← The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
1332: Slow Take: An Evening of Poetry and Reflection with The Slowdown and The Porch
01:19:26
Loading summary
Transcript161 lines
- [00:00]
Micah Kielbon
The Slowdown is supported by Greenlight. Juggling growing kids and aging relatives can be a balancing act between keeping a watchful eye and allowing feelings of independence. With Greenlight's Family Shield, you can protect your senior loved ones from scams and financial fraud without making them feel like kids. Stay on top of their finances with tools like account monitoring, real time alerts, and coverage for scam related losses and identity theft. Take care of your whole family, from kids to grandparents with Family Shield from Greenlight. Sign up today at Greenlight Dot.
- [00:34]
Jad Abumrad
You know how you always want to.
- [00:35]
Micah Kielbon
Know about everyone else's money on the podcast what We Spend, guests will for.
- [00:39]
Jad Abumrad
One week tell us everything they spend their money on.
- [00:42]
Major Jackson
My son slammed $6 worth of blueberries.
- [00:44]
Jad Abumrad
In five minutes and everything that makes them feel I want to own a house, I want to have a child.
- [00:49]
Dee Dee Jackson
But this morning I really wanted a.
- [00:51]
Jad Abumrad
Coffee because at the end of the day, money is always about more than your balance. Listen to and follow what We Spend.
- [00:59]
Micah Kielbon
An Odyssey Original podcast available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello. Hello. Welcome. I want to take your seats. Welcome to Analog at the Hutton Hotel. My name is Micah Kielbon. I'm the lead producer of the Slowdown, your daily poetry companion podcast from American Public Media. And welcome to Slow Take. So we are here with our amazing friends at the Porch, which is a local literary arts organization here in Nashville. Let's hear it for the Porch. I'm sure that their amazing work is why so many of you are here today, or maybe hearing Major tell you on promos for the Slowdown that we're going to be here in Nashville. And we're really here tonight to celebrate the Nashville literary community. We have amazing local poets and what we're here tonight to do is really reflect on the mission of the Slowdown and the mission of the Porch to bring poetry and writing and reflection and the arts into our daily lives. The Slowdown has been a part of your life since 2018 for over 1300 episodes, and those have been some pretty cacophonous years. I think a lot has happened for all of us and I'm just grateful to share this space together and talk about poetry, do some poems. That's our job here. All right, so I have some local poets for you tonight. Mark Jarman, Kate Daniels, Siona Rouse, Dee Dee Jackson. So have a local musician. I don't know if you all know this. We're going to have some music tonight from the amazing Tia Sillers. And along with our hosts, we're going to join forces in an expansive conversation about the daily noise, we interact with how conversation and sharing poetry, stories and reflection shapes our experience of the everyday. So it is my honor and pleasure to introduce your hosts for the evening. First, Jad Abumrad. Jad Abumrad makes audio stories and is a musician. His shows Radiolab, More Perfect, Dolly Parton's America Unerased, and the Vanishing of Harry Pace have been downloaded over a billion times. I will say Dolly Parton's America like changed my life as a podcast producer. Gotta be honest. Jad is a recipient of three Peabody Awards and in 2011 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is currently a Distinguished professor of Research at Vanderbilt University. You'll hear that university name a lot tonight. He's working on a new audio project that will debut in late 2025. He also recently announced new work as a co creator, co librettist and co composer of the innovative choral theater piece Portal. Our other host for the evening is the poet Major Jackson. Major Jackson is the host of the Slowdown and the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle, New and Selected Poems. Jackson is a recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. He's the Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He also serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review and is the inaugural recipient of Patricia Cannon Willis Prize from Yale Library. And really so excited tonight to be in Nashville to celebrate Major's time on the show. It's been over two years, over 443 episodes. I'm gonna say over cause I've asked you to read more copy than that. Without further ado, thank you so much for being here. And here's Major Jackson and Jad Abumrad for Slow Take.
- [05:03]
Major Jackson
Thank you, Micah. Call it Micah Poem Time. Kilbon. So thank you all for being here. It is National Poetry Month, but I could not think of a better co host to join me this evening than Jad. I think Jad's work as a storyteller, someone who engages all aspects of our cultural and political lives, done so artfully with sound, is the person that I thought of whenever I would go into the studio with Micah. It would be a great honor for the Slowdown to have the same kind of impact as your work has done with poetry. Who knew? So thank you for joining me this evening. Not only is it an occasion marking a great art form, some would argue the best literary art form ever in the history of mankind, poetry, but also it's here in Nashville and for Dee Dee and I to have arrived, when we arrived in this particular community that was rich with a history that went beyond music. And I'm happy we're going to feature a musician who's also a neighbor. But it seems like I grew over the past two and a half years with Micah as my teacher and with my colleagues at Vanderbilt University, with the poets, with my friends at the porch who have hosted events like this that have truly enriched my life. And I also want to say I said I would never move to a city that did not have a book festival. The Southern Festival for the Books has been an amazing locus of activity and a window into the amount of writers that are just either a state away or multiple states away. But this is a destination for writers, so we're here to celebrate that as well.
- [07:30]
Dee Dee Jackson
And I just want to say I'm really excited to be here with you, Major, to celebrate you, because I was just looking at the number of episodes that you have created for the Slowdown over the last seven years, and I think it's 1300.
- [07:47]
Major Jackson
Is that there's 1300 total podcast episodes, and I've contributed 443 of them.
- [07:54]
Dee Dee Jackson
That is astounding.
- [07:55]
Major Jackson
Thank you.
- [07:56]
Dee Dee Jackson
Astounding. I would love to take this moment to mark your tenure by asking you some questions, to reflect, because I know we're going to have some other poets here who are going to read their work, but maybe we could focus on you for a moment. How exhausted are you?
- [08:17]
Major Jackson
Oh, man. Well, I've since bought a pullout couch in my office. It seems like I was writing quite a bit. Those 443 episodes, however, were. So to encounter that many poems has totally enriched my soul and also strained my eyes. In a good way, I think. But what drove me was the amount of space that I felt like I was giving to emergent poets, established poets, poets who are part of our canon, but maybe forgotten. I didn't mind losing sleep in the interest of our larger literary culture.
- [09:15]
Dee Dee Jackson
Gotcha.
- [09:15]
Major Jackson
Yeah.
