I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things I love about poetry, one of the things I love about poetry, one of the things I look forward to and revel in as a reader and listener, is the way a poet can make the familiar strange.

A familiar landscape, thanks to poetic language, can be transformed into

something unfamiliar. An ordinary experience can be made extraordinary by the way it's described.

As W.H. Auden wrote,

a poet is, before anything else,

a person who is passionately in love with language.

I think one of the reasons we turn to poems is because we are seeking an experience that is not business as usual.

We are seeking something new for our hearts and minds to chew on, something transformative even.

And specifically, we're seeking an encounter with language that wakes us up to new possibilities in the words, in their sounds and meanings.

Today's poem offers us such an encounter. There are words here that were new to me and which may be new to you. Marang Baru, for example, is a religious site in the state of Jarkand in eastern India.

But in this poet's deft hands, even words familiar to me, like empathy, detriments, and shudder, are made strange and special.

On projection by Renna Shirali.

The gun to my head is ownership.

The gun to my head is,

I'm taking the word empathy and hanging it as on a laundry line and watching it waver in wind and not believing in words and also relying on them.

Reader, men and women alike,

shudder themselves with superstition.

Supposing I board the plane,

remain suspended,

some sort of cloud,

buoyant, detached, for one full day, followed by my arrival

...