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A joint venture of The Poetry Foundation, Kelly Writers House, and PennSound, the podcast series PoemTalk brings animated discussions of individual poems to a phone or computer near you. Each episode opens with a performance of the work by the poet (W.C. Williams, Rich, Oppen, Ginsberg, Berrigan, Jaap Blonk . . . ) followed by a lively exchange of responses.

Here's how host Al Filreis describes it: "For each episode of PoemTalk four friends and colleagues in the world of poetry and poetics convene to collaborate on a close (but not too close) reading of a single poem. We talk through and around the poem, sometimes beyond it, often disagreeing, always excited by what we discover as we talk, and perhaps after twenty-five minutes we've opened up the verse to a few new possibilities and have gained for a poem that interests us some new readers and listeners.

"Listeners? Well, yes: all the PoemTalk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of the PennSound archive."

You can find details, responses, and links to episodes in the PoemTalk section of Jacket2. Or find PoemTalk on iTunes: just go into your ITunes music store, type "PoemTalk" into the searchbox at the upper right, and click on "subscribe." Or go directly to the suite of Poetry Foundation-affiliated podcast series.

 
 

PoemTalk on Jacket2
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Randall Couch contributes to the conversation in episodes

1 on W. C. Williams's "Betwen Walls"
2 on Adrienne Rich's "Wait"
5 on Ted Berrigan's "3 Pages"
7 on Rothenberg's "A Paradise of Poets"
16 on Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man"
17 on Rodrigo Toscano's "Poetics"
24 on Barbara Guest's "Roses"
69 on Rachel Blau Duplessis's "Draft 85:
     Hard Copy" . . . .