- [09:16]
Dee Dee Jackson
I'm curious. The very first time we talked about poetry, you and I, which is when I was first joining the venerable community, so this would have been 2022. You showed me this tremendous archive that you have of. I don't know where you've got, like you were saying it, like, estate sales and garage sales, cassettes full of the voices of Walt Whitman, T.S. eliot, all of these people, like, incredible. Like, just this library. I'm curious to know who are the voices that filled you as a poet and that made you want to do this.
- [09:49]
Major Jackson
Yeah, I. My audio collection probably is mainly cassette tapes and CDs, so the technology, I don't listen to them as frequently as I used to. But there was a recording that was put out in the late 80s, early 90s called a century of Recorded Voices. And it was a well curated collection of American poets for whom the source was in the Library of Congress. So you had people like Edna St. Vincent Millay all the way to Lee Yong Lee before. I want to say listening to those particular poets was ultimately my education, but there was definitely some poets for whom, like Frost reading Burches, for example, is in my ear. And poor Micah has had to bear with me doing imitations of Robert Lowell. Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her spartan cottage. You know, I would just. I would break out. You know, we have in our lives a poet named Yusef Kumanyaka, who also has a very distinguished speaking voice. I want to say it was these listening to those poets that really attuned my ear as a poet. I've read them, but listening to them, it gets in your body.
- [11:27]
Dee Dee Jackson
Yeah. And for how do you make the selections that went into those 400 episodes? I mean, because. Do you start with a set of criteria? I want poems that do A, B and C, or. Because it's daily, is it sort of just embrace everything.
- [11:44]
Major Jackson
It's the very democratic. That's the first thing, is that I wanted the show to be as inclusive of all voices that constitutes our polis. And that meant, yes, I will definitely find poems and journals, very esteemed journals. But I'm as interested in the online zine. So there were a few of those that I subscribed to that do a poem a day. Micah was a great source. Friends would be on the lookout. Finding poems wasn't difficult. You know, there would be publishers that also would send you galleys of forthcoming books. What was difficult was finding the story to match the poem. And in that particular sense, one of the things that Mike and I talked about early on was being careful and the other producers being careful of not turning the podcast into a classroom, but a space where we might encounter, through the poems and maybe through the anecdotes, some of the very real, humane situations that we are likely to. You know, it's more like poetry as an applied art rather than poetry as something that's studied in the halls of academe.
- [13:16]
Dee Dee Jackson
Yeah, yeah. And I'm curious, like, why. I don't want to ask you. I'm thinking of the last episode where you Signed off. Yeah. Where you read. It wasn't actually you reading. It was your poem. But just you heard dozens of people reading your poem, why I Write Poetry, which is. It's a hilarious poem. I love it. But you said something on the way in that was struck with me. You said you love how poetry forces us to adjust to each other. I think that was the phrase. I'm wondering if you can expand on that.
- [13:52]
Major Jackson
Yeah. I've been thinking lately about this moment right here. We're about to hear four Poets tonight, and listening to each other is. It takes effort sometimes. It's not an effortless thing. We're thinking about the laundry that's left, and we're thinking about quite possibly dinner, maybe thinking about work. To concentrate, to invite someone to listen to your words. It's a gift to both read before them, but it's also a gift to listen. So we have to make room. We have to make room mentally. We have to make room emotionally. We have to open ourselves up to a poem. The podcast, I think, has been ritualized among thousands of listeners. Either they listen in the morning or midday or as part of their evening. Everyone that I've talked to, the poem eventually comes back to them. Like, you open up space for the words of others, but eventually the poem is you and the poem and the words that are left there. So thank you for that question and also thank you for listening to the podcast and thank you all for listening. Actually, I think we're going to bring up some poets. How's that?
- [15:31]
Dee Dee Jackson
Sounds good.
- [15:32]
Major Jackson
Yeah. Let's hear some poems. Major Jackson is the host. I'm joking. Mark Jarman's most recent collection of poetry is Zeno's Eternity from Paul Drey Books in 2023. He has also published three books of essays about poetry, the Secret of Poetry, Body and Soul, essays on poetry, and Dailiness. His honors include the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poets Prize, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Centennial professor of English Emeritus at Vanderbilt University, where He taught from 1983 to 2020, when he retired. Kate Daniels received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of six collections of poetry and the editor of one collected volume. Her honors include a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Best American Poetry selections, Pushcart Prize, and election to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her poems have been anthologized in more than 75 volumes and have appeared individually in journals such as American Poetry Review, the Southern Review, Oxford American, and Plowshares. She's the Edward Mims professor of English Emeritus at Vanderbilt. An affiliate faculty member in Medicine, Health and Society, she teaches writing at the Baltimore Washington center for Psychoanalysis Analysis and conducts community workshops on recovery for people whose lives have been affected by addiction. Please welcome Mark and Kate. Thank you both for joining us. You both have had poems featured on the Slowdown, but we're going to hear two poems from you. We'll start with Mark.
- [17:31]
Mark Jarman
Yes, poetry, the greatest art. This is just a poem about catching a young student before she fell on an icy path by Vanderbilt. It's a winter poem. So here's this young student, she's walking along. Here's Professor Jarman trudging along, and he sees that she's going to hit a patch of ice. This is called she Twirled along the Brick Wall Fingertips. She twirled along the brick wall, fingertips clawing at mortar to take hold and skittering over the wall, face like a keyboard, frantic, muted. And I, as usual, was just trudging along, head down on ice, this time more of a mincing than true trudging, though my soul trudged when I caught her, slim, young, padded and pleated fleece and taller than I. As I helped her stand, she pulled an earplug out beneath her knit cap and said ouch. And said it like a quiet bid for privacy, paternal, winded. I wanted an assurance and she assured me with a thanks that meant just let me cry.
