“10 Minutes of Poetry” is now also available as a podcast

For over nine years, the popular series “10 Minuten Lyrik” has been filling the break between two lectures with poems and their literary context. “The format is very popular. That’s why we’d like to make it accessible to even more people,” explains Lukas Betzler, who hosts and produces the podcast. Until 2023, he was a research assistant to Prof. Dr. Sven Kramer and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate College “Cultures of Critique.”
Like the original, the individual podcast episodes also last ten minutes. The episodes are published as audio files and are available on popular podcast platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts. In addition, the episodes are published on YouTube, where the spoken presentation is supplemented by a slideshow. The so-called “show notes” for each episode include—in addition to the poem’s text—further links.
The series kicks off with a pilot episode featuring a conversation with Sven Kramer, professor of modern German literature and literary cultures, and Julia Menzel, one of the project’s initiators. This will be followed every two weeks by recordings of lectures by faculty members as well as students. The selection of topics spans a wide range of historical periods: Among those featured is the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poem is presented in English. Two poems by contemporary poet Marion Poschmann are included in the series. Additional episodes are planned.
In keeping with the original format, the episodes are easy to listen to on the go—for example, during a lunch break or while traveling. At the same time, the lectures are well-suited for use in cultural and literary studies, in high school German classes, in German language courses, and in other areas of cultural education.