No.50 - July 2021
In the early days of the Covid lockdown, I wrote some reflections on poetry’s responses to traumas both public and personal. [“Poetry Pandemic”]. Now more than a year later, I’d like to continue that discussion, starting with some history and concluding with a few personal recommendations. I’m not aiming at original points here so much as I am reminding myself of some home truths that the pandemic has underlined for me.
Covid aside, in the past two decades or so—at least since the eleventh of September 2001—this country has seen a steepening descent into more and more acrid partisanship, anger, and grievance. The bitterly contested and still controversial Presidential election of 2000 had lasting ill effects on the body politic. Then the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016 further stressed the social fabric in ways I fear we are going to be dealing with for a long time. All of the above have been both accompanied and enhanced by the swift-moving currents of instant news, the flood of information and dispute on the internet. Social media platforms that thrive on anger, conspiracy, disinformation, and paranoia foster a continual beehive-poking that is good for the bottom lines of corporations like Twitter and Facebook. But not so good for our peace of mind or the health of our nation.
I’m far from the graham to remark on such developments. And yes, the contrarian in me immediately wants to affirm that there is nothing new under the sun, as the Book of Ecclesiastes anciently declared. I concede that when you take the long view, current rancor and partisanship will not seem entirely novel things. Take a look at American newspapers during the 19th Century: some of the rhetoric there would make Fox News sound fair and balanced by contrast. What doesn’t seem disputable is that, in large part due to the internet, a hectic sort of perpetual simmering grievance and gloom have become pervasive in a fresh way, as well as louder.
At the same time, I like to remind myself that there have always been countercurrents to all the blather and acrimony. And this is clearly where poetry comes in—all the arts, really. Art can be marshaled to push back against the diffuse anger many of us witness and consume daily in our various “feeds.” More than ever, I believe poetry has an important role to play in working against the bitter tide. Naturally a poet would think so. But even granting that there is little new in asking poetry to perform such cultural labor, still I feel a renewed need for it to do so. At least for me, the pandemic has just reinforced this need. Poetry has a distinctive opportunity to nourish our spirit in this era of constant “hot takes” and the like.
The term “hot take” intrigues me. “Hot” carries the suggestion of passion, perhaps even righteous anger. But more often it puts me in mind of other, less positive expressions, like “hothead” and “hot tempered.” On cable news programs as well as social media platforms anger, outrage, and sensation increasingly seem to predominate. There is such a thing as righteous and useful anger, but so often that’s not what we’re seeing. Anger can feel akin to fever, a sign of disease, not healthy debate. I like to be an informed citizen, but I am no longer sure that paying attention to broadcasters or social media pundits with their instant hot takes on the news of the day is worth my time. It’s interesting that there is no convenient, universally understood antonym for “hot take.” I’ve never heard a panelist on a news show speak about a “cold take.” And certainly I’ve never heard anyone say on such a forum, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it further.” That wouldn’t be good TV.
Yet it’s precisely that thinking further that we always could use more of. I sense in our current cultural moment a great hunger for honesty, truth telling, and serious reflection. This hunger is nothing brand new, as noted above, but it does seem especially pressing these days. On television, radio, and the internet we are bombarded daily by language that has designs on us. That wants to sell us products or ideas, heighten our fears, rile us up, mock opposing viewpoints, and so forth. Far too much of this language is trivial or deceptive in intent, and much of it doesn’t mean what it says. The fatigue from all that is one reason I turn to poetry, not as refuge but as replenishment. Why wouldn’t a reasonably sane person welcome a genre where another mind speaks to us directly without manipulative, dishonest, or empty rhetoric? The best poems aim to tell the truth in language that is both memorable and beautiful, and as such will long outlive every hot take. It’s not escapism but a practical response to existent conditions. Poetry, as Thoreau once noted, is healthy speech.
Poetry’s not the only source of honest reflection and expression, obviously. We can find such things in many places, including but not limited to church, classroom, and art studio. But poetry has been doing such work for thousands of years. When the world is too much with us, when we need to slow down and pay attention, when some quiet contemplation is called for, poetry is readily available right at our fingertips. Perhaps surprisingly, the ancient art of poetry also turns out to be well suited for our current plugged-in era of short attention spans. Indeed, the internet is awash with lyric poetry these days, easy to find, often free of charge.
