Today’s poem is Chaplinesque by Hart Crane. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. Around what has become known as “awards season,” casual conversations are abuzz with talk of the year’s movies. This week’s episodes explore how poets take up movies as subjects — how the two art forms intertwine to make us feel more closely this life we share. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s iconic Modernist poem celebrates the artist and movie icon who inspired generations of filmmakers and actors, but even more so, the man who both made us laugh at the folly of progress and urged us to embrace the tenderness of our hearts.” 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.