- [19:09]
Kate Daniels
Kate Mark and I are narrative poets, old time narrative poets. We like to tell stories. I have to talk before I tell my poem, but I won't take up my time. So my daughter is over there and I wrote a poem for her when she was an infant called Love Pig, which was a nickname we had for her because she was such a juicy sort of lickable, kissable infant. And she used to come to my readings and stand up and and crow in the audience. I'm the love pig. She stopped that when she was about 12 or 13. She's probably not going to do that tonight, but you may have heard crowing over there on the side while Jad and Major were talking. My granddaughter Lyra, who is the current generation of love pigs, who is at her very first poetry reading. And so I am going to read in her honor and in honor of her parents, my son Gus and her mother, my daughter in law Sarah. Love me because Lyra is also a juicy, kissable, lickable infant. Oh, I wrote this poem originally for CD Wright. Some of you will know who she was, an absolutely wonderful poet of Mark's in my generation who came to stay with me in Durham when my daughter Janie was an infant. And she's the one who sort of called her Love Pig. She slept in the same room with her and used to talk about that wonderful smell that infants have, as well as the wonderful tactile feel of them. So this is Love Pig. You too will love her thighs, the fat sweatiness of them, the toe curling odor, the bracelets, the biscuits of baby flesh washed in urine and milk. The neck is next best. Fat too, bejeweled with dried spit, old food, gray gyres of tears and sweat. If you like, I will let you borrow her for a while and you can burrow down deep in her sweet and her sourness, her soft and her softer, belly up to the buffet of her body and grow corpulent like us, guzzling sweet drafts of baby breath, gobbling mouthfuls of sticky, tender cheek, gorging ourselves on our own. Baby girl.
- [22:01]
Dee Dee Jackson
I'm curious about how a poem starts in you. I was talking to a choreographer recently who talked about how when she walks into a space, it creates an energy loop, like the space has energy in it. Then she has to complete it by making something happen in the space. What creates the energy loop for a poem?
- [22:25]
Mark Jarman
It has to do with connection. And in the poem I read you, it is a connection that would otherwise be prohibited. Professor Jarman does not go grabbing young students unless they need his help. And that was the moment when, on reflection, I thought, isn't that interesting? I caught her. I kept her from falling and hurting herself further. And I felt really paternal at that point. I mean, we were across the street from Vanderbilt Emergency. I could have taken her there. She was fine. As she said, just let me cry. And it was a charged moment. If you think about the relationships between professors and their students and that crossing that space, what is permitted, what is not? And so I realized that's what I need to do. And I waited to make sure that she was fine. And that. Now, how did it become a poem? That happened two or three years before I wrote the poem. It was just that moment stayed with me. And I found a way. I was working in a certain kind of form. The poem is in quatrains. It kind of decreases as it goes down the page. It had a shape that will allow me to tell the story, dramatize the moment.
- [23:57]
Major Jackson
Mark, did you finish it in one sitting?
- [24:01]
Mark Jarman
No, I never finished anything in one sitting. I wish I commenced it in one sitting. I had thought about it for a while. It was there it was something interesting to think about. The first draft. Yeah, maybe that was one sitting, as I recall. It took a while, but that's something I learned to do when I started writing poetry as a teenager. It takes a while.
- [24:29]
Major Jackson
Was it that piece of dialogue that you live with? Just let me cry?
- [24:35]
Mark Jarman
Well, it was the ouch. It was this motion that she made, which I couldn't. She pulled her earplug out of her ear and said, ouch. She didn't say, just let me cry. That was my interpretation. This was like, ouch. Now you can go, yeah, just let me cry.
- [25:00]
Major Jackson
Kate, did you write yours in one sitting?
- [25:03]
Kate Daniels
You know, I think I did. I was writing a whole bunch of poems. I was overwhelmed in early motherhood, when all my kids were little. And I remember. But to answer your question first, mine always starts with the kind of a psychological entry into something like, what is the psychology of this moment? And I grew up in the south, even though my mom was English. And there was this phrase, she or he's so sweet, you could eat him with a spoon. And that's what I felt like about my daughter. And I feel like that about my granddaughter, who I think has just been spirited out of the room because she's so vocal.
- [25:37]
Dee Dee Jackson
I.
- [25:37]
Kate Daniels
She says, they're so sweet, you just want to eat them. And so then I started thinking about cannibalism. I said, what the hell is that all about? And that was what led me.
- [25:46]
Dee Dee Jackson
I once tried to do a story about why do we want to bite cute things no one can really explain.
- [25:52]
Major Jackson
I don't think we've covered cannibalism on the slowdown yet. No, we haven't. Yeah. You both are longtime teachers, and as teachers, I'm curious about the precision of poetry. Most people think, one sitting and you're done. But clearly you come back and you rework the poems. Maybe you can use those poems as an example or not. But how do you get to precision? And where's the artfulness in poetry?
- [26:24]
Mark Jarman
When I have taught poetry writing, I always teach it as a process of vision and revision.
- [26:31]
Kate Daniels
Right.
- [26:32]
Mark Jarman
Mainly revision. And for me, writing has always been a process of revision. So when you asked me, did you write that poem in one sitting? I had it formed, perhaps in mind, but it took many, many drafts. And being willing to do that. My advice to any young writers, Being willing to be patient and to wait. Not that this should sound too mystical, but I want it to. The poem will tell you when it's done. It's like a child leaving home, and you have to Let it go.
- [27:10]
Dee Dee Jackson
Does it. That's interesting. Does it tell you just you, or does it tell you through other people? Do you know what I'm asking?
- [27:20]
Mark Jarman
I know exactly what you're asking, but I. That's an excellent question. Yes. I have some friends I always show my work to who are honest and even brutal. I just had an exchange with one of them, my oldest friend, who's a poet, and I showed him a group of poems, and he said, these two, they're stinkers. Get rid of them. But he said, but this one begins in, like, the second stanza. So, you know, poets talking to each other that way, you understand what it means is that you've written something that you need to throw away or put away, but you also have something that you need to work on. It's not done, but it will be clearer to you if you will remove part of it in front of you.
- [28:12]
Kate Daniels
And your initial question about teaching. So I always answer that, as I always approached that and still do, because I'm still doing a little bit of teaching as we're doing something really countercultural. I mean, frankly, it's. One of the things that appealed to me about the Slowdown was that it articulated my approach to poetry. It's slow, it's mindful, and if you're not on for that, this is not gonna be your game. You're not gonna be interested in it. And so I always taught it that way, that we're in this sort of, like, little cult, and we do this weird thing with words in our head that most people don't do. Everything is too intense for us, and we sort of manage it through these linguistic expressions. So that was kind of always. Because that's what it was like for me. Poetry I started was one of those geeks who started writing before I could write and read. I would dictate to my mom, and she would write them down. It, like, saved my shit. That's how I made it through life, and that's how I teach it. Because a lot of times, particularly because Mark and I both spent our careers in academia teaching, essentially adults, a lot of times, interestingly, these young people who come into these undergraduate workshops, they're embarrassed to be writing poetry. So you have to figure out a way to make it okay for them. So I sort of said, we're in this weird cult, and we're all in here together, and it's really cool.
