Trailer: Introducing the Rime Podcast
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Hello, I’m MJ Millington, and welcome to the Rime podcast, where we’re going to be telling amazing stories from the history of poetry. Stories you won’t hear anywhere else, about things like wizard battles, opium delirium, time capsules, grave robbings, mayhem and madness, monumental undertakings, dubious choices, suspect motivations, everything that goes bump in the night—and don’t forget about wombats.
Why poetry? Well, Poetry is one of those things that really belongs to everyone, but often gets hijacked by someone else’s agenda. They’ll say that poetry can only be this one thing, or this other one thing. They’ll say if it’s easy to understand, you’re doing it wrong; or that it’s only for the intellectual elite; or that the very things that let it take residence in your soul—like truth and beauty—are irrelevant.
But poetry is bigger than any one person or one group’s agenda. It’s bigger than all of us, and it’s as old as humanity itself. Or maybe older, as the poetry of nature was there first. Poetry is not one thing, no matter what someone else tries to tell you. It is everything. There is room for every kind of poetry, yours and mine included. And something so vast and so essential has room for every type of story, as well.
So that’s what I’ll be doing here—telling stories about poetry, because stories about poetry are stories about ourselves. What we think about, what we dream about, what we obsess over, what we’re afraid of—all things visible and invisible in the physical world, and in the world of the mind and spirit. If it exists, even only in the imagination, there’s a poem about it; and a good story to go with it.
And while I know a lot of stories, I don’t know them all; so please share ideas with me that you’d like to see become episodes, especially stories outside Western poetic history. You can contact me through the Rime website, at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll also find complete shownotes for every episode, including transcripts and sources. You’ll find my own poetry and visual art there as well, so check it out.
Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. Our theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. If you end up enjoying the podcast, please leave Rime a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, to help new listeners find our stories. And now, on to the show!