Today’s poem is oracle by Duriel E. Harris. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem intrigues me for how it upholds the possibility of poetry as a terse, sacred voicing that emerges from within, where the inexpressible finds its way to the world as transcendent music, something far more compelling than the language of machines.”

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 Clearing by Jane Kenyon. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

In this episode, Major writes… “Dogs have a lot to teach us. Learning to care about the land and people is to live daily in the fullness of existence, such that we come to cherish and love those close to us and beyond.”

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 Grading Rubric by Antonio de Jesús López. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s brilliant poem speaks to the ordeal of enduring racial abuse and microaggressions in educational institutions. It slyly appropriates an academic assessment tool to point out that we are clearly failing in treating each other like whole humans.”

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 Pacific Power & Light by Michael Dickman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

In this episode, Major writes… “The beauty of poetry is its diversity and how it gives us an opportunity to feel language, rather than the poem acting only as a substitute for a Hallmark card or occasion for a punchline.”

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 Eureka! by Jessica Abughattas. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

In this episode, Major writes… “To borrow a phrase, love calls us to the things of this world. But as today’s brilliant poem reminds us, in our search for happiness, we find our worth in relation to our freedom and societal expectations. We learn to self-affirm in our search for joy.”

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 Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack Gilbert. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

In this episode, Major writes… “Inadequacy is built into the enterprise of speaking; we struggle to say exactly what we need to say — if we even know what we need to say.“

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 Negro Hero (to Suggest Dorie Miller) by Gwendolyn Brooks. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

In this episode, Major writes… “When I last taught this poem, I asked a student to recite it. A Southeast Asian-American student could not mouth the once acceptable word “Negro.” Instead, without warning, she replaced the word with human, so that the title was “Human Hero,” and the black newspapers were “human weeklies.” It was heartbreaking. She simply could not say the word that, to her ear, sounded too close to the racial epithet with which we are all familiar. The class then discussed the nature of language and how context and time alter the meaning of words.”

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 130 by William Shakespeare. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

In this episode, Major writes… “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is brilliant for how the speaker disproves the idea that his girlfriend could be compared to anything in nature. He takes aim at hyperbolic similes; he offers examples that deflate the notion of flawless physical perfection. Any poem either collapses or succeeds based on the originality of its vision. The substance of Shakespeare’s vision is that our imperfections are what make us truly beautiful and rare.”

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 Gravelly Run by A. R. Ammons. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

In this episode, Major writes… “It is best if we come to know ourselves through its cycles and terrains, but without all the troublesome wrangling over questions of meaning. It is good simply to make peace with the rhythms of life and of death.”

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 "Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

In this episode, Major writes… “Time is the river that never dries up, that is always in motion. Yet, cycles of elections and global conflict appear as if we are going through the same debates and battles again. For sanity’s sake, it helps to remind myself that we are always moving forward, that change is real even if it seems elusive.”

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 Birches by Robert Frost. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual.

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

\In this episode, Major writes… “I have long admired today’s poem by Robert Frost. “Birches” spotlights a young boy who makes his own fun in the outdoors. It’s a poem about self-reliant play. It is powerful for how it precisely describes a boy’s ascent up a tree then his launch onto solid ground. In that sense, the poem becomes an allegory for the speaker, who himself wishes to climb out of his adult world.”

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