- [29:33]
Dee Dee Jackson
That's interesting that I suddenly was like, oh, my God. Podcasting is the same way. You almost have to convince people that it's a thing you can take seriously.
- [29:44]
Kate Daniels
Yeah.
- [29:44]
Dee Dee Jackson
That you're allowed to actually work at hard. Because everyone's like, oh, I'll just make a podcast. Everybody has a podcast, you know, So I wonder, do you. Do you have to convince people that poetry is a thing that you can actually spend your life doing? Not just. Not just as a vocation, but actually getting better at as a craft?
- [30:02]
Mark Jarman
The first thing I say to my student, said to my college students when they come into a creative writing class to write poetry, I said, we're going to write poetry. This is the best thing in the world. And it's hard and it's going to take you a long time and you're going to be frustrated and we're going to find joy in that.
- [30:24]
Dee Dee Jackson
Amen.
- [30:25]
Kate Daniels
Amen.
- [30:27]
Major Jackson
It reminds me of a quote from Czesla Miwos talking about poetry and thinking about the. The labor of it. He says, it's enough labor for a human life. And how I interpret that, like with any art, is that you are a lifelong student of that particular art. And around that emerges a life well lived, a life of meditation, one in which you are attentive to language. Do you have similar quotes that you share with students?
- [31:05]
Kate Daniels
Yes.
- [31:05]
Major Jackson
Okay.
- [31:06]
Kate Daniels
Stanley Kunitz was my teacher and my mentor in graduate school. What is the use of poetry if it doesn't say something meaningful about the human experience?
- [31:19]
Major Jackson
I can live with that.
- [31:20]
Kate Daniels
Yeah, that's cool.
- [31:23]
Dee Dee Jackson
What does that say about those poems that you can't understand? There's a certain kind of. You mentioned narrative poetry, so I'm the non poet on the stage, so please forgive what I'm about to ask.
- [31:37]
Major Jackson
We're going to induct you in.
- [31:40]
Dee Dee Jackson
But there's the narrative poetry as you, as you, as you mentioned. But then there's the other kind that is so layers upon layers of abstraction that you're just. It's more like music or it's more like word salad or something. What about. How does that. How does that form comport with the quote that you just.
- [31:59]
Kate Daniels
Well, that like, you know, gave me like a. A good sort of launch pad. Because I would say there's two sort of main modes, narrative and lyric. But what you're talking about is something different. What we used to call. I don't know what it's called now, but in our generation we called experimental poetry. And it was linguistically interesting, but did not stab me in the heart, which is what I need a poem to do, you know, so it made it okay for me to not feel uncool. Because I wasn't writing those kinds of poems you're talking about. That's what it did for me.
- [32:33]
Dee Dee Jackson
Okay.
- [32:35]
Mark Jarman
I'm reaching back to my mind for a pithy expression of what poetry is. I think I already said this is, I believe, Elizabeth Bishop, vision and revision. And I know a lot of poetry by heart. And right now I've forgotten all of it. This is a line at the end of a poem by Robert Frost called For Once Then Something. He's looking down at a well and he sees something. He knows he actually sees a thing. And at the end he says, is it truth? A pebble of quartz. For Once, then Something. For me, that is the heart of a poem. You have got something. It's real. And what you're trying to do in the poem is provide the dimensions of that real thing that you can only perhaps picture. You're not even sure it's real, but it's something. And that's a powerful word, something, because it's not nothing.
- [33:50]
Dee Dee Jackson
Yeah.
- [33:51]
Major Jackson
Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Mark, for joining us on stage and for your poems and teaching. Now, Michael, would you come up on stage to introduce our next guest?
- [34:10]
Micah Kielbon
Well, thank you again to Kate and Mark for that amazing conversation. And I'm gonna let you two major and Jad go get a drink. You'll have a second love. To introduce our next guest, we're gonna link together the lyric and the music I'd like to bring to the stage. Tia Sillers. Tia Sillers is a Grammy Award winning songwriter with countless successful singles including Leanne Womack's I Hope youe Dance, the chick's there's yous Trouble, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd's Blue on Black. I Hope youe Dance received worldwide exposure including the Nobel Prize Awards ceremony and was adapted into a New York Times bestselling book written by Sillers and her co writer, Mark D. Sanders. In addition to winning Song of the year at the 43rd annual Grammy Awards, I Hope youe Dance was named Song of the Year by cma, acm, nsai, ASCAP and bmi. Didn't think I would say ASCAP on a stage. Her latest recorded work is Zariba McIntyre's new single, I Can't. More than 30 million records have been sold worldwide featuring Siller's compositions. Her catalog has spanned genre from country to heavy metal, across geography and generations of recording artists. But today we're bringing Tia to the stage to highlight her as a performer, in her own work, in her own right, as an artist and a creator. Without further ado tia sillers Sam.
- [36:04]
Tia Sillers
Here we go.
- [36:08]
Siana Rouse
I got songs about true love. Songs about the lack thereof so gorgeous they cut straight to the court these days the skin I'm in Is a hair's breadth Too damn thin There's a whole lot of blood Left on the floor. Tale of a troubadour 10,000 rhymes that makes life a dozen maybe land just right. But I guess that's the way with anything. Cause the game is rigged the hearts are slim still we swing again and again and again and again and there lies the reason the caged bird sings O Troubadour Sam. Riding this baccana lane the flickering is warm and kind it softens the demons and the solitude that damn solitude and I must admit I like the way it hurts my fingertips to play.
- [39:14]
Major Jackson
These.
- [39:14]
Siana Rouse
Strings that ring Come back, friend Come back, fool and I always do come back for more tale of troubadour oh, I always do come back for my tale of a troop of do I always do come back for more tale of a troop Door.
- [40:05]
Tia Sillers
Major, you had requested one song, but I've changed my mind.
- [40:36]
Siana Rouse
Cassiopeia and Geronimo Met outside of Phoenix On a clear desert evening and the story goes she was shining like diamonds he was riding bareback Apache looked up, starlight looked down and somehow that was that soon it was racing west Night after night Chasing a shape across the sky Love we love who we love who we love Dream, we dream what we dream Would we dream? Would we dream? Love, we love who we love and love doesn't think it's some impossible thing at all now an Indian warrior and a Greek goddess they should have known better they could have said never to fall so hard and yet she would wait for the sun to drop over Texas he'd wait for the twilight to grow and then he would listen for Cassiopeia to call out Geronimo, be my Romeo. Love we love who we love who we love Dream we dream what we dream what we dream what we dream.
