1367: Abundance by Rick Barot - The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Podcast Summary: The Slowdown - Episode 1367

Poem: “Abundance” by Rick Barot
Host: Maggie Smith
Date: October 6, 2025
Podcast: American Public Media, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation

Overview: Embracing Shared Poetry and Abundance

In this meditative episode, host Maggie Smith explores the joys and significance of sharing poetry aloud with others, rather than experiencing it in solitude. Using Rick Barot’s poem “Abundance,” Smith reflects on memory, patience, connection, and the myriad forms abundance can take in ordinary life—reminding listeners of poetry’s unique ability to expand attention, foster wonder, and cultivate hope.

Key Discussion Points & Poem Highlights

The Pleasures of Sharing Poetry

Shared Experience: Smith sets the tone by celebrating “the pleasure of sharing our favorite poems with others rather than reading them alone.” (00:22)
Poetry as Connection: The episode underscores that reading poems aloud together creates a unique intimacy, drawing parallels between shared lines and shared moments in life.

The Poem as Dialogue With Memory and Wonder

First Meal in America: Barot’s memory of arriving in the US—symbolized by a “bucket of chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken”—serves as a metaphor for unexpected abundance and newness (00:50).
Abundance Framed Through Tasks: The comparison of memory to “sorting rice by color” in school evokes the work of remembering as a patient, attentive process (01:18).

Patience, Longing, and the Work of Love

Longing and Wonder:
- Barot reflects: “So many of the things I love don’t love me back, a claim that, to borrow an aching line from Miwosh, I make not out of sorrow but in wonder...” (02:10)
Patience in Daily Life: From hunger to love, the poem ties patience to gratitude, noticing, and persistence in the face of uncertainty.

Shared Poetry Reading and Mutual Presence

Memorable Scene: Two friends lying “on the summertime grass of the park,” swapping life stories—about family, childhood, work—while reading poetry aloud (02:40).
- Barot contrasts two memorable readings:
  - Larkin’s famous line: “that poem about how parents fuck you up, whisperingly amazed...” (03:10)
  - Dickinson’s poem about how things fall apart in an exact organized decay” (03:20)
Best Way to Read:
- “I had the thought that it was best to always read poems this way, like the trains in Europe where you have to sit facing each other.” (03:30)

The Power of Intimate Spaces—Literal and Metaphorical

Space & Intimacy: Barot draws analogies between the spaces in poetry and private connection:
- “The space between the lines in a poem was like the space between two people facing each other on a bed, the space of breath in the park.” (03:35)
Closet as Sanctuary: The word “closet” is reclaimed, evoking community and welcome—a reversal of shame:
- “Far back in its etymology, the closet, meant a space of intimate privacy where you might welcome others, not a place of shame you’re supposed to leave behind.” (04:30)

The Overflowing Details of Living

Curious Facts as Abundance: The poem catalogues an array of details—upholstery needles, supergiant stars, daily observations—each an opportunity for awe (04:10).
Images of America & Humanity: The poem closes with a sweep of scenes brimming with subtle richness: orchards, libraries, airports, church basements, festivals, small gestures and large communities—“the abundance of America” (05:05).

Facing Abundant Futures

Ending Insight:
- “Then, like all of us walking into the day, into the one thing there’s plenty of: the future.” (06:40)
Smith and Barot together propose hope as a shared, daily act rooted in attention.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Shared Poetry:
“I had the thought that it was best to always read poems this way, like the trains in Europe where you have to sit facing each other.” — Rick Barot (03:30)
On Wonder, Not Sorrow:
“A claim that, to borrow an aching line from Miwosh, I make not out of sorrow but in wonder...” — Rick Barot (02:10)
On the Closet:
“Far back in its etymology, the closet...meant a space of intimate privacy where you might welcome others, not a place of shame you’re supposed to leave behind.” — Rick Barot (04:30)
On Facing the Future:
“Then, like all of us walking into the day, into the one thing there’s plenty of: the future.” — Rick Barot (06:40)

