BY JOEY SWEENEY | There are many podcasts — there are so very many podcasts — but for the infinite variety of hosts and subject matter out there, it feels like there’s not that many people out there who are truly experimenting with the form. Love Jawns: A Mixtape does, and brilliantly so, and goes far beyond its simple elevator pitch: 3 poets record a poem. A DJ stitches them together with musical interludes. 

Produced by Jaléssa Mungin and former Philly poet laureate Yolanda Wisher for Philadelphia Contemporary, Love Jawns performs a little bit of magic in each episode — it conjures a space by way of hijacking the sounds of the city. “Love Jawns claims the mixtape format as a container for poetry,” Wisher told us. “More than a podcast, it’s trying to be a soundtrack to the city.” Each episode begins with a familiar SEPTA bell, and Wisher’s voice calmly intoning:

Doors are closing.
Next stop: Love Jawns, a mixtape for Routes L, J, A, and M
This is a soundtrack of the city; this is a soundtrack for the people. 
Please play at a volume the ancestors can hear.
For your listening pleasure, please stand close to the edge. Thank you for riding.

Underneath that bit of utterly transportive boilerplate, you’re also already being dropped into Vince Anthony’s jammy and evocative musical interludes, which are a key piece of the sonic glue that holds the podcast together. This together with the voice of Wisher — who’s been meditating poetically on Philadelphia for a while now and producing truly great work out of it — set a welcoming stage for everything and everyone that follows.

“LJAM is a brief conversation between the featured poets and the DJ, like old friends catching up on the bus or new friends droppin’ gems on the stoop of life lived,” she says. “These places we’re from, like Philly, are multi-tongued and grooved. Can’t no single poem really encompass a city. With each episode, we’re trying to create something like the best open mic--intimate, revelatory and nodding away to the full range of human expression.”