1218: Vulture by Ted Kooser

Today’s poem is Historical Site by Tommye Blount. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today’s poem is one of those that crushes me with its ending. Our Detroit poet manages to whittle the grand and often devastating expansi ...  Show more

Today’s poem is Katherine with the Lazy Eye. Short. And Not a Good Poet by francine j. harris. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Everyone is a hero to someone, or a beauty, or a problem, or all of the above. Today’s poem ...  Show more

Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)C.K. Williams' Collected Poems covers a lifetime's concern with ethics and personal morality. As his work proceeds, he develops a quality of consciousness and empathy that some would describe as a soul. In this conversation, this accessibl ...  Show more

About twenty years ago, I heard William Stafford read his poetry for about twenty minutes. For a young aspiring writer like I was then, he was mesmerizing, a mix of poetic energy and grandfatherly wisdom, with a high-spirited charm. I think it was the first poetry reading that I ...  Show more

Apollinaire is a pivotal figure in the history of French poetry. Friend of Picasso, albeit a sometimes volatile one, inventor of the term 'surrealism' and the poem without punctuation, he advocated a poetry that was direct and intuitive, free of any refined intellectualis ...  Show more