This situation still amazes me, since I am from the last generation to come of age in the pre-internet world. There are always good reasons to lament the state of the world, but the omnipresence and easy availability of poetry on our laptops and smart phones is cause for rejoicing. If I’m trying to remember a poem by Seamus Heaney, but the title escapes me, I can type in a couple phrases I do recall and in seconds there it is: the poem “Mossbawn” from his 1975 book North. I can reread it on my iPhone while waiting for my car’s oil change. At the same time I can use the poem to drown out the talking heads on the waiting room TV shouting through the usual simplistic certainties. In place of whatever manufactured crisis du jour is currently going viral, I can revisit Heaney’s tender portrait of his mother calmly going about her daily chores, a needful reminder of the lives and work that never make the news, but do make a family. The portrait ends on an image both homely and profound that I find deeply moving.
One of Heaney’s great knacks is in finding domestic images like that tin scoop: accurate, concrete, with more than a whiff of nostalgia, but on further reflection not as simple as it seems. Or perhaps more precisely, it somehow contrives to meld the cosy and the troubling. A brimming meal-bin clearly represents nourishment both physical and emotional. Yet the scoop isn’t scooping, is it? It’s “sunk” forever in its bin just as the memory of it is consigned to Heaney’s boyhood. His mother now dead, the scoop being “sunk past its gleam” suggests a clear-eyed realization of ineradicable loss. A student of Wordsworth like Heaney would have had the older poet in mind in composing that particular image. “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?”
I admit that’s rather a lot to think about during an oil change. But the point is that ready access to poetry, old as well as new, is cause for celebration. And also cause for slowing down, taking a pause, counter-acting all those hot takes with, what? Cold takes? There really isn’t a good term for it. I’m calling it slow poetry here in homage to the slow food movement, which emphasizes local food culture without spurning contemporary technology.
For better or worse, poetry as a genre is inherently neither centralized nor particularly susceptible to organization. So there is no slow poetry “movement,” and maybe that’s a blessing. In fact, you could say that contemporary American poetry has been growing more and more local for decades. No longer do a few New York publishers or prestigious coastal universities control poetic reputations to the degree they did when I was starting out in the 1970s. I well recall critics talking about The Age of Lowell, back when it was “generally agreed” that Robert Lowell was, if not the best American poet, surely one of the top five. You’ll find no such consensus today, and that’s a healthy development.
With the post-World War II rise of small presses and university presses, as well as the opening up of the traditional canon to become more inclusive, the process of decentralization was already well underway in my early years as a poet. The proliferation of creative writing programs across the country was also part of it. Then in the 90s the internet exploded. These days there are countless local and regional poetry communities all across America. There are Poets Laureate in most states, and many municipalities, fostering numerous thriving local poetry scenes. At the same time we have this marvelous medium of the internet to create connections and foster conversations among the many scattered localities. In fact, it’s possible, given all the poetic riches at our fingertips, to feel overwhelmed. To believe that it is not richness but a glut. How shall we find the best, most nourishing poetry?
Perhaps the slow food movement provides a model. With poetry as well as agriculture we can live locally while thinking globally. And in fact many of us do. We attend nearby readings by fine poets who may not have national reputations but who are great advocates and communicators. We can, as I mentioned, employ all the technical tools at our disposal to stay in touch with the wider world of poetry in ways that weren’t available forty years ago. For years now, the internet has steadily chipped away at the once considerable advantages of living in urban areas, with regard to the life of poetry. I’m still bowled over by the fact that I can put “Seamus Heaney” or “Adrienne Rich” in the search box at YouTube and in a few seconds be watching these departed elders in action. More recently, many poets have noted that one of the silver linings the pandemic brought was the abrupt proliferation of poetry events online during the lockdown, livestreamed and often archived for later viewing.
So. A rich time to be involved with poetry, with the pandemic providing a good excuse for pausing, rethinking, and rededicating. In fact, even before the pandemic hit, I noticed a renewed interest in many of these issues, as exemplified in the anthologies I mentioned in my column a year ago. There does seem to be an ongoing desire for poetry that reflects what gets called by various names, including gratitude, mindfulness, devotion, kindness, joy, and so forth. All of these are examples of slow poetry, I would argue: poetry with meat on its bones rather than mere rhetoric and opinionating; poetry with a generous spirit; poetry with solid craft; and poetry with a chief aim of honesty.
