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[00:00] Happy Poetry Month. Friends of The Slowdown are invited to celebrate with a special offer from Poetry Magazine. This April, an annual subscription to poetry includes a limited edition notebook. The notebook features a devious quote from Dorothy Alasky on its cover. I'm almost always lying in a poem, and the full poem is inside. Use the notebook for your own poems, lies, and secrets. Subscribe today at poetrymagazine.org/lying. Robert in Boise, Idaho, became a sustaining supporter of The Slowdown this month. Robert donated and said, Slowdown, like the sign on the side of the road, reminds me to take a moment, a few minutes or more, before stepping on the gas pedal of my own, often too rushed, head on day. Each poem, sad, happy, funny, thoughtful, inspiring, not my cup of tea, calls out to me to pause, to consider what the poet has to say to me, before I take off on the day ahead of me. It makes me feel like I am a member of the poetry community. It sometimes triggers a prompt for my next poem, or, and more importantly, provides insight into my life and the world I live in. Join Robert and support The Slowdown this National Poetry Month at slowdownshow.org. I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. I know this is a podcast, a podcast in which I read you a poem and you listen to that poem. So what I'm about to say may sound a little strange. When I can't see the poems I'm hearing, I feel like I'm missing out. I want to see what the poem looks like. I want to know the shape of it on the page, the lines, the stanzas, the way the poet uses the field of the page. Sometimes I swear I can hear the form of a poem if I listen carefully. I might notice the repeating end words of a sestina or the repeated phrase of a guzzle. But often I'm left to imagine the layout when I don't have the text in front of me, especially when it's a free verse poem. My ideal reading experience is to hear a poem being read to me while looking at it and following along. And thanks to the Slowdown newsletter and the transcripts being available online, you can do just that. Poems are meant to live in the air, to be read aloud. But I also know that form follows function. I want to see the choices the poet made when crafting the piece. Is the poem in couplets, tersets, or sturdy quatrains? Is it in one unbroken stanza with no white space? When I read a poem knowing that form has the opportunity to enact, or at least reinforce, the content, I learn from the poet's choices. The stanza shape and length is an opportunity to embody something in the poem. So what did the poet go with? Maybe they chose couplets for a poem about two lovers, or a parent and child, or a prose poem for a piece that is more narrative and casually spoken. Or maybe the poem explodes across the field of the page, fragmented and uncontained. Today's poem does just that, using the field of the page in an exciting way. I wonder if you'll be able to intuit the shape by listening alone. Either way, I encourage you to also look at the text of the poem online. This is a poem by Purvi Shah. You believed only a girl born of dandelion can be ferocious. As wind, which tenders astonishment. Purpulsion that beckons, Sojourn through skies, Convocations of indispensable sisterhoods. She hears your stray summons. Wrote, offered advent of lust and dusk as re-killed light or, as we say, time, which needs seasons to be understood, as a girl needs gentle soil and sometimes shared breath to be revealed. Within hush, your whorl unsticks you from the pinned-down planes of earth, X axis of social rules, this Y axis of material conditions. A young woman turns into cartwheels, aspirations too vast to be held in the hand, to be diagrammed as predictable science, to be shattered even when blown away. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. And find us on Instagram at Slowdown Show and bluesky at slowdownshow.org. Hi, it's Maggie. Thanks for listening to The Slowdown. Whether you press play to find calm or vivid inspiration, we're glad you're here. As a public media podcast, we rely on listener support to share these moments of poetry. Please consider donating today at slowdownshow.org/donate.