Saturday, January 9, 2010

Poetry on Podcast

There are several ways I have seen literature (in the widest sense) find its way to podcast. The most straightforward is the audio book on podcast. I have reviewed several of the productions by Librivox which have an enormous amount of books from the public domain read by volunteers and supplied on free podcasts. A little bit more can be found in the example of Julie Davis on her podcast Forgotten Classics who reads the books and accompanies them with comments that amount to a literature lesson. An example that I recommend wholeheartedly is the Uncle Tom's Cabin reading she did.

Other examples are podcasts that perform the literature, either through audio-drama (I have reviewed a couple of Dutch examples) or the author giving a reading performance of his work as Dave P. does on Namaste Stories.

One can also talk about literature, as does George Miller on Podularity. Right now I am listening to his interview with Hillary Mantel about her book Wolf Hall which is a fictional account of the life of Thomas Cromwell. Another podcast that talked about literature just recently was Open Source where Christopher Lydon spoke with poet Rick Benjamin.

Now there is the literary genre that I have hardly run into on podcast and which, if you think about it, demands podcast: poetry. I have done one amateur podcast that was named Irving Poetry Podcast and there is poetry performance (though with a tongue in cheek) on the Dutch Ronflonflon. What is there other than that? There should be a world of poetry on podcast.

Dear readers, do you know of any you can recommend?

5 comments:

Unknown said...

YES. The Poetry Off The Shelf podcast by the Poetry Foundation is fantastic. The PF has a bunch of other good podcasts as well, including a poem-of-the-day and a Great American Poets podcast, but Poetry Off The Shelf has a nice mix of poetry readings accompanied by poet interviews, commentary by the excellent host, Curtis Fox, and really good pointers at other online and offline poetry resources. I just can't recommend it highly enough.

GeoMiller65 said...

Thanks for the nice mention of Podularity, Anne.I entirely agree that poetry is made for podcasting and vice versa. I've only done a couple of poetry podcasts myself - with Michael Hofmann and Emma Jones - but found them among the most enjoyable interviews I've done. In the former case, I sat down with Michael, each of us had a glass of wine in front of us and we chatted about his work and I asked him to read a poem from time to time. You can judge the results here: http://podularity.com/2008/05/26/13-an-extended-passport-application/ The Emma Jones interview is here on the Faber site: http://www.faber.co.uk/site-media/audio-snippets/emma_jones_interview.mp3 I have plans to add some more poetry interviews this year, including, I hope, Don Patterson.

Julie D. said...

Classic Poetry Aloud, simply and beautifully read.

Thanks for the nice mention, Anne! :-)

Sean said...

Berkeley's Holloway Series in Poetry can often be quite good. I felt a particularly good one was with Michael McClure.

Anne the Man said...

Thanks, I am listening to McClure right now