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.

There used to be a time when movie celebrities were mythic figures.

Their lives seemed airtight, sealed from the public.

You only saw them on the big screen.

Some were demigods, those you saw running from the paparazzi.

They existed and moved about in a stratosphere such that we could only imagine their lives.

Even then, we were misled.

We conflated their roles with a possibly fallible person off the screen.

Today, you see celebrities testing avocados in your local health food store,

dispensing meditation advice on social media or trick-or-treating,

like I once saw Alec Baldwin and his family decked out as astronauts,

or was it Ghostbuster Outfits?

Today's cleverly sonic poem collapses the distance even more between celebrities

and us by using a parasycial relationship as a jumping off point for a journey of the imagination.

An apology for trashing magazines in which you appear by Nicole Seeley.

I was out of line, Brad Pitt.

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