- [43:28]
Kate Daniels
Love.
- [43:31]
Siana Rouse
We love who we love and love doesn't think it's some impossible thing at all no, not at all. So all you rich girls and poor boys all you Johnnies and Joes.
- [44:08]
Major Jackson
Dark.
- [44:08]
Siana Rouse
Skinned and blue eyed Buddhist and Baptist Remember Cassiopeia and Geronimo we love who we love who we love we love who we love who we love who we love who we love who we.
- [44:36]
Dee Dee Jackson
Love.
- [44:46]
Tia Sillers
And I have not been this intimidated in a long time. What an astute and articulate crowd. My gosh.
- [44:54]
Micah Kielbon
I think. No reason to Be intimidated. You were absolutely amazing. Another round of applause for Tia Sellers. Thank you so much. We're going to ask Tia to come sit in the hot seat on the orange couch here, and I'm going to ask Jad and Major back to the stage and we'll talk a little bit about your work. Thank you so much.
- [45:21]
Major Jackson
Tia. We are in Music City, I think, and you are. You've had a long career here in Nashville, and we poets often say we hope to write poems that arise to the condition of music. Do you hope to write songs that rise to the condition of poetry? Because you do. Am I right? Yeah. Yeah.
- [45:57]
Tia Sillers
I think that's probably both my curse and my blessing my whole life is that I. I've accidentally written songs that were very difficult, that connected with the world, and that's like the ultimate gift for me. But it's also made me lean into even more each time I write. With each song that was successful, it made me, instead of becoming more inclined to want to have that happen again. I wasn't as enamored with the.
- [46:35]
Micah Kielbon
Having.
- [46:35]
Tia Sillers
A number one song as I was about how did I connect with those people and how was I able to elevate? I feel like that I've been so fortunate that many of my. Most of my songs, all of my songs have. I've never written a song with the word beer in it. I've never had this. You know, I mean, I've never had a song with a pickup truck in it. I haven't. And somehow they've been embraced.
- [47:04]
Dee Dee Jackson
You know, if you were to write a song with the word beer in it.
- [47:09]
Tia Sillers
You know, I've really been thinking about that lately. No, I actually do. I want to write. Like, what? Well, if Chris Kristofferson were to write a song, how would he do it? Or how would Willie Nelson do it? And I think that I've been lately sort of thinking about that, and I've been more and more channeling as I write now these days, like Cassiopeian, Geronimo. I think that Willie Nelson should sing that song. I think that he should. He would kill it, right? But that's what I'm often doing now. I'm channeling, like, what would Kris Kristofferson write these days? Like, I'm really asking myself that.
- [47:48]
Dee Dee Jackson
You said accidentally. You accidentally write songs. What's the accidentally part?
- [47:54]
Tia Sillers
Well, I mean that a very long time ago, in another life, I was a commercial. I knew I wanted to be a songwriter, and I was at Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt's been very good to Me too. And I was going to summer school at Vanderbilt and taking a class in economics, and I met another guy who was also a Vanderbilt student, and. And he was playing a gig down at Amy's, and he was this incredibly hot, sexy fellow, and all the women were in love with him. I was not. I was just more. But I thought I was already having this inkling of secretly writing songs and poetry and everything like that all this time. And he mentions at the end of the class I should come see his show. So I did. And I came to his show, and it was my first experience watching someone on stage with tremendous charisma and wattage. He had the qualm, to quote Jerry Maguire, the magic qualm. And I was like, wow, this guy could be a star. But his songs were terrible. And so after class the next day, he asked me how I liked the show. And I said, I think you've got a lot of star power, but you need help with your songs. And I think you ought to let me do that. And I started writing with him. And then I went away back to college. I was going to Chapel Hill. And while I was back in college, he got a publishing deal, and then he got a record deal and all these things, and that's what. And then I got my first hits through him, writing these songs with him. And they were like super hyper intelligent songs. So it was crazy. I mean, he was over one record label, I mean, because it was too smart for the market.
- [49:35]
Major Jackson
But I'm kind of happy you didn't finance. But I do want to ask. I really much want my students to learn to songwrite, to write songs. If you were teaching a course, what would be essential to share with them?
- [49:59]
Tia Sillers
One of the things with poetry, as I was listening to the two poets today, it really struck me that they very much saw an experience or they were experiencing something very real, very visceral, and then they were trying to capture it through an economy of words. And even, as Mark said, the placement on the page to where the page would guide you as to the breaks, I think what happens, which is fascinating in a way, with poetry, the words are at the service of the page, not just what you're hearing, Right? So there's two ways you experience poetry. It's the person sitting in silence in their own personal life reading this thing and breaking it the way they think it should be, and maybe even reading it aloud to themself in their own cadence. Very rarely does a reader, a poetry, ever really hear Walt Whitman speak, or you speak or Whatever. And then it becomes different when you actually hear the poet read it out loud. Right. So it's. Those are two different experiences. Well, with songs, almost every. All the lyrics have to be at the service of the music. The music is kind of the page, maybe.
- [51:20]
Major Jackson
Yeah.
- [51:21]
Dee Dee Jackson
Oh, interesting.
- [51:21]
Tia Sillers
Maybe I'm thinking off my head right here. That and what's really fun was I picked two songs today that I feel that they stand completely on the page. Like they could just be a piece of poetry without the music, but.
- [51:37]
Major Jackson
So you chose the Apache leader Geronimo to be in a relationship with Cassiopeia, a Greek figure. That sounds very literary to me.
- [51:47]
Micah Kielbon
Yes.
- [51:48]
Major Jackson
Yeah.
- [51:48]
Tia Sillers
Well, I'm also. I have a strange, tragic story, but. So I was married to a wonderful man and my favorite collaborator, and he died of cancer. And now I feel that I. I don't even. I didn't even realize it. That's a song I wrote by myself. And a lot of my songs are. I do. But as a professional songwriter, you also collaborate often, but it was only several of my friends said, well, you clearly wrote that about your relationship with your late husband, except that your. I'm Geronimo and he's Cassiopeia. And we make this strange, heavenly. For a long time, I felt like this is another thing I want to write about in a song, but forever I felt that he was a ghost. And now recently, he's turned into an angel. And I much prefer living with an angel than a ghost. And I want to capture that somehow in a song. But that I realized that I think that, yeah, I'm Geronimo and he's Cassiopeia. But we make it work.
