I listen to a number of podcasts on the iOS app while walking around Philadelphia. Unfortunately, I’ve found it hard to find many worthwhile poetry podcasts aside from the two currently produced by the Poetry Foundation, and, while I sometimes find them enlivening, they are indisputably mainstream and fairly predictable.

Therefore it’s with some pleasure that I have occasion to share a new series, just launched this week, called Works Cited: A Podcast about Poems. It is the brainchild of two Lukes and a Kevin, specifically Luke Bauerlein, Kevin Cutrer, and Luke Stromberg, who is E-Verse’s indispensable poetry editor. In the first episode, the three, all poets themselves, talk about their earliest memories of poetry and various facets of the art that enticed them as readers and inspired them to become poets. The inaugural episode then gets down to serious discussion of Ai’s vivid and unsettling poem “The Kid.”

This is good stuff. It’s a gritty, downright underground project right now, and I hope it catches on. The hosts do not pose as authorities. Rather, they deliver the simple pleasure of hearing poets talk about poems as if they were sitting around with no greater aim than enjoying themselves. Their enthusiasm and intelligence are on fully display at all times. I’m told they have the entire first season recorded, so we have much more to look forward to. You can subscribe through Soundcloud and on iTunes and iOS Podcast apps. You can also visit their website and join their Facebook page.

You can also listen on the embedded SoundCloud player below. Check it out. See if it’s your thing. If you like it, please share with others to help them build and audience.