{"podcast":{"title":"The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily","slug":"the-slowdown-poetry-reflection-daily-7043130","podcast_index_feed_id":7043130,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/6220773/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-slowdown-poetry-reflection-daily--6220773","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/da0c6a368b84c1071fbd347ea97864da.jpg","author":"Eliana Benavides","episode_count":933,"summary":"Poet Major Jackson is your guide on the pathways to feel and understand our common journey – through poetry. In sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery. Join The Slowdown for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode, every weekday. Produced by APM Studios in partnership with The Poetry Foundation and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. Make us a part of your routine as you drink coffee in the morning, as you take a walk in nature, or as you wind down to go to sleep in the evening. With host Major Jackson, we collectively take a moment to calm, to inspire, to learn, and to engage with the best emerging poets and established writers of our time and generations past, from Emily Dickinson to Danez Smith, from Amanda Gorman to Mary Oliver. Listen to our back catalog for episodes by our previous hosts, Tracy K. Smith and Ada Limón, as well as guest hosts Jenny Xie, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tina Chang, Nate Marshall, Shira Erlichiman, and Jason Schneiderman. Our hosts and production team select poems that move them, and we hope they move y…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-20T16:20:32.051676+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-slowdown-poetry-reflection-daily-7043130"},"episode":{"title":"1539: Pluto by Maggie Dietz","slug":"1539-pluto-by-maggie-dietz","published_at":"2026-06-17T08:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-slowdown-poetry-reflection-daily-7043130/1539-pluto-by-maggie-dietz","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-slowdown-poetry-reflection-daily-7043130","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/1539-pluto-by-maggie-dietz--72560356","audio_url":"https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72560356/theslowdown_20260617_20260617_128.mp3","summary":"Today’s poem is Pluto by Maggie Dietz. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Diannely Antigua writes… “When I was younger, I learned the order of the planets through a sentence I’ll never forget: “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.” This mnemonic device was playful and ridiculous, but I can see now how it was a way of holding something vast inside something small. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Back then, Pluto was still a planet. But that changed in 2006 when scientists said Pluto didn’t meet the definition of a planet anymore. Its gravitational pull wasn’t dominant enough, so it was reclassified and renamed a dwarf planet. Pluto didn’t disappear, though. Out there in the astronomical unknown, it kept its shape. It kept orbiting the sun. Even its five moons remained, just as always. The only thing that changed was what we decided to call it.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation and get access to the sponsor-free version of The Slowdown today. Slowdownshow.org/donate","meta_description":"Today’s poem is Pluto by Maggie Dietz. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Diannely Antigua writes… “When I was younger,…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":456,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-slowdown-poetry-reflection-daily-7043130/episodes/1539-pluto-by-maggie-dietz/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-slowdown-poetry-reflection-daily-7043130/1539-pluto-by-maggie-dietz.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}