Transcript

Hey, it's Slowdown producer Myka Kielbon. We all need to take a moment to pause. Here at the show, we realized we know some pretty amazing poetry lovers who have their own Slowdown moments to share with you. Chefs, musicians, journalists, and more. These late summer Wednesdays, we're bringing you their selections. We hope you enjoy.

I'm Eric Whitacre, and this is The Slowdown.

There's this beautiful line in the book and the movie, A River Runs Through It, where he says, I am haunted by waters. And it's the best way I can describe how I feel about the sea, about water, about rivers, about the vast expanse of the ocean. There's something so beautiful and seductive about the liquid nature of water, the way it moves.

I could sit for hours and just look at sunlight reflecting off the top of water. I'm not a religious person, but I'm convinced that if there's a God, that's the language that he speaks — is light on the surface of the water. I'm mesmerized by it. And my wife even notices that every time I go swimming in the ocean, I come out a different person.

I'm cleansed or I'm released somehow, or I wash away the armor of the world. I don't know what it is. I have so many experiences in my life where I have a genuinely mystical experience with water. And I've always had that even as a child. I don't know where it comes from, but I'm drawn over and over again to water.

It's not that I feel made innocent by waters. It's actually more that it feels like my entire life I've been called by the waters, that there's this deeper truth somehow in the nature of water and in being in water. I don't understand consciously what it is. I just know that the physical and spiritual effect that it has on me is profound.

I can remember I was seven years old and I was in the back seat. My mom and dad were driving and it was raining outside. So I have this vivid memory of the rain on the windshield and on my window. It was nighttime and I was looking out at the lights and I realized in that moment, “Oh, I'm alone. I'm here by myself. I'm part of this little tribe, I guess, but I'm on my own.” And I've felt that way ever since. In the best way I think we're all alone. I think we're all little islands out in our own sea and we're looking for whatever connection we can find with each other.

My favorite song is “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” As far as I'm concerned, those few lines, “gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream,” are all the philosophy one needs. Today's poem, by a classic modern poet, also finds deep human truth in what seems like a nursery rhyme. It came into my life when I had almost lost the dream I was working toward. Now, it reflects back to me how inevitable loss is. But also, the beauty to be found through one’s own eyes and ears.

maggie and milly and molly and may
by E.E. Cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

"maggie and milly and molly and may" by E.E. Cummings from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, copyright © 1958, 1986, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.