Links of the week July 22 2019 (30)

A podcast allows you to do things outside of a poem by making the world of poetry itself more approachable. In most poetry podcasts, there's a discussion about the context of the work and the poet that goes beyond just reading a poem out loud.

We think that poetry is old ... that it's about dead men walking by a pond in the 19th century ... but poetry is more vast than that and podcasts ... allow you to access that vastness through conversation.

"We think that poetry is old ... that it's about dead men walking by a pond in the 19th century," says Ydalmi Noriega, of the Poetry Foundation. "Sure, that's one version of poetry, and perhaps that's what we are presented with in classrooms, but poetry is more vast than that and podcasts ... allow you to access that vastness through conversation."

History has yet to find the book that is universally adored - or the author who enjoys reading bad reviews. While Angie Thomas has topped the charts and scooped up armloads of awards for her two young adult novels, The Hate U Give and On the Come Up, her recent request that book bloggers stop sending her their negative reviews saw her on the receiving end of a wave of vitriol. Thomas wasn't asking reviewers to stop writing bad reviews. She was just asking that they didn't give her a prod on Twitter or Instagram to tell her about it.