qarrtsiluni

Qarrtsiluni now has a daily podcast. What this means in practical terms is that, from now on, each audio file we publish will include a brief introduction, with a sentence or two about the author, and you’ll be able to listen and subscribe to all our audio in iTunes. Readings by the authors will still make up the heart of each audio clip, and the Flash players on the website and the download links in the RSS feed will continue to work exactly as before.

Neither Beth nor Dave own iPods, but we think it makes sense to re-focus our energies on a single-track podcast. When we first started podcasting here a year and a half ago, we were a bit too ambitious, rolling all the audio files from each issue into one, massive show. Those were a lot of work to pull together, and we were afraid that for a lot of our readers, they were probably work to listen to as well. It can be difficult to sustain the quality of attention required to really hear poetry for longer than about twenty minutes at a stretch, and though we’d love to publish more fiction and creative nonfiction, the reality is that poetry makes up about 75 percent of what we publish, and that’s not likely to change.

Are single-poem or single-story podcasts too short? Is a daily podcast too frequent? We hope not. We figure if Slate and CNet can have daily podcasts, so can qarrtsiluni. If you use an iPod or other portable digital audio player, check it out and let us know what you think.