1279: Ode to My Mama and “The Purple Dress,” circa 1992-1993 by Brittany Rogers

Today’s poem is Ode to My Mama and “The Purple Dress,” circa 1992-1993 by Brittany Rogers. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… "It’s disconcerting seeing the younger me all these years later. I notice the sensitive, mildly insecure yet intellectually hungry me. I was trying to see a hidden world through the camera’s lens, my inner life in concert with the world around me. These pictures reveal how I strained to feel worthy. Time has cloaked that younger me in layers of earned confidence and extensive growth. I am not sure anyone in my life today would recognize that overly conscious, shy young man." 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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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.