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?