Behind the Mic: Narrator Edoardo Ballerini on the Power of Poetry in Trying Times

Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.

Narrator Edoardo Ballerini joins host Jo Reed to honor National Poetry Month and shares his thoughts on the power of poetry, especially in trying times. Edoardo has loved poetry from a young age, and it has a special place in his life as both a reader and a narrator. In this episode, Edoardo also narrates a poem for our podcast listeners, bringing a bit of brightness and hope into our dark spring with William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

From the episode:

It does seem to be that poetry occupies this other level, this other space in our collective consciousness. … It is a place that we want to go in times of either crisis or joy, and it’s been fascinating to see how many people are posting poems and how much poetry and recorded poems are being posted and handed around. There’s something about their brevity to a degree that it’s a bit of a quick hit, if you would. It’s also something that people can memorize and take with them the way that people memorize song lyrics. It’s very difficult to memorize a novel. You know how firm it might mean to you. So I think that all of these factors contribute to this to this moment when people are turning to poetry.

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Support for Behind the Mic for AudioFile Magazine comes from Naxos AudioBooks. Celebrate poetry every day with Naxos AudioBooks’ Poem For Today project, where each weekday in April they share a poem from a classic poetry audiobook, including fantastic performances by Michael Sheen, Ian McKellen, and John Cleese.