[encore] 236: Polaroid Ode by Cori Winrock

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

American Public Media

Arts, Performing Arts

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is Polaroid Ode by Cori Winrock.

The Slowdown is currently taking a break. We’ll be back soon with new episodes from a new host. This week, we’re going back into the archive to revisit Tracy K. Smith’s time as host. Today’s episode was originally released on October 21, 2019.

In this episode, Tracy writes… “Today’s poem captures the look and feel and ceremony—with all its hope and disappointment—of taking instant pictures. And it makes me wistful both for the past and the present.”

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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0:55.2	Terms and Conditions Apply. Hiring, Indeed, is all you need.
0:59.4	Hey there, it's Major. As we take a look back at the slowdown's deep well of episodes,
1:05.1	we're revisiting some standout moments from past hosts. Today, we're going into the vault
1:10.6	to bring you an episode from Tracy K. Smith, we're going into the vault to bring you an episode from
1:12.7	Tracy K. Smith, one of the voices that helped shape the slowdown into what it is today. This is
1:19.3	just one of the many special selections from our archives. I'm Tracy K. Smith, and this is The Slowdown.
1:38.5	When I was a kid, my mother had an old K. Brownie from the 1950s. It was a camera made of pebbly black Bakelite
1:47.6	and brushed chrome. To capture an image, you held the thing at waist level and looked down into its
1:55.0	viewfinder, which must have been fashioned out of some kind of a mirror. By the time I played with it, that camera was just a toy,
2:03.8	a reminder of another era. The only evidence that it had ever worked came from all the photos of
2:10.6	my parents in their youth that filled so many of our family albums. The reigning camera of the decade was the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera,
	...

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