The Slowdown

The Slowdown began in 2019 as a public-radio-style daily poetry podcast created by then-U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith with American Public Media and the Poetry Foundation: a few minutes of reflection that lands in a poem. Hosts since Smith have included Ada Limón and Major Jackson, each bringing their own curation.

It reaches an audience poetry rarely touches — commuters, podcast listeners, people who would never open a journal — and the companion email delivers each episode's poem in text. For the Almanac's purposes it is the model of poetry distribution that actually meets readers where they are.