- [52:49]
Dee Dee Jackson
I.
- [52:49]
Tia Sillers
You know. Yeah.
- [52:51]
Major Jackson
One last question. Didi and I sometimes. We're neighbors, by the way, Didi and I will sometimes hear you playing on your. Your porch. Do you write every day?
- [53:07]
Tia Sillers
No, but I do. One of the things that. Moss, that's my late husband's name, he was an amazing musician and performer, and he practiced every day. And I remember, and I'm now mad at myself. I just want to smack myself for ever saying anything snide or snippy to him. But I would often lament that he had to practice so much, and we would go on vacation, he'd have to bring a guitar so he could practice, you know, I mean, it was always a good. You know, everybody has to practice practice passes. And once he died, I realized that I needed to practice. Like that was this thing I needed to take up the practice, the practice, the practice. So it's very much no matter what. Every day I practice.
- [53:47]
Major Jackson
Thank you, Tia Sellers, for joining us on the stage this evening. Okay. We have.
- [53:57]
Dee Dee Jackson
This feels very cruel, Major. I had so many questions, but I was like, I know we. I cannot allow to ask them. Like, we. That could be. That conversation could have gone on for like.
- [54:06]
Major Jackson
Absolutely. Yeah, no doubt.
- [54:08]
Dee Dee Jackson
Do you want to notice. I just want to notice the cruelty.
- [54:11]
Major Jackson
Do you want to put one in the ether?
- [54:13]
Dee Dee Jackson
No, no, no.
- [54:13]
Major Jackson
Okay. Dee Dee Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity and Moon Jar. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, the New Yorker, and World Literature Today. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets, Poem A Day and the Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. A Dean's Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt, she teaches creative writing. Most recently, she completed her certification as a Tennessean naturalist. Siana Rouse is a poet and educator. She is the author of the chapbook Vantablack. Her poetry is featured in Poets.org the Slowdown, Oxford American, and on NPR's Turning the Tables. She has been a visiting writer at Vanderbilt and the University of the South Sewanee, Guest co curator of the exhibition Cut to the Quick, originating at the Frist Art Museum. Rouse lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she has or is opening Bardstown, a poetry centric bookstar and bar. Please welcome Siana and Dee Dee Jackson. Dee Dee, can we start with you in a poem?
- [55:43]
Jad Abumrad
Sure. This poem is titled Wild. I don't think I need to really say much about it. Yeah, I'm just gonna go straight in. Wild. When we moved our cat to our new house, the first thing he did was slip up the chimney. Without doubt or fear, after feeling a slight draft of cold air escape from the firebox's black mouth. He was looking for a way out, a way home. He scrambled up what we thought would become the heart of the house. Nothing could lure him down, no food lifted on cardboard or softly sung ballads. He wedged himself beyond the narrow throat and sat on the smoke shelf, safe in soot and ash. When I was little, we didn't have a fireplace, and even though it could snow in Florida, no one had flues to clean or creosote to peel from brick, no ash thin as onion skin to watch take wing and fly above flames. I was a sleepwalker through most of those days, a passenger in my own life. A lawn full of dandelion seed heads, lion's tooth, all waiting for Breath I couldn't look to my family and see myself reflected there. I was born to no one. I was wild. And when the water seemed to hiss down by the lake, I knew it was to me it called. You have to do better than that, said the grackle, drinking at the water's edge, wedged between reeds and cattails. To be wild, that is.
- [57:55]
Major Jackson
Siana.
- [57:58]
Dee Dee Jackson
Ah, so wonderful. Thank you for the invitation to be here and to sit next to Dee Dee and read work. And thank you to everyone for being here to hear poetry aloud. I do have a setup, and it's probably long, but it may be longer than the poem, actually. But the poem I'm reading, I've been studying the Chamberlain Khan act of 1918, in which the government decided that it would be the law to arrest women to protect soldiers from venereal diseases. And so in the process of doing that, I saw an image in. This lasted for a long time, by the way. So I saw an image in 1940, and so I want to tell you about that image and then the image that it made me think of, and then I'll read the poem so it sets it up for you. So that image that I saw was a World War II poster by an anonymous artist. It has a woman, a white woman, though her face is shaded and shadowed to be maybe more of an ambiguous skin tone. And she is glancing backwards over her left shoulder, her large eyelashes completely obscuring her eyes. She has this fully made up face. She looks like a vixen holding a cigarette between her bright red lips. She has on a red beret. And the backdrop is this shadowy gray, blue. Above her head in red letters, a message says she may be. And it has ellipses. And then at the bottom it says a bag of trouble. Syphilis, Gonorrhea. So a bag of trouble. And so we had. Yeah, right, yeah. And so I immediately though, saw this image and I do often write in response images. So it made me think of, of course, an image you may all know in 1943. So just a few years later by J. Howard Miller, the We Can do it poster. Also a woman wearing red on her head and flexing her bicep and wearing a steel worker shirt, looking straight at us and feeling empowered, also fully made up. And another propaganda poster, right, to get women to work in the industries that the men had left while they were overseas. And so I want you to imagine those two images as you hear this poem. We can do it. Back of trouble, eyes different, but both ready, telling you what she wants, just what she can do One flexing her bicep one crooking her neck One the fine wine one the wild tannin One protecting capitalist lusts One feeding the virile stallion One fastening and twisting into ten the other maybe yes, the same she's crisp and clean but smells of oil and iron and she has fresh Chantilly clinging to her clavicle don't be dizzied by her spell, they say A tart trap, a witchy vapor A siren scent meant to crash a sailor upon her shore the corner girl, the club girl the waitress in the diner who winks as she drips kerosene into your cuppa don't trust her if she covets your glance as she slides slices of pie across the table Beware she's riveting with her wanting her desire to do it she's riveting her knowing her lips licked and shining your way she's riveting with her wanting to know her body know yours A woman flexing her sex A woman who can do it does.
- [62:30]
Major Jackson
It's a very powerful poem. And, you know, one of the pleasures of reading poetry and writing poetry, but let's say reading poetry is that we're invited to take a closer scrutiny to the world around us. And in this particular case, these two propaganda posters. I'll ask that question. When did the spark happen for that poem? Did it happen upon sight or upon later reflection of these two images? I'm assuming one image fed into the other during the process. Could you talk about that?
