Qarrtsiluni Podcast #1: The Water issue
Download the podcast (67.7 MB)
This is an experiment. We’re hoping it will be the first of many bi-monthly productions, but that depends largely on what kind of feedback we get (we don’t get statistics on downloads). Will you download and listen to it, on an iPod or otherwise, or listen to it on-site? How could we improve it? General and technical suggestions are equally welcome. Leave comments here, send us an email, or join the discussion at our Facebook page.
Duration: 1 hour, 14 minutes
Start times of selections:
1:11 Lucy Kempton & Katherine Durham Oldmixon — issue summary (read by Dave)
3:00 Lana Hectman Ayers — Volume
3:30 Eve Rifkah — born in the year of deluge
5:10 Jessamyn Smyth — Bathe (read by Beth)
6:45 Christina Pacosz — White Heron Wading
7:50 Luisa A. Igloria — What We Ate After Passing the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins
9:55 Allan Peterson — Waterspout
10:35 Fiona Robyn — Aldeburgh Beach
11:35 Nancy Gandhi — Lost at Sea
12:40 Diane Gage — Fish Face
13:45 Susan V. Facknitz — Flotsam
14:50 Lisa J. Cihlar — Far From Any Ocean
15:45 David Graham — Ashes to Ashes, Water Over All
17:05 Pia Taavila — Waste
18:05 Ellen Goldstein — The Rain Walkers
18:45 Janet Yung — Watering Hole (read by Dave)
24:10 Tom Sheehan — Korean Echo
25:25 Nathalie Boisard-Beudin — Water that Was
27:50 Penny Harter — Camping in the Drought
28:45 Celia Lisset Alvarez — Restrictions
30:25 Juliet Wilson — Rainy Season (read by Beth)
31:10 Marion McCready — Looking Beyond
32:12 Nicholas Y.B. Wong — Transformer (read by Roger Phang)
33:28 Paul Dickey — Walking on Water
34:50 Scott Wiggerman — Baptism
36:07 Robert McGowan — Ascent (read by Beth)
37:22 W. Joe Hoppe — Crawdad Creek (read by Dave)
38:27 Rebecca Ellis — Everywhere You Look is Luck
39:10 Christi Krug — Water Rites
44:38 Lisken Van Pelt Dus — Self-Portrait as Aquifer
45:30 Tim Lockridge — A Brief Meditation on Movement (read by Beth)
46:37 Robin Davidson — August Garden (read by Beth)
48:36 Brent Goodman — Crank Bait (read by Dave)
49:50 Kelly Madigan Erlandson — Deep Subject
53:53 Michael Milligan — Swimming Lesson (read by Dave)
55:07 Diane Kendig — Sippo Lake (read by Beth)
55:51 Gill McEvoy — Rain Dancers (read by Dave)
56:57 Wanda McCollar — untitled (read by Dave)
57:42 Pamela Johnson Parker — Shuckswich Road (read by Beth)
59:08 Robbi Nester — Picnic at the Big Lady, Quabbin Reservoir
1:00:37 Ed Higgins — Week’s Rain
1:01:25 Lynne Shapiro — Replenish
1:02:15 Lisken Van Pelt Dus — The Lake Isn’t a Life
1:03:20 Monica Raymond — Inside Leviathan
1:04:50 Charlotte Mandel — The Mollusc World
1:06:25 Angela France — Intertidal
1:07:10 Marly Youmans — A May Flower
1:08:35 Gerard Wozek — Merman
1:10:02 Joe Hyam — Dry (read by Dave)
1:11:07 Allan Peterson — That Element
1:11:47 Robin Davidson — April Storm (read by Dave)
1:12:55 closing comments
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qarrtsiluni 
A great idea! I’d subscribe if it was on iTunes.
It’s possible to subscribe to a URL in iTunes, so if there was a category RSS feed for podcasts, that would work without it being in the iTunes Store. For that matter, I just tried putting the main RSS feed into the iTunes ‘subscribe to podcast’ box, and that already works, but you get each individual poem from the normal posts as well.
Doing it via the iTunes store would be more convenient, though. Potentially it would reach a wider audience, as well. I don’t know what kind of hoops you might have to jump through to get it listed, but there seem to plenty of non-commercial podcasts on there, so it must be possible.
Anyway, I’ve downloaded the first one. I use podcasts to listen to while I’m cooking, so I’ll see how it goes.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcastingfaq.html
Great idea Dave – I’m wondering if it might be about time you started making some money from this?! I’d pay a small amount for the podcasts…
Rob and Harry – Thanks for these helpful remarks (and the link). Of course, since this is WordPress, there IS a feed for every category (but since it’s WordPress.com, the category links at the foot of the post go to their useless and user-unfriendly global tag/category link farm). So thanks for reminding me of that — I’ve republished the post to include it. For now, simply input https://qarrtsiluni.com/category/podcasts/feed/ into iTunes. Later I’ll figure out how to register with the ITunes store, assign metadata categories, and jump through the other hoops apparently necesssary before one can get a podcast officially listed with the Apple gatekeepers.
fiona – Donations are always welcome (Beth has a Paypal account, I believe). If we could set up the podcast so that people would be prompted to make a voluntary donation when it appeared in their iTunes, I guess I’d be O.K. with that. (What would we do with money? Give something to the issue editors, first and foremost. If we had a LOT of money, contributors would get paid, too. Maybe someday…)
Just subscribed to the podcast and will listen to the poems over the next few days. I could see other possibilities — for instance fewer poems but the editors talking about their selection process. Or perhaps somewhere in the middle of the podcast, you could add a short “author talk,” with a poet speaking briefly about her poem, its origins, how it was re-worked or whatever. And then you could proceed after that break with the rest of the poems. Anyway, great idea and I look forward to other podcasts. Thanks!
Good suggestions. I’m reluctant to leave anyone off of a podcast, but if it seems too long, I could split an issue into two podcasts and do one a month, for example. And I certainly wouldn’t be averse to adding other content not found in the issue, as you suggest. I’m especially interested in hearing whether people would like more blather in between selections – we could include brief bios of each author from the Notes, for example – or whether that would just be a distraction. Perhaps, as you say, a sort of intermission would provide just enough of a mental break to keep the overall intensity from becoming overwhelming.
I guess I was thinking that hearing too many voices all at once might lead to poems getting lost in the crowd. Perhaps your idea of breaking the podcast into several editions, with commentary to break up the voice stream, is another way to go. I like a bit of blather!
I listened to the first half of the podcast. I problem I encountered was the varying volume of the readers. Some were so soft that I found myself trying to find the words to follow along. I don’t know if there is anyway to fix this problem or not.
I would also suggest that you break the podcast into sections. It was difficult for me to find enough time to listen to the entire podcast at one time.
Great feedback, Pam – thanks. I hope to do a much better job with volume control next time. I already have a top-of-the-line audio software package on order, which I’m hoping will permit us to do a better job of eliminating noise and standardizing volume levels.
We may never have another issue as lengthy as this, but if we do, we’ll certainly consider breaking the podcast into sections. And/or this may evolve into a monthly rather than a bimonthly thing – we’ll see how it goes.