Slow poetry may indeed be new wine in an old bottle, but the vessel remains most sturdy. The best discussion I know of what I’m calling slow poetry is Wendell Berry’s classic 1979 essay “Standing By Words,” in his book of the same title. I’ve often quoted this passage, which gets to the heart of the matter beautifully:
Now for my personal recommendations. A prime example of slow poetry that preceded the pandemic would be Tracy K. Smith’s wonderfully titled podcast The Slowdown, which began airing 2018 and continued till going on hiatus in 2020. It also involved a website and radio broadcast. The premise was simple: Smith would select someone’s poem to read aloud each weekday, prefaced with her own related reflections, many of which were just as beautiful as the poems themselves. I’m not aware of anywhere where Smith explained her title, but it’s nonetheless clear that her mission was, in fact, to slow us down with poetry. In a letter to listeners she described her goals:
Although Smith has stepped down from hosting, the entire series is archived, and well worth exploring (Slow Down). Meanwhile, other similar efforts have been around for even longer. One long-running podcast I love to catch is Charlie Rossiter’s Poetry Spoken Here. Rossiter features lively and informal interviews with an eclectic mix of poets as well as his own reviews, always with poems performed aloud. A new episode airs each Friday. Even earlier, Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 project, Ted Kooser’s This American Life, and Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem project, which were not podcasts, nonetheless shared a belief in the power of simply attending closely to one poem at a time; and all spread the word via the internet and other media. And lest we forget, Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac is still running, even after Keillor was booted from Minnesota Public Radio. You can catch it on some radio stations, or else visit his website, or sign up to receive your daily poem via email.
All of these enterprises (there are many more) are in sync with the goals of slow poetry as I’m thinking of it. Reading a single poem slowly and thoughtfully is always valuable, but hearing a poem read aloud not only provides all the aural benefits missing from a silent page reading, but it literally slows us down even further, since most all of us read more rapidly than anyone but an auctioneer can speak. There are other benefits besides a slow pace, of course, but that’s a major one.
As we know, during our long lockdown many formerly live poetry events moved to the internet. Readings, panel discussions, interviews, workshops, book groups, and more could all be accessed via Zoom, YouTube, or other platforms, and at times I had to choose between several events I wished to tune in for at the same time. Luckily, many of these livestreams and webinars were later archived. One notable enterprise worth highlighting is the “Stubborn Praise” series hosted via Zoom by James Crews and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. For each session they read poems and discuss the ideas in them, usually also featuring a guest poet too, and conduct conversations that are far-reaching, in-depth, and nourishing. Meanwhile, James Crews has been especially busy during these months in the service of slow poetry. His anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude & Hope appeared in 2021, full of a wide variety of slow poetry along with the editor’s “reflective pauses,” which highlight threads spun by various poets and lead into his “invitations for writing and reflection.”
I could multiply the examples of slow poetry activities manyfold—and I haven’t even mentioned online poetry journals and communities such as the one you are experiencing right now. But I will limit myself to one final recommendation. Early in the pandemic, as I sought new ways to stay connected with poetry in the absence of the face-to-face interactions I would normally have enjoyed, I went hunting for new poetry podcasts. One of the most wonderful discoveries I made was “Poetry Unbound,” hosted by Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, which airs twice weekly during its two “seasons” per year. Each episode conducts “an immersive reading of a single poem,” which the host website describes as “unhurried, contemplative and energizing,” which it most assuredly is. O’Tuama reads the poem carefully twice, with ten minutes or more of talk in between the readings in which he zeros in on both craft and idea with unfailing intelligence and humility. By the time of the second reading, the poem almost always has blossomed in my mind in ways I could not have anticipated.
As someone who was a teacher of poetry for many years and considers himself a fairly decent analyst, this is a somewhat humbling admission. But it’s true: O’Tuama almost never fails, in his gentle, unhurried way, to pull out some fresh ideas and connections from each poem, even ones that I already know well. He is particularly good at taking the full measure of a poem’s cultural context while exploring its craft. Quite rightly he recognizes how a good poem embodies personal experience, politics, philosophy, and historical awareness in seamless fashion. He reminds me that appreciation can be just as intelligent and provocative as criticism.
You can sign up for the Poetry Unbound newsletter and other extras, and read the transcript of each show on the website, along with sample poems. My only caveat: if you’re like me, “Poetry Unbound” can be expensive. I confess he has provoked me into buying more than one new collection of poetry.
If the notion of slow poetry appeals to you, “Poetry Unbound” will abundantly reward you. It’s remarkable how valuable just slowing down can be.
