Next time you make a search for the musician "Dylan" on iTunes, don't be surprised to find some Dylan Thomas alongside Bob Dylan.
And if English professor Al Filreis gets his wish, what you'll be listening to is a poetry podcast straight from the Kelly Writers House's Pennsound Project.
Already available online now, a third set of podcasts will be released on August 2.
"The great thing about a podcast is that is allows content providers to send content to their subscriber and the subscriber can be completely passive," said IT project leader Chris Mustazza.
While some providers charge for their podcasts, the Writers House and Pennsound podcasts are free. Most are around 20 minutes long.
A podcast allows automatic downloads from the content provider on a regular basis. Users subscribe to programs such as radio talk shows, news, music and in this case, literature and poetry.
The Pennsound project, an electronic archive of old and new poems on Penn's Writing Web site, is headed by poet and English professor Charles Bernstein.
The project aims at including a broad spectrum of poets and includes such famous lights as Allen Ginsburg or Robert Creeley, as well as those still writing, such as Penn's very own Greg Djanikian.
The Kelly Writers House effort serves up podcasts from house events. Subscribers can expect to find poetry, spoken prose and sound files, such as a speech by former Penn President Judith Rodin or the poetry festival "Mind of Winter."
"I would like Joe Blow in Kentucky to discover our rich archive of really cool programs," said Filreis, who currently edits the podcasts himself. While Filreis doesn't believe that the podcasts of lectures offered by other universities benefit the casual listener, Filreis is hoping that Writers House podcasts will allow people to do chores or exercise while listening to poetry on their iPods.
"Being in iTunes brings a lot of exposure," he added.
This exposure has served Filreis well, as he has garnered the attention of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, publishers of the well-circulated Poetry Magazine, to create a third podcast series driven by a roundtable literary discussion around a single poem.
And while Filreis wants to reach as many listeners as he can, he doesn't "want to dumb it down." Rather, Filreis wants to provide for an "audience ready to be interested in poetry, but don't know how to access it."
The first broadcast of Filreis' new series will feature a discussion of William Carlos Williams's "Between Walls" by Linh Dinh, Kelly Writers House director Jessica Lowenthal and Randall Couch, all poets in their own right.
Correction: In an earlier edition of the article, it was stated that the podcasts would be available on August 2, when they are actually online now. A new series of podcasts will be coming out on August 2.
