CFP produces three different podcasts for the Poetry Foundation: the weekly Poetry Off the Shelf, the monthly Poetry Magazine Podcast and the occasional Avant-Garde All the Time.

Avant-Garde All the Time is hosted by Kenneth Goldsmith and features recordings on the remarkable website Ubuweb, which he curates.  In the latest podcast, Goldsmith features the conceptual sounds of Los Angeles in the 1970s, the first in a series of programs about conceptual poetry and art in various cities.

Editors Christian Wiman and Don Share host the Poetry Magazine Podcast, which features poems and essays in the upcoming issue.  The May issue features longer work from three poets, all three of whom are discussed in the May podcast: Ilya Kaminsky, Inger Christensen, and Hanoch Levin.

Poetry Off the Shelf is hosted by Curtis Fox and features readings and informal conversations.  Recent programs include a chat with Al Filreis about his revival of Dial-a-Poem; Matthew Zapruder on a John Ashbery poem; Fanny Howe on some short poems by Jean Valentine; and the brilliant Christian Bok performs a nonsense poem by Hugo Ball and two of his own wackadoodle sound poems.  (5.04.09)

For many years Roger Angel was John Updike’s editor at the New Yorker.  When Updike died last month, Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor and host of the fiction podcast, asked Roger to choose and read an Updike story.  So in the March Fiction podcast, Roger Angel reads “Playing the Dynamite,” about an older man (the author, slightly disguised) reflecting on his procreative career.  As Angel tells Treisman in a post-story chat, the story hits on an obsessive Updike theme: the power of sex. (3.16.09)

In the latest Poetry off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, a poem written in 2004 about 1961 sounds like it was actually written last week.  “The Hat City After Men Stopped Wearing Hats,” by John Surowiecki, mentions a presidential inauguration, a poet reading at the inauguration, wars, environmental degradation and unemployment.  We hear the poem read by Michael Stuhlbarg, then call the poet himself for explanation.  (3/16/09)

In the March program Poetry Magazine editors Christian Wiman and Don Share interview Fanny Howe about poetry and spirituality, plus poems read by Conor O’Callaghan and Seth Abramson. (3/5/09)

“The Campaign Trail,” the New Yorker’s political podcast that is now called “The Political Scene,” won first place for Best Podcast Series in 2008 from the Magazine Publishers of America.  The program is hosted by Dorothy Wickenden and features Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, George Packer and other New Yorker writers and editors.  Editors for this series include Tony Field, Ave Carillo and Owen Agnew.  Blake Eskin, pictured here receiving the award, is the New Yorker’s web editor.  (3/4/09)

Responding to the death of W.D. Snodgrass, Ernest Hilbert discusses the poet’s dark humor, and passionate reading style.  Cynthia Have tells the story of Czeslaw Milosz’s rancor toward a Holocaust hero.  Samples from the collaboration between Langston Hughes and jazz musicians Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather.  And Mary Anne Caws talks about the whys and wherefores of manifestos by Charles Bernstein, A.E.Stallings, and Thomas Sayers Ellis that first appeared in Poetry magazine and were recently performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (3.3.09)

In February the editors of Poetry Magazine talk about another manifesto moment, love poems and war poems, and new translations from the Aeneid.  In March they discuss a new John Ashbery poem, plus readings from Seth Abramson, Katy Didden, and Fanny Howe on her memoir The Winter Sun.  (3/2/09)

In the most recent Fiction podcasts, Roddy Doyle reads Maeve Brennan’s story “Christmas Eve,” and Thomas McGuane reads the “Last Night” by James Salter.  In politics Dorothy Wickenden has been talking with the magazine’s political reporters and essayists about Obama’s transition.  And for the New Yorker Out Loud, web editor Blake Eskin spoke with Ariel Levy about The Joy of Sex, Martin Schoeller and Steve Pike about portrait photography, and Judith Thurman about the resurgence of Scrabble.  (1.13.09)

CFP produced our first video recently.  It’s a video podcast featuring the Children’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman reading poems from Laughing Time by William Jay Smith.  Mary Ann Hoberman obviously has a great deal of experience capturing the attention of young children.  We expect to roll out more of these videos in the coming month. Edited by Owen Agnew.  (1.13.09)

In the January Poetry Magazine podcast, previously unpublished poems by Langston Hughes, a preview of Michael Hofmann’s essay on Lowell and Bishop—and a phone call to readers in Texas who don’t like the poems in this month’s issue, plus readings by Kim Addonizio and Allen Edwin Butt, a poet still in college. In the most recent Poetry Off the Shelf, Pejk Malinovski and Naja Marie Aidt talk read and talk about the poetry of Denmark’s greatest poet, Inger Christensen, who died last week.  (1.12.09)

Back in a November Poetry Off the Shelf podcast, I called three poets to ask them what poems they would want President-Elect Obama to read before taking office.  Elizabeth Alexander was one of those poets.  A week or two later it was announced that Elizabeth Alexander had been chosen to read at the Inaugural.  So we put together another podcast with her, including a question and answer I had cut from the previous podcast about what poets she would like to read at the Inaugural.  Elizabeth Alexander is also the narrator of the Poetry Foundation’s poetry walking tour of Washington DC, which is currently in production.  So we included in this podcast the stop in which she tells the story of Robert Frost nearly botching his reading at JFK’s inaugural.  Plus Alexander reading one of her own poems.  (12.22.08)

It’s one of the most famous short stories in American fiction.  Infamous when it was first published in 1948.  In this month’s edition of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, A.M. Homes reads “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and talks about it with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. (11.12.08)

CFP is now producing the weekly New Yorker Out Loud podcast, which features an interview with a writer in the upcoming issue.  Recently, Blake Eskin interviewed John Lanchester about how finance went post-modern, and George Packer about Obama the progressive versus Obama the post-partisan uniter.  (11.12.08)

We recorded the last Campaign Trail from the New Yorker last Thursday, two days after the election.  Host Dorothy Wickenden phoned in from home with a broken ankle.  David Remnick, Hendrik Hertzberg and Ryan Lizza review the turning points of the campaign.  The program will continue under a different name: The Transition.  Stay tuned.  (11.10.08)

In the most recent Poetry Off the Shelf podcast, Charles Bernstein, Patricia Smith and Forrest Gander recommend poems for Barack Obama before he takes over the White House.  Bernstein explains how Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem “The Bomb” is an attack on monolithic thinking; Smith recommends a classic; and Gander says that an inauguration is a like a wedding and proposes an epithalamium.  (11.8.09)