Timestamps for Key Segments

00:22 – Maggie Smith introduces the episode’s theme: shared poetry.
00:50 – Barot’s “first meal in America” as metaphor for abundance.
01:18 – The teacher’s rice-sorting lesson: memory and patience.
02:10 – “So many of the things I love don't love me back…” and wonder.
02:40 – Sharing lives and poetry on summer grass.
03:10 – Referencing Larkin and Dickinson; poetry’s raw honesty.
03:30 – “Best to always read poems this way…”: poetry as face-to-face intimacy.
03:35 – The space between lines, the space between people.
04:10 – Cataloguing the details: abundance in knowledge and daily life.
04:30 – The etymology of “closet”; space as intimacy and affirmation.
05:05 – A panorama of America’s daily abundance.
06:40 – Final affirmation: stepping into “the one thing there’s plenty of: the future.”

Tone and Takeaway

With serene appreciation, Maggie Smith and Rick Barot invite listeners to celebrate everyday abundance—found in food, patience, poetry, memories, and all the moments we share with each other. The episode gently insists that attention, care, and presence are radical forms of hope, and that a poem, especially when read aloud with someone else, is “its own abundance.”

Transcript

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I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slowdown. Today's poem rejoices in something at the heart of this podcast the pleasure of sharing our favorite poems with others rather than reading them alone. Abundance by Rick Barrett it must say something wonderful about my life that my first meal in America was a bucket of chicken from Kentucky Fried chicken. I was 10 hours before the arrival at the airport to the cacophony of relatives, then the drive to my uncle's house in the new winter cold, where the bucket waited like America itself. For once that one memory is not like the tattered band T shirt you only wear to bed, but like the crisp task the teacher gives to her students. She hands each of us a mason jar full of black, white, red and brown rice. She tells us to pour the rice on the table and and sort it by color, however long it will take. In this way, the counting and accounting, like the work of memory, is its own abundance along with that of the gorgeous rice. All my life I have been drawn to exercises and patience because so many of the things I love don't love me back, a claim that, to borrow an aching line from Miwosh, I make not out of sorrow but in wonder, the patience of bending over a table, counting the patience of hunger, the patience of love clinging to an image of sunlight on the a hazel eye. That day we lay on the summertime grass of the park and looked up at the maples the sun ruffled through. He told me about the stern way his grandmother had taught him how to play violin when he was a child. I told him about my childhood newspaper route, walking the neighborhood, sleeping streets at dawn, my hands black from newsprint, stung by the rubber bands that always snapped when we weren't talking about those things, we were talking about poetry beside ourselves. When reading out loud the Larkin poem about how parents fuck you up, whisperingly amazed, reading Dickinson's poem about how things fall apart in an exact organized decay, reading the poems with someone else, I had the thought that it was best to always read poems this way, like the trains in Europe where you have to sit facing each other. I had the thought that the space between the lines in a poem was like the space between two people facing each other on a bed, the space of breath in the park. The maples we lay under were Norway maples, a species considered invasive because it outshades everything around it. I didn't know this when I fell in love with the geometry of each astral leaf, or fell in love with the chorus the leaves made when the breezes conducted them. Often I am moved by all the information I've gathered but don't know what to do with that the needles used for upholstery are curved like parentheses, that there's a star somewhere 200 times bigger than our sun. That far back in its etymology, the closet, and actually meant a space of intimate privacy where you might welcome others, not a place of shame you're supposed to leave behind. The abundance of that closet, crowded now with my fierce friends, the abundance of having a new truth in the mind, the bloom in your senses like biting into a fennel seed, the abundance of America, its orchards and its libraries, its cemeteries and its airports, the circle of people praying in the basement of a church and the muddy field after a festival, the boy counting the 67 rings of the fresh cut log washed up on the beach and the girl wearing red sunglasses on the train in the morning, startled awake at her stop. Then, like all of us walking into the day, into the one thing there's plenty of the future. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. Find us on Instagram @downdownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org.