NPR Explores Podcasts That Bring Poetry to the People

Jeevika Verma introduces readers of NPR's "Book News & Features" section to podcasts delivering the words of poets to eager and curious listeners. "For years, audiobooks and poetry readings have used the authority of voice to bring poems to life. But there's another, newer platform I want to talk about: the podcast." 

A podcast allows you to do things outside of a poem by making the world of poetry itself more approachable. In most poetry podcasts, there's a discussion about the context of the work and the poet that goes beyond just reading a poem out loud.

"We think that poetry is old ... that it's about dead men walking by a pond in the 19th century," says Ydalmi Noriega, of the Poetry Foundation. "Sure, that's one version of poetry, and perhaps that's what we are presented with in classrooms, but poetry is more vast than that and podcasts ... allow you to access that vastness through conversation."

Noriega says hearing a poem right in your ear breaks down some of the barriers that people may feel between them and that same poem on a page. And hearing it discussed on a podcast makes the broader audience aware of what is happening inside the contemporary poetry community.

Learn more at NPR.