- [63:12]
Dee Dee Jackson
Yes, I really. I like responding to visual images with poetry. A crisis. And so that's a practice that's very natural to me because I see something and I. And I want to put language to it. And so immediately in seeing this image and thinking of both of these women and how they were used and positioned in propaganda. Yes. And it did flow rather quickly once I saw them together. Like Mark, Though I do believe the writing is in the revision, so I've spent quite a lot of time massaging it. I'll probably massage it more.
- [63:51]
Major Jackson
Yeah. Dede, your. The poem about the cat, which I happen to be privileged to have been there. We went out for cat food and came back and. And then we heard meowing throughout the house, but we didn't know where it came from. What you leave out, which is very interesting, is this was your first day in the house. Our first day together in the house. And you climbed up in the chimney to get the cat.
- [64:26]
Jad Abumrad
That makes it sound like I was a contortionist. I mean, I wasn't all the way up in the chimney. Contortionist. Yeah. I had to bend certain ways for sure.
- [64:36]
Major Jackson
So I could have asked this question of even our friend Tia and Mark and Kate, how do you decide what to keep in and what to leave out in the poem?
- [64:45]
Jad Abumrad
Right, right. Well, you mean, what moments of the whole, entire story, for instance? Yeah, I mean, I don't think nothing was made up in there. I mean, I also feel that there's. We have the liberty to add details, too. Like, there could have been some more interesting things that could have happened in the chimney that I. That didn't really. That I might have added to the story, but I didn't have to do that because the story truly was crazy enough.
- [65:12]
Major Jackson
Yeah.
- [65:12]
Jad Abumrad
I was trying to think of why the cat wanted to. Why the cat was going for the air. And I mean, he had also, in the cat's defense, just had a plane ride, was kind of drugged, but I don't think the drugs really worked. So it gave him more energy instead of less. I mean, it was just a nightmare. And we thought he was safe. And in Florida, this is where the next. The second part of the poem comes in. I mean, we have fireplaces in Florida, but it's rare, and you hardly ever use them. You might use them twice the whole year, and you get excited if you have one. So I didn't grow up with a fireplace, and so that made me want. I wasn't. We just dropped the cat off and I thought, oh, we're safe. He's fine. Easily could jump up and get up into the chimneys.
- [65:57]
Dee Dee Jackson
So.
- [65:59]
Jad Abumrad
Yeah. And so that's what one thing led to the next with the chimney. And then my experience in Florida and what that means.
- [66:05]
Dee Dee Jackson
Yeah, I was very struck by the grackle at the end. Speaking of. I'm just curious how that figure appeared to you as a poet. Not so much as obviously, as a memory.
- [66:21]
Jad Abumrad
But sure, I write a lot about birds. People who know me, like, know I write. But there's a lot of birds in my poems. But that wildness when I was. And I was. I lost my train of thought for a second. But why the cat wanted out was to be in my. In my mind, in the poem, want to be wild. And that made me think about where's my wildness? What.
- [66:41]
Major Jackson
Where.
- [66:42]
Jad Abumrad
When do I want to. When did I want to be wild? How tame am I right now? You know, and in relationship to that poem, the poem you just read, too, and the grackle was kind of like this. The speaker for the wild. In that moment, I grew up on a lake. That's true. All that's true. Grackles would come in hordes by the water's edge. But the grackle was the speaker for the wild and the wild self.
- [67:08]
Major Jackson
It's National Poetry Month, right? Yeah. And what a lot of people don't know, or maybe they've forgotten, is that the Slave Slowdown emerged as a project of former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. Each poet laureate has to come up with an idea of how to get poetry into the public. Our friend Ada Limon decided to pull together poems in national parks. Tracy came up with the idea of the Slowdown. I think Joseph Barotsky wanted to put anthologies of poems in hotels next to the Bible. What would be your. If you were poet laureate of the state of Tennessee or Nashville or the U.S. what ideas do you have? And this isn't research, by the way.
- [68:08]
Dee Dee Jackson
It could be. I mean, several hosts have been poet laureates. So I love this question because I think of it often. I met at split this rock conference a long time ago, a guy from Iran and I used to belly dance back in the day. And so I had been in so many Persian restaurants and so I knew all this stuff about food, so. So I asked him what he missed about home. And I just knew it was going to be some food that then we could chat about. And he said, I miss sitting at the table. I'm getting all my food ideas ready. And he said and talking about poetry with his friends. And I was very surprised by that. And he said, we used to talk about poetry the way that you all talk about Justin Bieber. And I was so depressed.
- [69:04]
Micah Kielbon
But I do.
- [69:05]
Dee Dee Jackson
I often think about a lot of ways that I try to move in Nashville and create spaces is so that we are talking about poetry the way that people talk about Bieber or Beyonce. And I keep thinking of that image of the table. And so I would love to just create dinners all over the place where people like each course comes with a different idea of talking about a poem. And we just have this poetry dinner spaces. I think dinners are places where you fall in love, right? You go on dates and you have those moments. So fall in love with a poem. Fall in love with each other. Maybe you're strangers talking about a poem together. I just want to see dinners all over the United States where we are talking about poet.
- [69:53]
Jad Abumrad
I would be there.
- [69:54]
Dee Dee Jackson
Yeah. So here in Nashville, I've done a couple actually, and they've been really lovely and fun. And I think of Joy Harjo saying, you know, maybe at all the world begins at the table.
- [70:05]
Jad Abumrad
And I think. I think you're already doing certain things like that. Right? Like the. I think the. What's the. I mean, not dinner, but the other. The other one. The drinks and the.
- [70:15]
Dee Dee Jackson
Oh, yes, drinking.
- [70:17]
Micah Kielbon
Yeah.
- [70:17]
Dee Dee Jackson
At Bardstown, we'll have a bar and tables, so we'll do it there, too, for sure.
- [70:22]
Jad Abumrad
So I think you're already right there. I was thinking about that question that you were answering. And I taught high school before I came to Vanderbilt for 20 years. And I was just talking to my students today about how when Billy Collins was poet laureate, he developed that anthology called poetry 180, and how truly important that was actually for my students. And I would start class with a poem every single day. And so if I could, if I ever had that position, I would want to emphasize poetry in the classrooms and not to forget about high school students. But, you know, I know we often start with, you know, elementary school and. But all the way through, that's what I would want to accentuate.
