What is the show?
The Poems We Made Along The Way is a poetry podcast where I (Gregory Kearns) talk to poets about their work, how it has been informed by their friendships and the communities that have been integral to their development. Previous guests have included Carl Philips, Malika Booker, Gillian Allnut, Andrew McMillan, and Sarah Howe.
This poetry podcast contains multitudes. The Poems We Made Along The Way is perfect for poets honing their writing, or poetry-lovers wanting to unlock another layer of appreciation.
These interviews show different writers’ perspectives on craft, the ways they have navigated the creation process and, despite the often-essential solitude of writing, the interconnectedness of poets.
The History
Though The Poems We Made Along The Way didn’t start until 2024, my ambition to make a podcast where I interview poets took root back in 2014. I was a massive fan of The Comedian’s Comedian’s Podcast (know as ComComPod), a show where host Stuart Goldsmith interviews (mainly Stand Up) Comedian’s about the technical side of comedy and whether they are happy (and mental health more generally). My ambition was to take a flattering amount of inspiration from ComComPod, but interview poets instead.
This idea was encouraged by multi award-winning poet and previous guest Andrew McMillan (episode 3). He was also a fan of ComComPod and agreed to be my pilot episode for my poetry version. I recorded a few more but not really knowing how to do any of the other parts like editing and then actually posting the interviews, those have be consigned to gather cobwebs on a hard drive.
A few more false starts and we get to 2024, first The Writing Squad podcast where I produced 6 episodes with fellow Squad poets. Researching, interviewing and editing were all covered by me, The Writing Squad covered the publishing. I am proud of those interviews, not just because they were fundamental to me making The Poems We Made Along The Way, but because I got to hang out with people whose company I enjoy.
Its worth mentioning that there was also a failed attempt on my part to produce a series of The Writing Squad podcast back in 2020. Interviews were recorded remotely and I taught myself how to edit audio files. Though another failed attempt at a podcast was on the (audio)books, I was very slowly, bit by bit, a crewing the skills to make my own poetry podcast.
The Future
The dream is to become a modern anchorite, communing with disembodied voices about poetry 24/7. But what are the goals more specifically?
- Increasing the number of episodes per year. There are so many poets from all over the world that I would love the opportunity to talk to (and in some cases I’d love the opportunity to talk to poets a few times across the years). A way of maximising the number of guests would to be able to guarantee a minimum number of episodes a year. Currently averaging about 30ish a year, it would be so much work but 50 episodes a year would be incredible!
- Transcripts!!!
- There are a bunch of ways of already accessing transcripts/captions for the podcast already, but they are auto-generated by podcasting platforms I find they aren’t always the most accurate (also quite a lot of the time formatted in weird ways). I would love to be able to pay someone to create high quality and well formatted transcripts.
- Also, I’d love if an institution of some kind (probably a library or university) would put those transcripts somewhere. I hope that these interviews are a interesting archival material, taken both as a whole and in isolation.
