836: A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

American Public Media

Arts, Performing Arts

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck by Ilya Kaminsky. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is from a sequence of poems about a town that has been invaded by an occupying force. Both sides believe that they are on the side of right, and both sides justify their violence by calling it a response to the other side’s violence. The poet’s sympathy is certainly with the occupied people, and as a Ukrainian American poet, Ilya Kaminsky’s poems have become relevant in a new way, as they speak to the atrocities we are currently witnessing in his country of origin.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode is courtesy of the fantastic poet, Jason Snyderman.
0:06.0	Hang tight, and I'll be back on March 27th.
0:15.4	I'm Jason Snyderman, and this is the slowdown.
0:18.4	My favorite pet shop voice song and my favorite Pedro Amadova movie share the same title.
0:36.4	What have I done to deserve this?
0:39.4	It's a question that assumes that the events in our lives are all rewards or punishments
0:44.4	that life is just one long Christmas.
0:47.4	For our stockings are filled with presents if we were good and cold if we were bad.
0:53.4	On a recent news report I saw a Ukrainian woman who was standing in the rubble of her city
1:00.4	asked the reporter what she had done to deserve this.
1:05.4	Of course, the answer is nothing.
1:08.4	She had done nothing to deserve this.
1:12.4	There is an entire branch of theology dedicated to asking why God lets bad things happen
1:19.4	to people who have done nothing to deserve it.
1:22.4	How could a good and loving God stand by and watch the Holocaust happen
1:27.4	or allow 400 years of slavery in the Americas?
1:31.4	This branch is called Theodicy, spelled THEDICY.
1:38.4	But every time I hear the word I hear Theodicy, you know, that pagan Greek poem about Odysseus
1:46.4	spending 10 years trying to get home after winning the Trojan War.
1:52.4	In Theodicy, there is no question as to why the gods let bad things happen
1:58.4	because the gods are just like people, only with immortality and more power.
2:05.4	Why did Odysseus have to spend 10 years fighting a war he didn't believe in and 10 years getting home?
	...

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