The Slowdown

Today's poem is Geranium by Karen Solie. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem reminds me that even though “volunteer plants” may create extra work for me, I respect their hardiness, their resourcefulness, and their ability to take root.” 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 Poem about everything except— by Amy Lemmon. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I was drawn to today's poem from the get-go because of its title: ”Poem about everything except—.” I went in anticipating maximalism — “everything but the kitchen sink,” as the saying goes, and the poem delivered.” 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 Or am I a room with a roof taken off, still holding onto my idea of ceiling by Kelly Hoffer. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Fireplaces, thunderstorms, ocean waves—these sounds are popular “white noise” for sleep and relaxation. And it's odd, when I think about how these sounds represent very real dangers in nature. About how we are soothed by the contained version of something that can harm 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 Somewhere Else by Adam J. Gellings. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I was born at 4:30 in the afternoon on a cold Sunday in February. All of this is either useless information — time of day, day of the week, month of the year — or it's part of our own myth-making.” 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 Sleep by Matthew Dickman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Poems so often say the things we can't. They give language and shape to ideas that feel too big for words — like love, and mortality, and grief.” 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 Perspective, Coyoacán by Corey Van Landingham. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem is an ekphrastic poem, a poem inspired by a piece of art. It opens with an epigraph that is a quote by Frida Kahlo. It strikes me now, reading that line of hers, that while she's talking about painting herself, it can also refer to writing about oneself.” 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 Word for It by Kevin Craft. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “The planet we call home is full of miracles, and we don't have to look hard to find them. Today's poem is about paying attention to the beauty around us, and to the life around us, even if we don't fully understand it. Especially if we don't fully understand it.” 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 Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem is such a beautiful meditation on knowing ourselves, and knowing what we need to be at home in our own 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 February by Jim Moore. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Despite February being my birth month, it is easily my least favorite month of the year. The winter weather in the Midwest is brutal. By mid-January, the twinkling lights and holiday cheer that make December bearable are gone. By February, I'm over it.” 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 on projection by Raena Shirali. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “One of the things I love about poetry—one of the things I look forward to, and revel in, as a reader and listener—is the way a poet can make the familiar strange. A familiar landscape, thanks to poetic language, can be transformed into something unfamiliar.” 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 an excerpt from THERE IS ONLY ONE GHOST IN THE WORLD by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “ Today's piece is collaborative, written by Sophie Klahr and Cory Zeller. I love the way it begins with the legend of the Bermuda Triangle but then turns toward the incredibly personal, though there isn't a single person's perspective or experience behind it.” 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 Rubicon by Carl Phillips. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “‘Crossing the Rubicon' has long been a widely used idiom. It refers to having stepped over a line, or passed a point of no return. We use it to say that one has taken the final step into dangerous waters from which there is no retreat; once that line has been crossed, nothing will ever be the same. A new beginning of a certain kind.” 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 Historical Site by Tommye Blount. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem is one of those that crushes me with its ending. Our Detroit poet manages to whittle the grand and often devastating expansiveness of history right down to the explosive synapses which drive and alight our very gray matter.” 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 Katherine with the Lazy Eye. Short. And Not a Good Poet by francine j. harris. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Everyone is a hero to someone, or a beauty, or a problem, or all of the above. Today's poem acknowledges exactly that with a brutal, identifiable honesty. But what this poet insists that we remember is how we are all, also, even if not loved, then so, so very lovable.” 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 Closing Time; Iskandariya by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem, in ways that I aspire to in my own writing life, manages to take a deep breath in and collapse two thousand years of danger into a single moment of misunderstanding.” 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 A Backstory Beyond My Recounting by Paulann Petersen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem asks who we think we are. That existential question can feel like judgment or threat, but the poet turns it back toward the daily realities of our own agency.” 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 Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Our most important journeys often take us through vistas that we hadn't, couldn't, even imagine when we took our first steps. Leaning into adventure forces us to embrace uncertainty.” 