Poetry Podcasts

Joy Priest wrote "Elegy for Kentucky" in staggered couplets, and on Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast she remembers needing to take it very slow: "the speaker's overwhelmed with trauma, but I don't want to overwhelm the reader." Then she reads it aloud, and you can test the claim against her pacing. The best poetry podcasts work at that scale: a line held back, a form chosen to bear weight, a refrain that changes each time it returns.

In Maya C. Popa Reads Brenda Shaughnessy, from The New Yorker: Poetry, Popa chooses "Artless" from the magazine's archive. She argues that "free verse doesn't mean free from form": the repeated sound "less" forces Shaughnessy to invent words to keep the pattern going. Later Kevin Young admits he took Popa's own poem for a 14-line sonnet before noticing it has 15, and he asks her how that happened. In April Bernard Reads John Ashbery, Bernard concedes that Ashbery is hard to understand. She then argues that he makes perfect sense while you are in the middle of the poem.

Poetry Unbound, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, is built around single poems, and its conversation episodes widen the view. In Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Haleh Liza Gafori, Gafori recites Rumi in Persian. The word "mara" lands at the end of line after line, so you hear the ghazal's returning end-word before she names the form. Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Lorna Goodison turns on her translation of Dante's Inferno. Its warmest stretch is about her mother's sewing room, where Goodison says she learned storytelling from women waiting to collect their clothes.

The Poetry Magazine Podcast is the studious cousin, with guests in conversation with Cindy Juyoung Ok. In torrin a. greathouse and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Being Loud on the Page and Form as Open-Source Software, greathouse likens erasure to "lossy conversion," the data lost when a PNG becomes a JPEG. In Kevin Young and Cindy Juyoung Ok on All the Things Poetry Does, Young recalls Denise Levertov insisting "the page is a score." These episodes date from 2023.

Southword Poetry Podcast, from the Munster Literature Centre, gives a poet long, unhurried space. In Gail McConnell: The Sun Is Open, McConnell describes packing her father's papers into a flat-pack Ikea box labelled "dad box". She also explains how she treated the double-facing page as a canvas, which produced a poem shaped like a seahorse. She admits that grey and black type may be difficult to convey in a reading, a fair warning for anyone hearing visual poems through headphones. New Books in Poetry leans scholarly: Avrom Sutzkever: Ten Poems traces manuscripts saved from the Vilna ghetto, and a stanza is read in Lithuanian translation.

The Hive Poetry Collective airs on KSQD community radio in Santa Cruz, station breaks included. In S8: E11: Elizabeth Robinson's new poetry book, Vulnerability Index, with Roxi Power, Pt. 1, Robinson discusses her work with unhoused people in Boulder. She speaks of Lily, a woman she wanted to befriend who killed herself in jail after being picked up on a small infraction, then reads "Confession" in her memory. The conversation gives the story time, and it is heavy listening. On The Poet and The Poem, Grace Cavalieri asks the poets in Beth Dulin and Jennifer Keith Ciattei what they want from a poem when they write one.

VS (Poetry Foundation) put performance near the centre in this conversation. In aja monet vs. Alignment, Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers ask monet why performance is critical for poetry, and near the end they say the next episode will be their last. Nearby, the Author Interviews and Book Reviews & Criticism pages pick up where this one stops, and the Literature guide and the Arts category guide map the wider field.

For listeners on the less-talk side, One Poem Only presents readings with little more than a poet's name between them in The Call by Maggie Devers & Weekly Poetry Recap | One Poem More. Paradise Lost reads Milton aloud. 03 - Paradise Lost - John Milton includes Book 5, where Adam wakes beside Eve.