Special Feature: Major Jackson reads Clint Smith on The Slowdown
The New Yorker: Poetry
The New Yorker
4.4 • 571 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We have a special episode to share with you today of the daily poetry podcast, “The Slowdown.” “The Slowdown” offers a poem and a moment of reflection in short episodes, each weekday. In this episode, host Major Jackson, reads “Chaos Theory” by Clint Smith. Major writes… “Occasionally, I try to follow the series of decisions that led me to this present, however triumphant or painful. My life wavers between fate and destiny. But then again, poetry brings me to the belief that some mysterious force is at work, below, that unveils a spiritually deeper meaning to it all.”
If you’d like to hear more episodes of “The Slowdown,” you can learn more at slowdownshow.org and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker and host of the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. |
| 0:06.3 | Today we're sharing a special episode of the Daily Poetry Podcasts The Slowdown. |
| 0:10.9 | In this episode, Major Jackson shares a moment of reflection and reads the poem Chaos Theory by Clint Smith. |
| 0:18.6 | The Slowdown is a Cornerstone Public Media Poetry podcast running since |
| 0:23.1 | 2018. It was previously hosted by Tracy K. Smith and Adela LeMone and has released over |
| 0:29.4 | a thousand episodes available to all. The Slowdown has featured many poets who also appear on |
| 0:34.7 | the New Yorker Poetry podcast, including myself. The show is currently hosted by Major Jackson, the author of six books of poetry, including |
| 0:42.3 | Razzle, Dazzle, new and selected poems, and he is an elected member of the American Academy |
| 0:48.3 | of Arts and Sciences and serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. |
| 0:52.3 | Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, |
| 0:55.7 | where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair |
| 0:58.0 | in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. |
| 1:01.1 | We hope you enjoy this episode. |
| 1:08.6 | I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown. |
| 1:19.1 | I stood before an applauding audience. |
| 1:27.0 | After just finishing a reading in Mystic Connecticut, |
| 1:30.2 | I thought, how is this my life? |
| 1:34.8 | One in which a quest for language is a welcome source of communal joy and discovery. |
| 1:42.0 | Even here, on this podcast, I get to share with you poems written by poets |
| 1:48.3 | that hopefully you experience as moving and even as a necessary part of your day. What a life. |
| 1:59.3 | Over the years, because of this art, I have made friends and students who are like family, |
| 2:05.6 | and readers who challenged me to do more than dilly-dally, |
... |
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