1210: Negro Hero (to Suggest Dorie Miller) by Gwendolyn Brooks

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

Om Podcasten

Host Maggie Smith is your daily poetry companion. Poetry is one of the greatest tools we have to wield our own attention — to consider our own lives and the lives of others, to help us live creatively and compassionately, to use that attention to lean into wonder, and joy, and truth, and to find hope — to keep hoping. The Slowdown community knows that reflecting on a poem, every weekday, can connect us to our inner world and the world around us. Listen as you make your morning coffee, as you go on a walk in your neighborhood, as you pull away from the to-do list, as you resist the dismal, endless scroll to share five minutes of perspective through the lens of poetry, from poets old and new, well-loved and emerging onto the scene. Brought to you by American Public Media, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.