- [71:05]
Major Jackson
Yeah, these are great answers. Let's create a list, because there was an article in the newspaper here about why doesn't Nashville have a poet laureate? So maybe we can send Mayor Freddie some ideas about who is also a poet himself. Yes, he is a poet, so we.
- [71:25]
Dee Dee Jackson
Need to get those going.
- [71:27]
Major Jackson
I love it. Thank you, Dee Dee. Thank you, Siana.
- [71:30]
Dee Dee Jackson
Thank you.
- [71:30]
Jad Abumrad
Thank you.
- [71:35]
Major Jackson
Jed, are you a poet yet? Are you on your way? I don't know.
- [71:40]
Dee Dee Jackson
It would feel. I mean, I'm gonna answer your question from an adjacency.
- [71:45]
Major Jackson
Sure.
- [71:46]
Dee Dee Jackson
I have felt. And maybe it's the. I mean, Micah mentioned the sort of the. The tumult of the last few years, last few months. How long has it been? I don't know. Time. What is time? It. Something about this moment has opened my heart to poetry. And I don't encounter it maybe the way that you and all the amazing poets do. I don't encounter it in journals. It's usually sent back and forth through a network, but they hit different now, you know, So I don't know if I'd call myself a poet, but I am part of the energy loop that I was talking about now.
- [72:32]
Major Jackson
I love the energy loop, and I love the idea that poetry could be a part of that. I'm also thinking about maybe what prevents us from. From cozying up to a poem, but we often find it when we need it. Like, you're not alone in that regard. Sometimes it takes A loss of a friend or family member. That brings us to a poem. There are shared public events when the. When the planes went into the tower some years ago, poetry was circulating. Remember Auden's poem September 1, 1939, and Adam Zagayewski's poem, Try to Praise the Mutilated World? Is it the perception of pretentiousness? Is it this high tone art? What do you. If you were ahead of the PR department for poetry across the globe, where should we start?
- [73:43]
Dee Dee Jackson
I mean, that's a. That's a great question, which is far above my pay grade.
- [73:49]
Major Jackson
I.
- [73:49]
Dee Dee Jackson
You know, it's one of the thoughts that I take with me from hearing this incredible work read tonight. It makes me appreciate what is sometimes lacking in the discourse about poetry. The discourse about poetry has a bit of a joy problem, you know, but there's been so much joy and so much humor.
- [74:13]
Major Jackson
Say that last part again. I was laughing about the joy.
- [74:19]
Dee Dee Jackson
The role that humor plays, the role that whimsy plays delight, that poems can do that too. That. I mean, I was reminded about seven times tonight that that's. Those are moods that are available to us. So maybe I would start there. And this might simply be a PR problem that, you know, very often you find that the perception lags the reality and that the reality of poets, poetry as it's practiced, as it's consumed, is not the perception. Yeah, but the perception needs to catch up on.
- [74:57]
Major Jackson
This is a conversation that Micah and I always have about the poems that I select because of course, we want to address and have poetry be. Do what poetry does best, which is to acquaint us and perk up our ears to language, but also to reflect, but also to heal. And so a lot of times the subject matter may be addressing some of the challenges of life, but we are very conscientious about celebrating language, celebrating humanity, to the point that we even seek out anthologies that have a lightness of subject matter. Yeah, yeah.
- [75:43]
Dee Dee Jackson
Major. I'm just to mark the moment of this being your sign off, really.
- [75:48]
Major Jackson
I'm in denial.
- [75:51]
Dee Dee Jackson
I wonder. I mean, this is a horrible question to ask, but in the hundreds and hundreds of episodes you've done and all the thousands of poems you've read, do you find that certain voices, certain poems come back to you and help you heal in this moment? And if, I mean, what are those?
- [76:10]
Major Jackson
There are. What I'm proud of is I like to think of poetry as an estate, something that we have inherited over the years. And what I'm most proud of is the younger generation of Poets who are emerging and taking on the discipline, but also thinking about poetry as relevant to their lives. So those poets are there, but we are also consider it really a crucial part of our mission, I think, is to have those younger poets be in conversation with that estate and to encourage them to kind of reacquaint themselves with those voices. And all the thousands, I would say, are the ones that, interestingly enough, are the ones that. Whose lines I kind of live with in my body and my head because they address something that is going on at that particular moment. Yeah.
- [77:24]
Dee Dee Jackson
And I certainly will take from tonight. Mark, quoting the Frost last line. I'm gonna probably misquote a bit for once then something. Or is that correct?
- [77:37]
Major Jackson
Yes, that's right.
- [77:38]
Dee Dee Jackson
That's right.
- [77:39]
Major Jackson
I have another one you can take with you. It's From Burch's, about 3/4 of the way down. Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better. And when I hear that line, it has me reaffirm and recommit myself to not burying my head during these moments of crisis, but to spreading the joy and the love and the richness of our humanity through poetry. So I'm going to say thank you, Micah Kilbond, for two and a half years of working together at the Slowdown. Thank you, Porch. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Susanna. Thank you, board members for supporting the Porch. And thank you to the folks at Analog and have a safe drive home. Thank you for joining. Thank you, Jad.
- [78:54]
Micah Kielbon
And thank you again to Major. One big round of applause again to Major for everything you do for the Slowdown. Thank you again, Jad. That's all I have. But they have fabulous, fabulous classes at the Porch. Fabulous things. Listen to on the Slowdown. We're so grateful to be here. Everybody get home safe. That's Slow Take. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web@arts.gov to get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. Find us on instagram, loadownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org Today's episode was produced by and edited by our own Maria Wurtel. The Slowdown's lead producer is me, Micah Kielbon. Slowtake was produced in partnership with the Porch in Nashville. Special thank you to the porches, Katie McDougal and Susanna Phelps, and to Analog at Hutton Hotel in Nashville. For hosting us. Our music is composed by Alexis Quadrado, engineering by Josh Savageau. Our digital producer is James Napoli, additional production help by Susanna Sharpless and Lauren Humper. Our executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith. Hi everyone, it's Micah, lead producer of the Slowdown. I want to take a minute to talk to you about public media. You may have heard about federal budget cuts and other threats to public media, but what you might not know is that the Slowdown is actually part of the public media ecosystem. If you want to protect your favorite public media podcasts like this one, visit americanpublicmedia.org action to learn how you can help.