1050: To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

American Public Media

Arts, Performing Arts

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. This week, we’re sharing listener stories from the Twin Cities Book Festival. In this episode, our producer, Myka Kielbon, writes… “I think some poets will come at me for this, but for a lot of reasons, poetry is like the original meme. Memes are by definition a form, much like a poetic form. You can put different text upon the same picture, and the picture invites a certain read, much like using a sonnet or sestina. Maybe the proliferation of memes has… simplified our expressions of some experiences. But this expansive vocabulary of internet shorthand has also helped me commune and commiserate and connect with the people in my life over the things we feel and see every day. As our listener A. Rafael told us, those poems which really connect are much the same — they put language to a bit of life that feels large and unwieldy inside of us.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This fall I spoke with listeners at the Twin Cities Book Festival about the place of poetry in their lives.
0:08.0	This week we're sharing their stories.
0:18.0	My name is A Raphael Johnson. I am a writer and teacher of creative writing. I find poetry is vital. I find poetry is something I need
0:30.1	because poetry has this wonderful ability to take us out of our daily lives, to sort of lift
0:39.2	us out of the daily grind of like I got to get up, I got to get the kids to school, I got to get on my commute,
0:48.7	I got to answer this email and go to this meaning, and poetry can just take us out of that for a moment
0:56.8	and reconnect us to what it means to be human.
1:00.2	And it's wonderful and very necessary.
1:03.2	It is finding language for an experience you've had,
1:08.3	but you haven't been able to put into words yet.
1:11.6	And you know, with a lot of poetry not all but with a lot of poetry it
1:19.0	captures this sort of this moment or this corner of the human experience in a way that no one else is quite seen.
1:28.0	And it lets us step out of ourselves and enter someone else's not their life not their
1:36.3	narrative not their not the whole arc of their life that moment of experience.
1:43.0	We're able to share that,
1:45.0	even across years, across languages,
1:49.4	across cultures, you know, cultures, just it lets us bridge our shared humanity in a way that, you know, that is unique in in art forms.
2:07.0	I'm Micah Kielbonne,
2:12.0	I'm Micah Kilbahn, producer of The Slowdown.
2:15.0	My friends and I, like many people, send each other stuff on the internet that we feel relates to each other, different
2:24.0	topics for different friends, jokes about card games for some, and videos of
2:28.9	very round and happy Arctic SEALs for others. And a common response is, I feel so seen. It's a response I also
	...

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