Eliana Benavides
500 episodes listed below
A daily poem, held up to life.
The Slowdown is a short-form poetry ritual built around close attention. Each episode frames a poem through lived reflection, moving from ordinary moments like dishes or childhood homes into questions of inheritance, land, love, and repair.
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The Slowdown gives poetry a compact daily frame. It is less a lecture than a considered pause, using one poem to open a small door into larger human questions. The episodes often begin with domestic or personal material. Parenting comes up through dishes, laundry, gender, and the anxiety of wondering what children receive from the adults around them. Family appears as both shelter and inheritance. Home can be warm, open, and neighborly; it can also carry mistakes, expectations, and old patterns. The show keeps returning to imperfection. It treats that subject with a steady voice, not melodrama. History also matters here. An episode on Robin Coste Lewis's work moves from a country's milestone to ancient earthworks, ancestral Puebloan structures, renamed mountains, and the layered timelines beneath modern life. That breadth is part of the show's appeal. A poem about one place becomes a meditation on land, memory, and who gets remembered. Other episodes turn toward healing, community, animals in poems, and life after a marriage ends. The bonus episode shifts format but keeps the same seriousness about language, following Namwali Serpell and Tracy K. Smith in close conversation about Toni Morrison's prose, narration, sound, and blues-like musicality. The show is gentle, but it is not evasive. It can hold beauty beside difficult history, family strain, and the harder edges of literature. For listeners who want poetry made present in ordinary life, The Slowdown offers a clear, humane entry point.
Made for: For listeners who like poetry, reflective essays, and short episodes that fit into a quiet part of the day. It especially suits people drawn to family stories, literary language, and emotional clarity without hurry.
What sets it apart: The show makes poems feel lived-in by placing them beside parenting, history, home, and community. Its strength is the bridge between close reading and ordinary experience.
Poet Major Jackson is your guide on the pathways to feel and understand our common journey – through poetry. In sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery. Join The Slowdown for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode, every weekday. Produced by APM Studios in partnership with The Poetry Foundation and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. Make us a part of your routine as you drink coffee in the morning, as you take...
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Serpell and Smith read Morrison's opening pages for voice, sound, and the weight of what arrives first.
Serpell and Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye with unusual care, staying close to Claudia's voice, the blur of family names, and Morrison's sentence-level music.
A Nashville poetry night where craft, labor, and community share the same conversation.
Micah Kielbon opens Slow Take at Analog at the Hutton Hotel, setting a clear frame for a night where The Slowdown and The Porch meet around Nashville's literary community.
A warm live poetry night that treats reading as a shared, playful event.
A live night in Los Angeles turns poetry into a shared room: part reading, part conversation, part game, with the pleasure coming from hearing poets think out loud together.
Long-form Apple talk with sharp product judgment and deep tech history.
Weekly film, music, and arts criticism from Monocle 24's Midori House studio in London.
Two product designers talk Figma workflows, button sizing, and AI design tools weekly.
Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert dissect CSS, CMS workflows, and AI coding agents weekly.
Stack Overflow's Ryan Donovan interviews founders and engineers on AI agents, protocols, and dev tools.
Namwali Serpell and Tracy K.
A poetry podcast episode featuring a love poem to alpacas, introduced with a promotion for Poetry Magazine and a call to support the show.
A promotional episode for The Slowdown podcast celebrating National Poetry Month with a special offer from Poetry Magazine and a reflection on healing through communion.
Maggie Smith introduces a poem about graduation and imperfection, reflecting on how we and our loved ones are imperfect.
Maggie Smith introduces a poem about a stadium as a metaphor for finding perspective after divorce.
Maggie Smith introduces a poem about the feeling of a welcoming home and community, with sponsor messages at the start.
Maggie Smith introduces National Poetry Month and a special offer from Poetry Magazine, then reflects on the misunderstood nature of poetry and hope.
Maggie Smith introduces a special offer for Poetry Month and reflects on her amateur birding hobby.
Host Maggie Smith uses the boiling frog metaphor to explore why humans are slow to respond to gradually increasing dangers.
Maggie Smith introduces Anne Waldman's poem 'How to Write' as a meditation on consciousness and creativity.
Maggie Smith introduces a poem by Kelly Hoffer that explores the tension between soothing natural sounds and their dangerous origins.
Samia Bashir introduces a poem that explores how people are reduced to others' perceptions, using Wendy Hilliard's story as an example.
In a live taping of The Slowdown at the Hutton Hotel in Nashville, hosts Major Jackson and Jad Abumrad mark Jackson's over two years and 443 episodes hosting the poetry podcast, joined by local poets Mark Jarman and Kate Daniels, songwriter Tia Sillars, and poets DeeDee Jackson and Sianna Rouse.
Recorded live at The Crawford in Los Angeles with LAist, host Major Jackson of The Slowdown is joined by poets Jason Schneiderman, Samia Bashir, and Padraig O Tuama, host of the rival podcast Poetry Unbound.