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The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

By: American Public Media
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Poet Major Jackson is your guide on the pathways to feel and understand our common journey – through poetry. In sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery. Join The Slowdown for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode, every weekday. Produced by APM Studios in partnership with The Poetry Foundation and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. Make us a part of your routine as you drink coffee in the morning, as you take a walk in nature, or as you wind down to go to sleep in the evening. With host Major Jackson, we collectively take a moment to calm, to inspire, to learn, and to engage with the best emerging poets and established writers of our time and generations past, from Emily Dickinson to Danez Smith, from Amanda Gorman to Mary Oliver.

Listen to our back catalog for episodes by our previous hosts, Tracy K. Smith and Ada Limón, as well as guest hosts Jenny Xie, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tina Chang, Nate Marshall, Shira Erlichiman, and Jason Schneiderman. Our hosts and production team select poems that move them, and we hope they move you, too.Copyright 2025 Minnesota Public Radio
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Episodes
  • [encore] 1174: Separation Wall by Naomi Shihab Nye
    Jul 10 2025

    Today’s poem is Separation Wall by Naomi Shihab Nye.


    Last spring, we asked our community to submit poems that have helped you slow down in your lives. This week we’re revisiting these selections. Today’s selection was submitted by Meital from Washington, D.C.


    In this episode, Major writes… “Coexistence on the planet demands that we transcend reactionary treatment of each other. For this reason, we need poems to tease out our innocence, that part of us untouched by the callousness of the world, to bring us to a sanity beyond inherited hurts and old fears, away from the logic of ‘an eye for an eye.’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that this kind of violence ‘destroys communities and makes humanity impossible. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.’”


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

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    7 mins
  • [encore] 1173: Sono by Suji Kwock Kim
    Jul 9 2025

    Today’s poem is Sono by Suji Kwock Kim.


    The Slowdown is currently taking a break. Last spring, we asked our community to submit poems that have helped you slow down in your lives. This week we’re revisiting these selections.


    In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem coordinates a masterful flow of language, simulating the journey of a child crossing into our time through another’s body. The poem reminds us, with sound and texture, to not lose our sense of marvel.”


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

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    7 mins
  • [encore] 1172: From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
    Jul 8 2025

    Today’s poem is From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee.


    Last spring, we asked our community to submit poems that have helped you slow down in your lives. This week we’re revisiting these selections. Today’s selection was submitted by Candace from North Carolina.


    This week we’re featuring the team’s selections. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem exults in that bounty of spiritual abundance and celebrates the joy inside us yielded from the land. ”


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

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    7 mins
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