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 Home by Warsan Shire. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Immigration, which built the United States—for better and for worse—is again on trial not just here, but in much of the West. The crackdowns are beyond devastating, yet the potential for complete societal collapse seems unable to trigger our better natures to see each other's humanity.” 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 Nightline: September 20, 1982 by June Jordan. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem reminds me of the power of poetry to comment, to respond, to shed light and offer us space to form our own impressions of what the facts may mean. To decide, then, with the knowledge provided by our very own bodies, what we mean to do about it.” 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 Orchestra by Russell Brakefield. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Restoration, like most things worthwhile, is far from simple. But we know, and this poet shows us, that by taking such deliberate steps toward doing recovery, repair, and renewal, in our poetry as well as in our environmental stewardship, we re-establish our own ability to live our own best 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 Gratitude by Cornelius Eady. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem makes a promise of its title, dresses it in flesh and bone, and tracks it across time. It's a clear, bold promise that might actively change the future not only for its speaker, but for the world we all share.” 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 Mistake by Heather Christle. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “As humans, we're hardwired to see faces. How many of us have come upon a discarded item of clothing or a balled up blanket on the side of the road and shuddered to think it might be a dog or a deer? There's a sense of relief when we realize we're looking at an object, not a dead creature, but there's also another feeling—one I hadn't been able to put my finger on until I read today's poem.” 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 Hackberry by Cecily Parks. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem is a kind of love poem—to a beloved tree, and to the sense of home it created.” 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 Congratulations! Your Grief Is About to Stop Being Relevant! by Bridget Bell. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem captures a time of grief in the speaker's life, when life goes a little quiet after a flurry of support and care.” 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 Come Back! by Camille Guthrie. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “One of the poets I discovered in college was H.D.. Born Hilda Doolittle, she published under her initials. I remember being wowed by her poems, which were experimental and strange, unlike anything I'd read before—and unlike anything I've read since.” 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 Apocatastasis by G.C. Waldrep. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When a poet, or a child, plays with figurative language, they explore the possibilities and the boundaries of the words we use to describe the world around us. Life will throw at us things that are hard or impossible to describe, both beautiful and awful things. So I think that kind of play isn't just a writing tool—it's a life skill.”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 Birthday Wish by David Groff. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem muses on different kinds of knowing without privileging one over the other. What we know vs. what animals know vs. what plants know, for instance. I think of us humans as being on a need-to-know basis, and this poem reminds me that we don't need to know—or be—everything." 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 New Year by Kate Baer. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Is it too late to wish you all a Happy New Year? I don't think so. I don't think there's ever an expiration date on well wishes, and frankly, we need all the well wishes we can get for 2026!” 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 Lost It by Monica Ferrell. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I've misplaced—or lost—many things in my life, but a few come to mind because losing them pained me. A few Polaroid pictures of a loved one who's gone now. Some vintage clothes I was attached to. A long handwritten letter. At first, losing those irreplaceable items felt like losing the keys to that loved one, that place, that time. But I eventually realized the doors to those memories are still there — and to my surprise, they're always unlocked. I can open them with my mind … my imagination … whenever I want. Do I wish I still had the things I treasured—the keys to those doors? Yes, of course I do. But I don't need them.” 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 Long Now by Robin Beth Schaer. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem addresses a child—a child full of questions about the world. It reminds me that as parents, we don't need to have the answers, and we don't need to pretend to have them. Instead we can listen, stay open, and honor our kids' curiosity and wonder. Honor the poets and philosophers that they are.” 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 Now that we've been married all these years, by Keetje Kuipers. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… "I can remember a few “beforetimes” in my own life, though some are foggier than others. It's hard for me to clearly imagine the life I had before my kids. It's also hard for me to conjure the life I had with my ex-husband, and the life I had before him. Now is so… well, present. I'm happy, and I feel like my life is as it should be. I don't want to go back. But the past is never really past; it's with us, because it changes us. The past shaped who we are in the present. Today's poem is a love poem, one in which the long-married speaker can hardly imagine their own “beforetimes”—the life before their spouse."