Abram Van Engen, co-host of the podcast, recently reflected on five years of building a loyal audience through episodes that invite listeners to hear, rethink, and rediscover poetry.
The “Poetry for All” podcast, hosted by Abram Van Engen and Joanne Diaz, has hit a major milestone: its 100th episode.
Since its debut in 2020, the podcast’s episodes have been downloaded more than 265,000 times. According to Van Engen, the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities, the podcast is designed for both poetry enthusiasts and those who may not know much about it.
“I think there are a lot more people into poetry than realize they are into poetry,” Van Engen said. “I always promise people that if you start reading poetry and allow yourself to dislike some of it, you will find poems that you like pretty quickly.”
For five years, Van Engen and Diaz, a Illinois Wesleyan University professor, have built a loyal audience through bite-size episodes. Each installment features the hosts reading a poem, sharing their reactions, and then reading it again. Van Engen said the aim is not just to understand a poem, it’s to come back to it, listen again, and reexperience it.
On the podcast’s website, listeners can explore episodes by occasion or theme, including Black History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Father’s Day, or Labor Day. Van Engen said the team strives for diversity in mood, theme, identity, and poetic form. They recently released a three-episode series on pantoums, a poetic form with repeated lines that gained popularity in the 19th century. Popular episodes feature poets ranging from Rumi and Shakespeare, along with contemporary voices like Ada Limón, the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025.
At WashU, Van Engen is chair of the English department and his scholarly focus is 17th-century Puritans, not poetry. The podcast, he said, allows him to engage his passion for literature on a personal level, approaching it through appreciation first and foremost.
Van Engen believes the podcast succeeds because people enjoy hearing a thoughtful, engaging conversation.
“Joanne and I are very good friends going back 20 years; we laugh at each other, and we bring really different worldviews,” he said. “We learn from each other, and in the same way, the listener learns along with us.”
