Why This Podcast Works: Poetry Unbound

It’s easy enough to create a compelling show when your topic is one of the top priorities in your audience’s life.

When your audience is already actively seeking out and hoovering up as much information on your topic as possible, your show concept development and marketing have a lot more margin for error.

But what if you produce a show on a topic that is not—and will never be—one of your audience’s top priorities?

Or perhaps a show on a topic that is important to your audience… but one that they already spend so much time thinking about (ie. their job) that they don’t want to dedicate more mental space to it?

In this issue of Why This Show Works, we’ll unpack how Poetry Unbound used a mix of a Killer Concept and ingenious Episode Engineering to build a large mainstream audience around a niche, non-urgent, low-priority topic.

But first, a quick overview.

The Overview

Category: Poetry

Business Model: Book Sales, Grant-Funded

Show Job to be Done: Mission-driven, specifically to expand the number of people who engage with and appreciate poetry.

Poetry Unbound was launched in 2019 under the umbrella of On Being Studios.

Hosted by accomplished poet, theologian, and conflict mediator Pádraig Ó Tuama, the audio-only show operates on a seasonal release schedule and has released 200+ episodes to date.

While it’s impossible to find any definitive download data, the show ranks in the top 0.05% global podcasts via Listen Notes which I would estimate corresponds with 50k–100k plays/ep.

In addition to the podcast, the show has spun off two books, each of which follows a similar format to the show.

Speaking of which, let’s take a closer look at the show’s concept and format.

The Killer Concept

Here’s how I’d describe the show’s concept pitch:

Poetry Unbound is a poetry podcast where in every 15-minute episode, we tease apart a single poem, one line at a time, to better understand what it’s saying—about its subject, it’s writer, the world, and ourselves.

The Format

Poetry Unbound is a solo show that revolves around a consistent, tightly defined structure that is both incredibly simple… and incredibly effective.

Block 1: Vignette — Where Pádraig shares a short, poetic (but not a poem) 30-60 second personal story or experience that has some oblique connection to the poem’s topic.

Block 2: Poem Read Through — Where Pádraig reads through the poem in its entirety, with zero context provided. As listeners, we typically finish the read through utterly bewildered as to what it’s about or what it’s saying.

Block 3: Analysis — Where Pádraig walks us through the poem. This block usually starts with some background on the poet and the personal backdrop against which the poem was written before Pádraig walks us through the poem, line by line, teasing apart, musing at, and explaining what’s happening in the poem and what it could (or does) mean. In this block, we as listeners begin to connect the dots and the poem begins to make sense.

Block 4: Second Poem Read Through — Where Pádraig reads the poem again, and where we as the listeners get the rich payoff of fully comprehending and understanding the poem in its entirety.

Block 5: Reflection Space & Credits — Where the (pitch perfect) theme music swells up behind the last few lines of the poem read through and then plays for 5-10 seconds, creating space for us to reflect on the poem before the credits come in.

Why This Show Works

The core of why this show works is its masterful understanding of its intended audience, which is then translated into a series of smart creative decisions to make the perfect show for them.

Who is that audience?

My suspicion is it’s people like me, who want to read and enjoy poetry… but feel stupid when they read it because they don’t understand it (thanks high school English class).

People who are less poetry nerds and more poetry curious.

In fact, my suspicion is that the internal mission of the show is to expand the number of people who read, engage with, and appreciate poetry in general, by creating a sort of gentle, low-stakes, non-judgmental environment to experiment with it.

In short, the show is something of a gateway drug to poetry more broadly.

This audience and internal Job to Be Done are directly reflected in the show concept and format.

Why The Concept Works

There are a couple of key elements of the concept that provide the show-level hooks.

The first is its core mechanic: “Teasing apart a single poem, line by line”.

If you’re curious about poetry but always feel bad because you don’t understand it, this is exactly the solution you’ve been looking for.

The show promises to not only help you understand (and have a richer experience of) the individual poems it dissects, but also poetry more broadly, showing you what to look for, how to read between the lines, and how to come to your own conclusions about what a poem might be saying.

The second hook is a very intentional structural decision of constraining the episodes to just 15 minutes.

Because this is a gateway show for the poetry curious, the (correct) assumption is that poetry is not a priority in the typical listener’s life. As such, they’re probably not dedicating an hour or more per week to listening to podcasts on it.

That said, they can almost certainly find space for 15 minutes.

In addition, the short run-time makes the show feel more approachable, less intimidating, easier to sample.

There are almost certainly long-form poetry shows that do extraordinarily well, but for this show, with its specific target audience and purpose, the short episode length feels highly congruent.

Why The Format Works

We’ve already discussed how the show’s format and the core mechanic of line-by-line exploration it’s built around provides its primary external hook in addition to being a highly useful method of helping listeners understand both this poem and poetry more broadly.

But the real genius of Poetry Unbound’s Episode Engineering is the two readings of the same poem that bookend the episode.

The contrast between the two—from confusion to comprehension—not only creates a delightful payoff but also a feeling of progress, where we can feel ourselves getting smarter, and perhaps even a little wiser in real time.

This psychological reward that happens in every single episode creates a kind of addictive experience where we want to keep coming back and experiencing that thrill again and again.

What Else Works

In addition to the concept and format, it’s impossible to ignore the importance of Pádraig’s presence and tone as the host.

One of the core reasons Poetry Unbound works is the tone of curious exploration rather than declarative confidence.

Despite being an accomplished poet, as a listener, Pádraig never makes you feel stupid for not understanding a poem on the first read. In fact, through his own musing and pondering, he demonstrates that you’re not supposed to understand a poem immediately.

That a poem is something to be thought over, wondered at, poked, prodded, questioned, and explored…

And that the value of reading poetry is not in the understanding of the literal meaning… but in the wondering at it for yourself.

Additionally, it’s hard to overlook that Pádraig’s Irish accent—and the incredibly rich cultural history it invokes, specifically related to poetry—is a core asset for the show.

Apply This

If there’s one key takeaway from Poetry Unbound, it’s about:

1. Understanding your audience, and then
2. Designing a Killer Concept that goes all in on positioning the show around one of their key blockers, bottlenecks, or objections

Poetry Unbound doesn’t try to be anything and everything for everyone. It instead has a very clear target listener which it has designed all of its creative decisions around (concept, format, content strategy).

The second takeaway is around the show’s Episode Engineering.

Poetry Unbound employs a consistent, highly-structured episode format that it follows every single episode.

Many podcast hosts resist this kind of tight format out of fear it will make the show feel repetitive, generic, and boring.

And yet, as Poetry Unbound (and many other shows) demonstrate, this repeatable, familiar format is exactly the thing that helps listeners fall in love with and build expectation, anticipation, and a habit around the show.

Every single episode, you know exactly what you’re going to get from a format perspective, with the novelty being supplied by each episode’s poem and accompanying analysis.

Finally, I personally love the cyclical format where we encounter something—in this case, a poem—at the start of the episode, and then revisit it with fresh eyes and ears at the end.

In an issue dedicated to a show about poetry, it feels fitting that this “there and back again” technique calls to mind a line from a T.S. Eliot poem.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Hope you took something useful from this you can apply to your show.

If you did, hit reply and let me know what stood out to you.

And if you have a show you’d love to see dissected, let me know and I’ll add it to my list.

Including yours.