through a rich panoply of difficult moments, today’s poem names and confronts life’s consuming dramas.” 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 If only by Dawn Lundy Martin. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem unapologetically claims psychic space. In order to be at peace and clear-eyed, the speaker forgoes decorative language that would obscure what their heart and mind believe is ethically true.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp