Today’s poem is You & the Donkey Cart by Rosa Alcalá.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “We carry stories across our individual realities. And, like our listener, Margaret said, we carry our family stories, our habits and practices. They live across generations, across borders and across seas. What we carry is often what brings us to poetry, what makes up our poems.”

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 To The Stone-Cutters by Robinson Jeffers.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “Our listener, Morgan, found writing poetry to be a tool to connect not only with her father’s homeland, but to connect with the people in her life, with her poetic lineages, with the body, and with nature. By focusing on the way poetry feels in the body, Morgan reminds me of a route to access language that sometimes feels insurmountable. Today’s poem, at first, leans into the cynicism of the Romantics, into the truth of mortality. But as it turns, it finds solace in what we create.”

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 After, We Try to Switch Our Hearts Back On by Joy Sullivan.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “Today’s poem reads almost like a bullet journal, a rapid log of experiences in a day. Through that we hear the speaker take hold of small pleasures. And in the noise of what once was ordinary, it makes space for questions about how different so many of us still feel.”

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 Sonnet for Ochún by Leslie Sainz.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “In today’s poem, I hear a shared melancholy, a world-weariness where the edges of life fail to offer answers. Yet, I detect, too, in the presence of a deity, the transits and rituals of hope and renewal.”

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 Mixed Marriage by Nick Laird.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Some days, we bicker, nothing major (pun intended). Often, it’s minor: control of the thermostat, recycling duty, my general proclivity to forget. On very rare occasions, we hit upon a disagreement that requires work — where we need to figure out why we react so strongly. I have not been in a romantic relationship that did not require work. I mean come-to-your-maker kind of work. I’m talking emotional work that has you question every decision you have made up till that moment and every decision you will make thereafter. Faint of heart? Don’t even go there. Too awed by your own existence? You might be better off alone. Allergic to change? Incapable of adapting? Only the rotation of the sun is a constant; all else is subject to life’s mutability and human fallibility. The most stable of relationships account for this fact.”

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 “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return” by CAConrad.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem inhabits the breathlessness and press of love, that is creatively generative, that is organic in its speed and purpose, that is feverish and holy in its corporeal intensity.”

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 Ode to Badminton by Prageeta Sharma.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “If it were up to me, everything I love would have a poem in praise of it. I mean everything: homemade chocolate cookies, park benches, sinuous roads beside city rivers — even to that clear plastic cap on a newly purchased deodorant stick, that this morning I only figured out the best way to remove. Turn the dial.”

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 By Then by David Rivard.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I love the clarity in today’s poem, in how it nurtures self-awareness in the wake of emotional turmoil and growth.”

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 Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “When a performer brings their whole self the planets align. Life magically makes sense. Today’s famous poem ponders one of those moments in which, through another’s expression, all agonies and confusions give way to a dignified stasis.”

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 What Good Is Silence by Phuong T. Vuong.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem illustrates returning to listening as a ventilation of the soul, sublimating the ego in the interest of interacting with more than just our thoughts.”

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