1480 Episodes

  1. [encore] 684: I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won't by Traci Brimhall

    Published: 6/13/2025
  2. [encore] 531: anti-immigration by Evie Shockley

    Published: 6/12/2025
  3. [encore] 676: Last Sundays at Bootleggers by Carlos Andrés Gómez

    Published: 6/11/2025
  4. [encore] 516: In Response to Feeling Alone by t. liem

    Published: 6/10/2025
  5. [encore] 603: Sligo Abbey by Rebecca Lindenberg

    Published: 6/9/2025
  6. [encore] 373: Tracing the Horse by Diana Marie Delgado

    Published: 6/6/2025
  7. [encore] 459: The Feeling by Ari Banias

    Published: 6/5/2025
  8. [encore] 303: Telling My Father by James Crews

    Published: 6/4/2025
  9. [encore] 9: Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal by Kaveh Akbar

    Published: 6/3/2025
  10. [encore] 311: Listen, by Barbara Crooker

    Published: 6/2/2025
  11. [encore] 821: I Have No Idea What's Going to Happen by Justin Marks

    Published: 5/30/2025
  12. [encore] 1113: Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi

    Published: 5/29/2025
  13. [encore] 1168: Refusing Rilke's "You must change your life" by Remica Bingham-Risher

    Published: 5/28/2025
  14. [encore] 1201: Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

    Published: 5/27/2025
  15. [encore] 1029: If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso by Gertrude Stein

    Published: 5/26/2025
  16. [encore] 600: I Imagine the Butches' Stripper Bar by Jill McDonough

    Published: 5/23/2025
  17. [encore] 760: Song by Charif Shanahan

    Published: 5/22/2025
  18. [encore] 647: Walking Across Fire Island by Shelley Wong

    Published: 5/21/2025
  19. [encore] 571: Golden Age by Chris Santiago

    Published: 5/20/2025
  20. [encore] 708: Bruised Peaches by Bronwen Tate

    Published: 5/19/2025

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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.