Around what has become known as award season, casual conversations are buzzed with Talk of the Year's movies.

This yearly moment of cinematic recognition reminds us just how valuable the art form and the artists who make it are.

Movies are an invitation to live in someone else's shoes, to learn, to experience, to

empathize. We need these skills to nurture a culture of community now more than ever. This

week's episodes explore how poets take up movies as subjects, how the two art forms intertwine to make us feel more closely this life we share.

I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Romney must have been eight or nine years old when we watched the silent films of Charlie Chaplin.

For a month, Fridays were a venture into the wild antics of the funniest tramp to ever grace the silver screen.

We buttered out popcorn, unwrapped Kit-K Kat bars and bright red twizzlers, and sat down

side by side on the couch with our mugs of ginger ale. When the dark-suited toothbrush mustache manned

with the oversized Oxford's walked, cane swinging toward the camera, we instantly laughed. We laughed at

his exaggerated manners, the tilting of his bowler hat, his adjustment to his tie, his fluttering

eyelashes when smitten with a girl. We laughed at his tenderness with pets and children. We admired his

undaunted spirit and facing hardship. Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing. Even to a jellyfish,

Chaplin wrote in one script. Watching black and white films for Romi was the equivalent of entering an ancient cave to find

the horses, bison, and deer, were suddenly animated and come to life.

I worried that he would not like silent films.

He had to read spoken dialogue at a pace, maybe slightly faster than his reading

comprehension aloud. But he loved them. Our favorite was modern times, the movie that

critiques early 20th century factories that dehumanized people, rendering them mechanical cogs.

Romy would mimic one of its famous scenes.

He jerkily walked around the house pretending to tighten bolts.

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