My name is Aida Nique and I financially support the slowdown because the show

allows me to understand poems on a deeper level. I love the thoughtful lead in

major provides before each poem. Join me in making a gift to the slowdown

today. Head to slowdownshow.org slash donate.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

Often when driving down a country road I audibly gas when it bends and opens to

a field of wildflowers or prairie grass. If mountains are behind often a

distance performing their silhouetted the atrix of imposing stillness,

forget about it. I am seated with a modicum of peace. A momentary touch of the

sacred. No thoughts of wars and foreign countries. No shaking my head at the

dismantling of legal protections. No disparaging thoughts of self-worth. Just the

stark naked joy of encountering a wavering meadow whose beauty enters me

entirely. This is the sublime at work and if I am sharing this journey with

another passenger I find that my exhilaration makes me vulnerable. Yet that

opens us up to each other and this field of possibility equally magnetic its

own force brings us then ethically closer to each other. Because of our

eternal ambiguity our shared dilemma of rampant strife and contrast with

rampant beauty poetry has a way of illuminating fields of the known and the

unknown. About his work William Carlos Williams wrote my life is a constant

watching of the field. Charles Oson influenced by Williams wrote that we now

enter actually the large area of the whole poem into the field if you like

where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to

...