In 2021 I launched my poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, to share poems I love with the world.
Over the past five years it’s been a joy to make the show and to share the poems with listeners around the world. I’ve also been encouraged by enthusiastic reviews and feedback, and seeing the show selected as a top poetry podcast by The Guardian and Podcast Review.
Now, I’m adding a new dimension to A Mouthful of Air: video.
One of the challenges I have on the podcast is that poetry is a visual medium as well as an auditory one. I do my best to describe the structure of the poems – line length, stanza shape, the proportions of a sonnet, and so on. But it’s a lot easier to do this when we can both see the text.
In this video I give you a Poet’s Eye View of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60, one of the first poems I featured on the podcast. You get to look over my shoulder at the text of the poem, while I draw on it and add notes, to make the structural points more clearly.
If you’re curious, please have a look at the video. And if you like it, I’d be grateful if you would like it and subscribe to the A Mouthful of Air YouTube channel.