Today’s poem is Mercy by Dessa.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I never took to the attitude of I’ll show them. It concedes that those people, people who did not think enough of me to take care of my feelings, are still in my life, in an unhealthy manner, subconsciously controlling my actions. My success is not going to suddenly prove me worthy of love in their eyes. Will they have thought better of that moment when they scarred me? Maybe. Will they think me more intelligent than they initially granted? Possibly. But, truth is, I am healed when I no longer care to have their acceptance or validation.” 
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1116: Mercy by Dessa

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.

Arts

Literature

Performing Arts

Design

Food

Fashion & Beauty

Visual Arts

Today’s poem is Cy Twombly's Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor) by Javier O. Huerta. 
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Ekphrastic poetry sometimes pushes back against the idea of simple art made complicated in idea, born from an eccentric personality. Inspired by another famous Twombly painting, one that itself is inspired partly by a poem, today’s poem realizes the frenetic sense of the artist’s canvas is a conceptual product of a sophisticated and sometimes frustrating mind.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1130: Cy Twombly's Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor) by Javier O. Huerta

Today’s poem is Hagar in the Wilderness by Tyehimba Jess.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Today’s poet pays homage to an artist who, with her own hands, made art out of heroic, mythical, and biblical figures, whose visions were worthy of the substance of stone.” 
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1129: Hagar in the Wilderness by Tyehimba Jess

Today’s poem is Post-Industrial Society Has Arrived by Vidhu Aggarwal.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Poets possess an expansive intuition, a proclivity towards image-making that meets head-on the most difficult of artists. In responding to works of art, poets perform the gift of interpretation. By turning language into a critical practice, they find pathways into paintings and teach us how to see what they see. They make the paintings speak.” 
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1128: Post-Industrial Society Has Arrived by Vidhu Aggarwal

Today’s poem is Two Paintings Seen Again by Rachel Hadas.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. Today’s ekphrastic poem makes a compelling assertion that to fully register the power of art, we must take our time to take it in.” 
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1127: Two Paintings Seen Again by Rachel Hadas

Today’s poem is Not So Much an End as an Entangling by Linda Gregerson.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “This week’s episodes are a special feature on ekphrasis – poems which engage with works of art. The vision of birds stilled in motion at the center of Tom Uttech’s paintings invite similar speculations. Today’s poem reads an exodus of earth’s species as an ominous commentary, I surmise, on the decimation of the environment.” 
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

1116: Mercy by Dessa

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