During National Poetry Month, pass a poem along. Your gift to the slowdown turns your

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so tomorrow's episode finds someone who needs it. Pass a poem along when you donate today at

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

Hope is as misunderstood and is mischaracterized as poetry.

Poetry gets a bad rap for being fussy or stodgy or just too difficult to understand,

as if it's a riddle that only a select few may solve.

But, slow down listener, you and I know that poetry is bigger and wider and deeper and

deeper and more accessible than all of that. As for hope, it gets a bad rap for being soft and easy. But hopeful people aren't soft. They aren't uninformed. They aren't smiling Paulianas who think everything is fine. Hope is actually really hard because it

requires something that poetry also requires imagination. Hope allows you to envision what might be up

ahead even when you see nothing.

To feel optimistic, you have to believe that the future has better, brighter things in store for you.

So hope is inherently creative, or, to put it another way, if hope is imaginative, then pessimism

is a failure of imagination. I know optimism can be a tough cell when there's so much suffering,

so much difficulty in the world.

But this brokenness is exactly why we need more poems, more paintings, more films, more films, more plays, more art.

To make things that don't exist yet

and don't need to exist

because that is the very definition of art

and to send them out into the world

is wildly, impractically, gorgeously hopeful.

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