Thinking about it, poetry might be the best application of podcasting yet. I suppose that poetry is about as close to music as language gets and listening to poetry in my ‘don’t-even-think-about-talking-to-me’ public transport bubble on the daily commute is qualitatively much like listening to The Flaming Lips or Schubert or Mrs Mills (although I feel obliged to tell you I am really pissed off with the performance of my stupid Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman phone. Simply put: if you plan to buy one and use it with a Mac, don’t bother. It doesn’t work).
Anyway, a bit of googling turns up dozens of poetry podcasts but most are poor – it’s early days, I suppose. Here’s a really good one: the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Subscribe to the podcast and then fetch some of the brilliant MP3s from the archive – many by famous poets reading famous poems.
Daniel Barenboim’s 2006 Reith Lecture series is only a week old but already moving and thought-provoking and humane. What a man! Of course there’s a podcast. Definitely worth downloading.