7 Poetry Podcasts to Make You Better in 2019

Happy almost 2019! I know you’re starting New Year’s Resolutions, or eschewing them because they’re dumb and you don’t do them anyway. What if I told you I knew of a super easy solution that would make you smarter, funnier, more interesting to everyone immediately in the coming year? That’s right — poetry podcasts!

Start 2019 off right with poetry in your ears. And I got seven piping hot podcasts here for you to listen to!

(PS: If it aids your experience at all, I tried to write these in iambic pentameter, gave up and looked out the window for a while. So I believe that you can subscribe to at least one of these to make your feed a little more metaphorical.)

Poetry Off the Shelf

Have you been listening to the podcasts from the Poetry Foundation? Because they have 1,000 podcasts and they’re all amazing. I promise to only recommend two. POTS explores the diverse world of contemporary American poetry with readings by poets, interviews with critics, and short poetry documentaries. And since they’re the Poetry Foundation, they have some amazing old poetry readings that you never expected someone got on tape–and we’re lucky they did.

VS

Okay, here’s the second one! VS is the voice of contemporary poetry: it’s insightful, it’s boisterous, and it’s a goddamn good time. VS isn’t any ol’ interview podcast; the concept is really interesting. Poets come onto the mic to confront the ideas that move them, both in real life and on the page. This to conversations you would never expect, which makes the best audio. Though the best part of the show has to be the hosts. Danez Smith and Franny Choi, two extremely accomplished writers in their own right, light up the microphone with energy, and the guests feed off that energy as soon as they step into the booth.

The Slowdown with Tracy K Smith

Jobs you assume the poet laureate has to do: read poetry, write poetry, go to inaugurations. Jobs you don’t assume the poet laureate has to do: make a daily podcast. Every weekday, U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, the literary sledgehammer behind Life on Mars, delivers five-minute episodes every weekday to see the world through verse. I cannot confirm that this will make you a better person, but probably!

Commonplace with Rachel Zucker

The short version: she’s interviewed your favorite poet already.
The longer version: Rachel Zucker has intimate, unique conversations with her writer and poet guests. And she’s been in the verse-writing game for so long that she knows what to ask to uncover the the exciting underneath the ordinary. Check out the description from their website: “One feels, when listening to Commonplace, the pleasure of eavesdropping on the kind of unexpected, intriguing connections that only happen when interesting people sit together in a small room and talk about their real concerns and ordinary lives.” Yeah, I trust this woman with my literary life.

The New Yorker: Poetry

Much like the New Yorker, you just need this in your feed to look smart if someone sees your subscriptions. But being the preeminent place for high-brow verse does have its perks – look for the interviews with John Updike and Deborah Landau reading Anne Sexton (which, to those uninitiated, is a goddamn banger).

The Poetry Corner Sections of Wonderful!

Wonderful! Is a show about wonderful things, like Vine, hammocks, and Bud Lite Lime. And, every so often, poetry becomes the wonderful thing. Rachel McElroy, poetry MFA, reads poetry that she likes because she can and it’s her podcast. And isn’t showing people poems you like just because you can the whole point of this endeavor? She’s done it enough that her readings have gotten its own section name, The Poetry Corner, with a theme song and everything.

The Allusionist

Okay, it’s not EXACTLY a poetry podcast. But the show’s fascination with words and deconstruction of language has to be on the list. Like the best poem, it shows you something that has always existed, but you’ve never really thought about.