Covid aside, in the past two decades or so—at least since the eleventh of September 2001—this country has seen a steepening descent into more and more acrid partisanship, anger, and grievance. The bitterly contested and still controversial Presidential election of 2000 had lasting ill effects on the body politic. Then the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016 further stressed the social fabric in ways I fear we are going to be dealing with for a long time. All of the above have been both accompanied and enhanced by the swift-moving currents of instant news, the flood of information and dispute on the internet. Social media platforms that thrive on anger, conspiracy, disinformation, and paranoia foster a continual beehive-poking that is good for the bottom lines of corporations like Twitter and Facebook. But not so good for our peace of mind or the health of our nation.
I’m far from the graham to remark on such developments. And yes, the contrarian in me immediately wants to affirm that there is nothing new under the sun, as the Book of Ecclesiastes anciently declared. I concede that when you take the long view, current rancor and partisanship will not seem entirely novel things. Take a look at American newspapers during the 19th Century: some of the rhetoric there would make Fox News sound fair and balanced by contrast. What doesn’t seem disputable is that, in large part due to the internet, a hectic sort of perpetual simmering grievance and gloom have become pervasive in a fresh way, as well as louder.
At the same time, I like to remind myself that there have always been countercurrents to all the blather and acrimony. And this is clearly where poetry comes in—all the arts, really. Art can be marshaled to push back against the diffuse anger many of us witness and consume daily in our various “feeds.” More than ever, I believe poetry has an important role to play in working against the bitter tide. Naturally a poet would think so. But even granting that there is little new in asking poetry to perform such cultural labor, still I feel a renewed need for it to do so. At least for me, the pandemic has just reinforced this need. Poetry has a distinctive opportunity to nourish our spirit in this era of constant “hot takes” and the like.
The term “hot take” intrigues me. “Hot” carries the suggestion of passion, perhaps even righteous anger. But more often it puts me in mind of other, less positive expressions, like “hothead” and “hot tempered.” On cable news programs as well as social media platforms anger, outrage, and sensation increasingly seem to predominate. There is such a thing as righteous and useful anger, but so often that’s not what we’re seeing. Anger can feel akin to fever, a sign of disease, not healthy debate. I like to be an informed citizen, but I am no longer sure that paying attention to broadcasters or social media pundits with their instant hot takes on the news of the day is worth my time. It’s interesting that there is no convenient, universally understood antonym for “hot take.” I’ve never heard a panelist on a news show speak about a “cold take.” And certainly I’ve never heard anyone say on such a forum, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it further.” That wouldn’t be good TV.
Yet it’s precisely that thinking further that we always could use more of. I sense in our current cultural moment a great hunger for honesty, truth telling, and serious reflection. This hunger is nothing brand new, as noted above, but it does seem especially pressing these days. On television, radio, and the internet we are bombarded daily by language that has designs on us. That wants to sell us products or ideas, heighten our fears, rile us up, mock opposing viewpoints, and so forth. Far too much of this language is trivial or deceptive in intent, and much of it doesn’t mean what it says. The fatigue from all that is one reason I turn to poetry, not as refuge but as replenishment. Why wouldn’t a reasonably sane person welcome a genre where another mind speaks to us directly without manipulative, dishonest, or empty rhetoric? The best poems aim to tell the truth in language that is both memorable and beautiful, and as such will long outlive every hot take. It’s not escapism but a practical response to existent conditions. Poetry, as Thoreau once noted, is healthy speech.
Poetry’s not the only source of honest reflection and expression, obviously. We can find such things in many places, including but not limited to church, classroom, and art studio. But poetry has been doing such work for thousands of years. When the world is too much with us, when we need to slow down and pay attention, when some quiet contemplation is called for, poetry is readily available right at our fingertips. Perhaps surprisingly, the ancient art of poetry also turns out to be well suited for our current plugged-in era of short attention spans. Indeed, the internet is awash with lyric poetry these days, easy to find, often free of charge.
This situation still amazes me, since I am from the last generation to come of age in the pre-internet world. There are always good reasons to lament the state of the world, but the omnipresence and easy availability of poetry on our laptops and smart phones is cause for rejoicing. If I’m trying to remember a poem by Seamus Heaney, but the title escapes me, I can type in a couple phrases I do recall and in seconds there it is: the poem “Mossbawn” from his 1975 book North. I can reread it on my iPhone while waiting for my car’s oil change. At the same time I can use the poem to drown out the talking heads on the waiting room TV shouting through the usual simplistic certainties. In place of whatever manufactured crisis du jour is currently going viral, I can revisit Heaney’s tender portrait of his mother calmly going about her daily chores, a needful reminder of the lives and work that never make the news, but do make a family. The portrait ends on an image both homely and profound that I find deeply moving.
