1586: WHITMAN: by Larry Levis

Today’s poem is For You Who Have Loved Old Dogs by Silas House. This episode was originally released on September 29, 2025.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “My Boston terrier, Phoebe, is about to turn eleven, so if she were a human, she’d be a 77 year old woman. If Phoebe were one of the Golden Girls, she’d probably be Rose: quirky, loyal, a little dim-witted. We adopted her from a Boston terrier rescue organization when she was one and a half, in the spring of 2016. When people assumed that the best thing to happen to me in 2016 was my poem “Good Bones” going viral, I have to correct them. “Good Bones” changed my life, to be sure, but the best thing to happen to me that year was Phoebe. As she grows older—silver muzzle now, too—I get emotional when I’m reminded that my years with her are limited. We only have so much time.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is Protection Spell Jar by Cynthia Marie Hoffman. This episode was originally released on October 14, 2025.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this encore episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem is from a collection of prose poems that chronicles a woman’s journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder, from childhood into adulthood. I admire the way we’re invited into the speaker’s consciousness, to see her mind at work.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is WHITMAN: by Larry Levis.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Every year, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs holds a conference in a different American city. A few years ago, when the literary industry descended on Kansas City, a poet I know posted on Instagram that he wanted to go to Charlie Parker’s grave. The pilgrimage was based on a Larry Levis poem. I threw my hat in the ring to join him.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is Dialogue on Violence by Jayne Cortez.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “If you’re listening to this episode first thing in the morning or as you go to sleep, looking for something easeful, I should apologize. Today’s poem is not that. It is a grim litany. But I think by naming our harsh reality, it holds out hope for a different world. It will be read to you in just one voice, my voice, but the title calls it a dialogue. I want you to consider, while you’re listening, whom the dialogue might be between.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is Missed Time by Ha Jin.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “I love to journal as documentation. To remember what happened in my day-to-day, even the small things I see and feel. I can thus make my own life real to myself. This is something I’ve worked out over time. When I look back at my first blue notebook, the recollections are fragmentary and melodramatic. They hardly make sense as a record. However much I feel a positive value in the process, if I look back at most of my journals, I would think that my life is miserable. Because I often turn to the page when I’m having a tough time, when I have difficult experiences to work through. I love to be alone, but it seems I write the most when I’m feeling lonely in the worst way. Today’s poem considers, joyously, the anonymous effect that this dynamic could have.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is Are You Not Tired Yet? by Mohammed al-Khatib.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Though under ceasefire at the time of this recording, Gazans are still living in unimaginably difficult conditions, largely uprooted from their homes and experiencing limited access to resources and information. There has been a massive loss of human life in Palestine in the last three years, making it impossible for anyone to be without personal grief. The awareness of loss and trauma is undeniably constant.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is Visitor's Center by T Bambrick.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem takes me back to a specificity of a Washington State public school education: learning the intricacies of salmon, sturgeon, dams, ecology, and electricity. What I didn’t see then, that I see now, is the tension between control and appreciation of the natural world. That our modern lives rely on a system built by lionizing the will of man. The speaker, here, wonders: At what cost?” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

We’re bringing you a preview of the new series from the podcast, Death of An Artist. In February 2024, celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Petra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they choose to die together? And what did that decision do to the people left to mourn them? Journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael’s letters — as one married couple trying to understand another. Through intimate conversations with Petra and Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind. Done entirely in recordings, Death of an Artist is as much a love story as one about death. Listen to Death of An Artist wherever you get podcasts. And if you want to hear the full story right now, ad-free, you can binge the entire season with a Pushkin+ subscription — sign up on the Death of an Artist show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

Today’s poem is Stop Thinking & End Your Problems by Elisa Gabbert.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “So often my mind feels crowded. Busy. Like a rush hour intersection of internal monologue. I’ve tried lots of strategies. I’m still trying new strategies. Blocking out focus time, tweaking notifications, using restrictions. My favorite strategy is keeping an art book on my desk. When I feel the desire to distract from the onslaught, or when I hit a mental block, I open up the book to a random painting. I don’t stop thinking; I change the shape of my thinking — by looking at art and avoiding words for a moment.”This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is Story of My Life by Jameson Fitzpatrick.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Myka Kielbon writes… “Today’s poem shows us how our desires are about both projection and possession.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation today. Slowdownshow.org/donate