Podcast Review: Slate's Weekly Poetry is Free Enlightenment

May 10, 2010
Alex Sharp

Poetry Podcasts - Subscribe and Listen Weekly - derrickkwa (Flickr Creative Commons)

Every week a new poem arrives on iTunes for free. Sometimes poems are read by the authors, and sometimes they are read by a former U.S. Poetry Laureate.

When it comes to poetry, Robert Pinksy knows what he's doing. People don't have to Google Robert Pinsky to discover their qualifications. He was the Poet Laureate for the United States. He has written lots of books. He teaches at an impressive East Coast university. What is incredible is that his knowledge and talent are free every week, because he is the guiding hand of a Slate's weekly poetry podcast.

Slate's Podcast Makes Poetry Accessible

Poems can be tricky to understand. In his April 23, 2007 Slate article "In Praise of Difficult Poetry," editor Pinksy convincingly argues that, "Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures." He then offers a poem by Michelangelo, written in 1509 when he was painting the Sistine Chapel as an example that people like to struggle with the challenges of doing hard things. He offers other poets – Yeats, Frost, Shakespeare – to support this idea.

When readers are done with the article, they:

Feel overawed that from discovering that Michelangelo wrote a really good poem while he waiting for the paint to dry on the Sistine Chapel, and
Are ready to start exploring poetry with Pinksy.

Dive Into an Ocean of Poetry

Slate's weekly does of poetry is just one poem a week. Listening to it takes a few minutes, at the most. The archives hold welcome depths of exploration. There are little known poets, new poets, and classic poets. There are topics many people relate to, like an excerpt from "Jubilate Agno," in which Christopher Smart studies his cat.

"For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.

For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying."

There are also the topics that people relate to only through suffering, like heartbreak, misery, and cycles of abuse and addiction. Consider "Addicts" by Carol Muske-Dukes, which introduces drug addicts as, "Monsters, all of them."

Listening to Poetry is Different From Reading It

Poetry is a different experience than a chapter book. A poem read aloud can be intentionally different than the same poem being read silently; listening to poetry reveals magical cadences and emphatic shifts that add layers of meaning into the poem itself.

In "Big Box Encounter," Erika Meitner's soft voice lilts over "shun" sound when she describes running into a man she shouldn't be attracted to at Wal-Mart.

"But how to explain my obsession with destruction? Not self-immolation

but more of a disintegration"

Shun, shun, shuh, shun. The sounds rings like a bell as she speaks the words, although they do not stand out in the same way in the written poem.

Not only does the podcast have living authors reading poetry (Pinksy reads the dead author's works), the poems are available on the site to read. It is always help for to read and listen at the same time, so the podcast can be downloaded or streamed from the site.