And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
One of Heaney’s great knacks is in finding domestic images like that tin scoop: accurate, concrete, with more than a whiff of nostalgia, but on further reflection not as simple as it seems. Or perhaps more precisely, it somehow contrives to meld the cosy and the troubling. A brimming meal-bin clearly represents nourishment both physical and emotional. Yet the scoop isn’t scooping, is it? It’s “sunk” forever in its bin just as the memory of it is consigned to Heaney’s boyhood. His mother now dead, the scoop being “sunk past its gleam” suggests a clear-eyed realization of ineradicable loss. A student of Wordsworth like Heaney would have had the older poet in mind in composing that particular image. “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?”
I admit that’s rather a lot to think about during an oil change. But the point is that ready access to poetry, old as well as new, is cause for celebration. And also cause for slowing down, taking a pause, counter-acting all those hot takes with, what? Cold takes? There really isn’t a good term for it. I’m calling it slow poetry here in homage to the slow food movement, which emphasizes local food culture without spurning contemporary technology.
For better or worse, poetry as a genre is inherently neither centralized nor particularly susceptible to organization. So there is no slow poetry “movement,” and maybe that’s a blessing. In fact, you could say that contemporary American poetry has been growing more and more local for decades. No longer do a few New York publishers or prestigious coastal universities control poetic reputations to the degree they did when I was starting out in the 1970s. I well recall critics talking about The Age of Lowell, back when it was “generally agreed” that Robert Lowell was, if not the best American poet, surely one of the top five. You’ll find no such consensus today, and that’s a healthy development.
With the post-World War II rise of small presses and university presses, as well as the opening up of the traditional canon to become more inclusive, the process of decentralization was already well underway in my early years as a poet. The proliferation of creative writing programs across the country was also part of it. Then in the 90s the internet exploded. These days there are countless local and regional poetry communities all across America. There are Poets Laureate in most states, and many municipalities, fostering numerous thriving local poetry scenes. At the same time we have this marvelous medium of the internet to create connections and foster conversations among the many scattered localities. In fact, it’s possible, given all the poetic riches at our fingertips, to feel overwhelmed. To believe that it is not richness but a glut. How shall we find the best, most nourishing poetry?
Perhaps the slow food movement provides a model. With poetry as well as agriculture we can live locally while thinking globally. And in fact many of us do. We attend nearby readings by fine poets who may not have national reputations but who are great advocates and communicators. We can, as I mentioned, employ all the technical tools at our disposal to stay in touch with the wider world of poetry in ways that weren’t available forty years ago. For years now, the internet has steadily chipped away at the once considerable advantages of living in urban areas, with regard to the life of poetry. I’m still bowled over by the fact that I can put “Seamus Heaney” or “Adrienne Rich” in the search box at YouTube and in a few seconds be watching these departed elders in action. More recently, many poets have noted that one of the silver linings the pandemic brought was the abrupt proliferation of poetry events online during the lockdown, livestreamed and often archived for later viewing.
So. A rich time to be involved with poetry, with the pandemic providing a good excuse for pausing, rethinking, and rededicating. In fact, even before the pandemic hit, I noticed a renewed interest in many of these issues, as exemplified in the anthologies I mentioned in my column a year ago. There does seem to be an ongoing desire for poetry that reflects what gets called by various names, including gratitude, mindfulness, devotion, kindness, joy, and so forth. All of these are examples of slow poetry, I would argue: poetry with meat on its bones rather than mere rhetoric and opinionating; poetry with a generous spirit; poetry with solid craft; and poetry with a chief aim of honesty.
Slow poetry may indeed be new wine in an old bottle, but the vessel remains most sturdy. The best discussion I know of what I’m calling slow poetry is Wendell Berry’s classic 1979 essay “Standing By Words,” in his book of the same title. I’ve often quoted this passage, which gets to the heart of the matter beautifully:
One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness—to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extralinguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing.
