Literary Podcasts

Confession #4,080: I am a podcast junkie. A near-brutal, weekly commute last year forced me to seek alternatives to NPR’s apple-pie programming. Don’t get me wrong: I wish I had Scott Simon’s intelligent, bubbly voice, and who does not wish to be interviewed by Terry Gross, if only for the opportunity to elicit her infectious, on-air laughter with a sly, smart joke, to fall into her sweet, joyful, amused giggle that corrals us, all of us, into one wholesome tribe of clever Americans. One summer, while driving across country, in less friendly, unfamiliar terrain, NPR proved to be a welcomed sign of intelligent life. So, my beef? It’s just that, while Top 40 music can make one dumb, NPR tends to render its listeners immensely smug, “informed,” and homey.

So, I’ve turned to hunting the internet for compelling, downloadable conversations, short stories, news reporting, essays, literary interviews, poetry readings, live performances, and award speeches that would truly agitate my imagination, that often converts the interior of my car into a virtual classroom, concert hall, or auditorium on wheels. With the software Total Recorder from High Criteria, I can even make my own MP3 files out of streaming audio or video files on just about any subject from biodiversity to global philanthropy. I feel as if some of the world’s smartest poets, artists, thinkers, and leaders are suddenly my friends, sitting in the passenger seats, discussing the nuances of their art, politics, or scientific experiments such as Diamanda Galas on the poetry of Cesar Vallejo, Paul Celan, Pier Pasolini, Antonio Machado, and Henri Michaux; Chris Abani on the transformation of communities vis à vis language; James Baldwin at UC-Berkeley in 1974, introduced by Angela Davis; Elie Wiesel on the Jewishness of Jesus or William Faulkner’s Nobel speech.
The podcasts’s distant cousins are the legendary Books-on-Tapes, and the even older Spoken Word LPs, both of which caused alarm early on as to whether or not they would supplant print culture as primary sources of learning and textual engagement. What we’ve discovered, of course, is that each generation’s technology only enhances the reception of a given cultural work or author. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” is likely to be even more anthologized than other poems because we have that quivering voice of hers in performance to accompany the poem, itself worth reams of future, collegial essays.
Speaking of which, what will future scholars and researchers do with it all? Digital technology will leave behind youtube footage and flickr images of some of our most revered authors, scientists, and entertainers tying their shoes, brushing their teeth, and walking their dogs. There will be no mystery to contemplate; their sources, influences, and childhood traumas will be obvious and unproblematic, quite available to link up to their storehouse of mental images and imaginative ideas; and will such a glut of information slow down over time our collective mental intelligence? Still, how amazing that more of our waking lives can be captured and stored on a server for future consumption. It just all seems overwhelming.
Nonetheless, below is an unranked, non-exhaustive list of my top resources for podcasting pleasure. I hope you enjoy as much as I do. And please, add your own.
TedTalks
PEN American Center
Lannan Foundation Podcasts
Academy of American Poets
UBUweb
WGBH Forum Network
KQED The Writers Block
World of Ideas
Nobel Banquet Speeches
BBC Poetry Out Loud
BBC Radio 3
ps: I am putting in a special plug for PEN American Center’s 2007 Beyond Margins Awards ceremony podcast. It’s soooo good.