Today’s poem is The Poet by Bert Meyers.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “How do we celebrate our teachers? We pass down their advice. We recall legendary moments in the classroom. We discuss the brilliance of their poems, and sometimes, we gossip about their failures and triumphs. We keep their poems alive in public. When poets die, we also mourn the loss of great friends. Today’s poem is by a Los Angeles poet, one whose life and work are the subject of renewed interest and celebration, not only as a writer of astute verse, but also as a beloved teacher.”

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Today’s poem is In An Elevator with Ashbery, Crossing Stanzas, Bashfully by Alina Stefanescu.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem gently refuses to consign poetry to the world of philosophical musing, semiotics, and language games, which many have experienced in the difficult and wildly associative poetry of the great American poet, John Ashbery.”

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 Areyto for the Shipwrecked: The Case for Spanglish by Vincent Toro.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem celebrates the power of speaking multiple languages, of having options to fulfill poetry’s demand to achieve ever more expression of human emotion.”

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 THIRSTY by Dionne Brand.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I love the beauty of natural spaces, and will never jettison the sense of sacred communion there, but cities serve as staging grounds for my feelings of agape, the benevolence I feel from and extend to fellow human beings.”

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 Emptying by Aaron Zhang.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I know that when I cannot write, when the words fail to arrive, something intangible is obstructing passage to the areas of my brain and heart. It hijacks my ability to imagine, to really hear the poetry of the world around me.”

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 Portrait of My Father With the Letter V by Bill Hollands.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Who we are today, and eventually, who we are in memory, grants our loved one’s access to modes of living. We can connect in remembrance of traditions of existence that affirm who we fundamentally are and what we could possibly become.”

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 Burnt Plastic by Sean Singer.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is by Sean Singer, who, like me, is a teacher, but at a certain point he became a cab driver to support himself. In his poems about driving a cab, he experiences not a lilting relational arc of guiding students through a semester, but a staccato chord of intense contact, a brief and unguarded glimpse into a life, one in which he is equal parts service provider and witness.”

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 Part by Phillis Levin.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem uses the form of a dictionary definition the way other poems use the form of the sonnet or villanelle. Instead of starting with a highly technical and specific word, like “irony” or “cardiovascular,” Phillis Levin starts with the seemingly simple word “Part,” a common word that, it turns out, can mean many things.”

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 Friend Who Is Crying on the Phone by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “In today’s poem, the poet looks at what it means for things to change—what it means to live in the present and to plan for the future—and how painful and destabilizing it can be when what we expected, planned for, worked for, and dreamed of—is suddenly taken away.”

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 the dormitories after dark by James Fujinami Moore.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Jason Schneiderman writes… “In today’s poem, the poet revisits a childhood experience in which the youthful collective exerts its power by ganging up on another boy. Notice how the poem moves from observation, to complicity, and then to how a youthful wound might take a lifetime to heal.”

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