Now for my personal recommendations. A prime example of slow poetry that preceded the pandemic would be Tracy K. Smith’s wonderfully titled podcast The Slowdown, which began airing 2018 and continued till going on hiatus in 2020. It also involved a website and radio broadcast. The premise was simple: Smith would select someone’s poem to read aloud each weekday, prefaced with her own related reflections, many of which were just as beautiful as the poems themselves. I’m not aware of anywhere where Smith explained her title, but it’s nonetheless clear that her mission was, in fact, to slow us down with poetry. In a letter to listeners she described her goals:
I’ve long believed that poetry brings out the best in us. It makes us gentle and attentive. It urges us to lend all of our senses and all of our good will to the task of comprehending someone else’s story. In a world where pain and loneliness and misunderstanding are real and present barriers to happiness and wholeness, poetry can be life-affirming.
Although Smith has stepped down from hosting, the entire series is archived, and well worth exploring (Slow Down). Meanwhile, other similar efforts have been around for even longer. One long-running podcast I love to catch is Charlie Rossiter’s Poetry Spoken Here. Rossiter features lively and informal interviews with an eclectic mix of poets as well as his own reviews, always with poems performed aloud. A new episode airs each Friday. Even earlier, Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 project, Ted Kooser’s This American Life, and Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem project, which were not podcasts, nonetheless shared a belief in the power of simply attending closely to one poem at a time; and all spread the word via the internet and other media. And lest we forget, Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac is still running, even after Keillor was booted from Minnesota Public Radio. You can catch it on some radio stations, or else visit his website, or sign up to receive your daily poem via email.
All of these enterprises (there are many more) are in sync with the goals of slow poetry as I’m thinking of it. Reading a single poem slowly and thoughtfully is always valuable, but hearing a poem read aloud not only provides all the aural benefits missing from a silent page reading, but it literally slows us down even further, since most all of us read more rapidly than anyone but an auctioneer can speak. There are other benefits besides a slow pace, of course, but that’s a major one.
As we know, during our long lockdown many formerly live poetry events moved to the internet. Readings, panel discussions, interviews, workshops, book groups, and more could all be accessed via Zoom, YouTube, or other platforms, and at times I had to choose between several events I wished to tune in for at the same time. Luckily, many of these livestreams and webinars were later archived. One notable enterprise worth highlighting is the “Stubborn Praise” series hosted via Zoom by James Crews and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. For each session they read poems and discuss the ideas in them, usually also featuring a guest poet too, and conduct conversations that are far-reaching, in-depth, and nourishing. Meanwhile, James Crews has been especially busy during these months in the service of slow poetry. His anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude & Hope appeared in 2021, full of a wide variety of slow poetry along with the editor’s “reflective pauses,” which highlight threads spun by various poets and lead into his “invitations for writing and reflection.”
I could multiply the examples of slow poetry activities manyfold—and I haven’t even mentioned online poetry journals and communities such as the one you are experiencing right now. But I will limit myself to one final recommendation. Early in the pandemic, as I sought new ways to stay connected with poetry in the absence of the face-to-face interactions I would normally have enjoyed, I went hunting for new poetry podcasts. One of the most wonderful discoveries I made was “Poetry Unbound,” hosted by Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, which airs twice weekly during its two “seasons” per year. Each episode conducts “an immersive reading of a single poem,” which the host website describes as “unhurried, contemplative and energizing,” which it most assuredly is. O’Tuama reads the poem carefully twice, with ten minutes or more of talk in between the readings in which he zeros in on both craft and idea with unfailing intelligence and humility. By the time of the second reading, the poem almost always has blossomed in my mind in ways I could not have anticipated.
As someone who was a teacher of poetry for many years and considers himself a fairly decent analyst, this is a somewhat humbling admission. But it’s true: O’Tuama almost never fails, in his gentle, unhurried way, to pull out some fresh ideas and connections from each poem, even ones that I already know well. He is particularly good at taking the full measure of a poem’s cultural context while exploring its craft. Quite rightly he recognizes how a good poem embodies personal experience, politics, philosophy, and historical awareness in seamless fashion. He reminds me that appreciation can be just as intelligent and provocative as criticism.
You can sign up for the Poetry Unbound newsletter and other extras, and read the transcript of each show on the website, along with sample poems. My only caveat: if you’re like me, “Poetry Unbound” can be expensive. I confess he has provoked me into buying more than one new collection of poetry.
If the notion of slow poetry appeals to you, “Poetry Unbound” will abundantly reward you. It’s remarkable how valuable just slowing down can be.
©2021 David Graham
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