Finding the Angel Within: An Interview with Ken Ronkowitz

I was interviewed for the National Poetry Month episode of the podcast L-Town Radio. The host, Joe O'Brien, is a multi-hyphenate librarian-poet-musicmaker at the Livingston Public Library in New Jersey, which is the town where I spent several decades as an English teacher. 

We had a long conversation, and I talked about my experiences as an English teacher, teaching poetry and writing poetry. We got into my invented form, the "Ronka," and how writing a poem is like "finding the angel within." 

The interview is broken into parts and mixed with library staff reading favorite poems, and news of the library. 

If you are curious to hear the voice of and know a bit more about the person behind Poets Online, you can listen on their website  or on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify 

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Writing the Day Podcast

In April 2021, I started doing podcasts of some of the poems that I have been writing and posting on another personal site called Writing the Day  That site began in 2014 when I decided to try a daily poetry writing practice. I wrote 365 poems that year in my invented form. I have continued the practice though now on more of a weekly basis.

The website has followers and gets regular visitors and I assume some of the podcast followers are those same people - though perhaps the podcast has a different audience. It's hard to know about who is connecting to these virtual forms of poetry. 

It doesn't have a large audience but, for now, I enjoy writing the poems and doing the podcasts. There are now more than 800 poems on the website, so there is much that could be recorded. The poems are brief and so are the readings. Some have additional information about the poem but most of them clock in at just a few minutes.  

I record the poems using Anchor and you can listen to them at Anchor, but right now most visitors are listening at Spotify - which isn't surprising since it is a very popular app, though probably more associated with music. The podcast is also available on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic and Breaker.  They are all free, as are the apps to listen.

Any thoughts? Have you listened? Leave a comment. 

Ken

Podcasts and Poetry

An NPR story talks about how "Podcasts Are Providing A New Way Into Poetry" for listeners.  I have been listening to podcasts since 2005 when iTunes made them more accessible via subscriptions in their software.

Today, there are more ways to subscribe and listen. iTunes still works and many podcasts are available on a website. I prefer listening and downloading ones to listen to later using Stitcher on my phone or tablet. It's a free app and almost all podcasts are also free.

Besides my daily doses of news and many interview programs that I am listening to all week, I subscribe to a variety of programs devoted to poetry. You can do a search for them in whatever app you decide to use.

Here are my current top 5 favorites.

1. The Slowdown - Former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith does this on weekdays. She opens with a personal essay and then reads someone's poem that relates to that topic. Highly recommended.
2. Poetry Off the Shelf – poets, poems, poetry topics from The Poetry Foundation
3. The New Yorker: Poetry - Hosted by poetry editor Kevin Young. A guest poet selects and reads a poem from the magazine by someone else and also one of their own.
4. The Poetry Magazine Podcast - Poetry magazine's editors go inside the new issue and talk to poets who read their contributions.
5. The Writer's Almanac - I start each day with this 5-minute podcast hosted by Garrison Keillor who reviews events that occurred on this day in history - some literary, some not - and then reads a poem. 

Where there's a Will (Shakespeare)

All the world's a stage! The Play's the thing. Fair is foul and foul is fair. Hardly a day goes by when the words that flowed from William Shakespeare's pen don't meet and greet us in the modern world.

This is a recommendation to listen to an episode from To the Best of Our Knowledge on Shakespeare today.

TTBOOK is a great radio program and it's available online and as a podacst in places like iTunes.

The episode is called "SHAKESPEARE: WHERE THERE'S A WILL."

You will discover My Name is Will by Jess Winfield, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare in Classical Comics,  The Works of William Shakespeare some things about the film Shakespeare in Love and Shakespeare's last will, about the continuing controversey about the authorship of the plays