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 Vacation by Sara Moore Wagner. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “It feels like a quintessential American experience, taking your kids to the beach. I remember trips to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Ocean City, Maryland, when I was young — road trips in the family minivan, because it was more affordable to get a family of five to the coast by car than by plane. (My first flight wasn't until I was twenty years old, but that's another story for another day.)” 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 ars poetica, 2019 by Airea D. Matthews. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I love poetry. Of course I do—I'm hosting this show every weekday! And you're here, listening, so I think we have this love of poetry in common. But I also know people who are a little uneasy with poetry. I've met plenty of people who've confessed to me, ‘I love to read, but I don't get poetry.' Or they might simply say, ‘I'm not a poetry person.'” 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 Waiting for the Call I Am by Wyatt Townley. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Waiting is a kind of purgatory, a middle ground. In that liminal, in-between space, we alternate between hope and fear. Some despair might creep in, too. Everything will be okay, we tell ourselves one minute. The worst has happened, we tell ourselves the next. Even the metaphors for waiting are deeply uncomfortable. Treading water. Being on pins and needles, or on tenterhooks. Waiting is hard on the body because it's hard on the 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 Given to Rust by Vievee Francis. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem touched me in how it explores the intimacy of sound, and especially the human voice. How, too, the silence between us can be so loud.” 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 Good Guy by Blas Falconer. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem touched me because it acknowledges the patience and tenderness we need to have as spouses and as parents. Relationships are a lot of work, and when you have children it adds another layer of love and another layer of work. Another level of consideration.” 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 Going Home by Joan Kwon Glass. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When my children tell me about their dreams, it's not uncommon for them to say, “We were at home, but it wasn't our house,” or “I was with my friends, but they weren't my real-life friends.” Sometimes I play a cameo role as myself, but sometimes the role of their mother is played by someone else. Dreams are strange like that. Our sleeping brains sometimes offer us alternate versions of familiar people and places.”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 Earth Shovel by Dan Albergotti. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem, which looks at the fragility of our planet, begins with two epigraphs. One is from American astronomer Carl Sagan, from his book Pale Blue Dot. The other is the famous line from politician Michael Steele.” 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 Midlife Crisis by Jane Zwart. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Midlife has upended everything I thought about aging. It's not at all what I expected. Certainly, when I was a child, I thought of people in their forties as old, and now that I'm closer to 50 than 40, I laugh at that. I feel … young! I feel younger, in many ways, than I did ten years ago. I admire how today's poem describes time, and what it feels like to reach the middle of one's life only to be surprised at what you find.” 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 Defense of “Candelabra with Heads” by Nicole Sealey. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem pulls back the curtain on the revision process, showing us how it's about more than just the text on the page. The poet refers to an earlier poem of theirs, an ekphrastic poem based on a sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn. His work “Candelabra with Heads” features mannequins bandaged in brown duct tape and hung from a wood frame. This poet revised her poem of the same name to remove the last line, but later went back and reinstated it.”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 A toast to something beautiful flapping in the wind by J. Hope Stein. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Once upon a time, I was a new mother with a baby girl in my arms, and I was her whole world. It was seventeen years ago, but sometimes I swear I can transport myself back there just by closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. I remember reading that a baby's first three months of life are called the fourth trimester. Three trimesters are spent in the mother's body, bobbing around like a little fish, but the ‘fourth trimester' is when everyone is adapting to life in the outside world. The babies seem bewildered, trying to adjust to nursing and sleeping, but I think parents are just as bewildered.” 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 One-Way Gate by Jenny George.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Sometimes I swear I can feel a life-changing moment as it's happening. Some moments in life feel like walking through a doorway from one place or time into another. Like crossing a threshold. It's often easier to see these thresholds from the other side, looking back. Retrospect is clearer than present perspective. But as I get older, I think I'm getting better at seeing significant moments as they're happening: seeing the train doors slide open or closed. I think I'm getting better at noticing that my life is changing in real time, even if I don't know how it will turn out.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp