The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
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...
Location:
United States
Genres:
Arts & Culture Podcasts
Networks:
American Public Media
Description:
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.
Language:
English
Episodes
1476: The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
3/13/2026
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
Duration:00:06:01
1475: Out of These Wounds, the Moon Will Rise by Jay Hopler
3/12/2026
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
Duration:00:05:35
1474: Epistemic Distance by Emma Bolden
3/11/2026
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
Duration:00:06:45
1473: Solar Eclipse by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
3/10/2026
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
Duration:00:06:01
1472: The Road to Baghdad by Seth Brady Tucker
3/9/2026
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
Duration:00:06:33
1471: It Was Like This: You Were Happy by Jane Hirshfield
3/6/2026
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
Duration:00:06:18
1470: Common Denominators by Cynthia Arrieu-King
3/5/2026
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
Duration:00:06:14
1469: Pardon My Heart by Marcus Jackson
3/4/2026
Today’s poem is Pardon My Heart by Marcus Jackson.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “If I had a different kind of heart, a tougher heart, would I be able to see what’s happening in the world around me and not feel so brokenhearted? What would it be like to be able to sleep through the night, unbothered? I can’t imagine feeling less, or caring less. That’s not the heart I have.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
Duration:00:05:48
1468: Five Paragraph Essay on Time by Kathleen Flenniken
3/3/2026
Today’s poem is Five Paragraph Essay on Time by Kathleen Flenniken.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Recently, I told a friend that I had procrastinated a task, and so I had to really hustle to get it done on time, and she kindly corrected me. Or, rather, she reframed what I was calling procrastination as something else: triage. That’s what she called it. She said, “You have so much to do, you have to triage tasks—tackle the big and immediate ones first, and let some of the smaller ones go for a bit.” She had a point. I didn’t have a time management issue or a lack of focus. I was juggling multiple tasks, and that meant that some of them naturally had to wait.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
Duration:00:05:56
1467: Geranium by Karen Solie
3/2/2026
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
Duration:00:05:46
1466: Poem about everything except— by Amy Lemmon
2/27/2026
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
Duration:00:06:58
1465: Or am I a room with a roof taken off, still holding onto my idea of ceiling by Kelly Hoffer
2/26/2026
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
Duration:00:06:19
1464: Somewhere Else by Adam J. Gellings
2/25/2026
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
Duration:00:05:58
1463: Sleep by Matthew Dickman
2/24/2026
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
Duration:00:06:26
1462: Perspective, Coyoacán by Corey Van Landingham
2/23/2026
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
Duration:00:06:21
1461: Word for It by Kevin Craft
2/20/2026
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
Duration:00:06:40
1460: Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly
2/19/2026
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
Duration:00:05:43
1459: February by Jim Moore
2/18/2026
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
Duration:00:05:04
1458: on projection by Raena Shirali
2/17/2026
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
Duration:00:06:29
1457: an excerpt from THERE IS ONLY ONE GHOST IN THE WORLD by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller
2/16/2026
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
Duration:00:05:49