Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast More Moore and Moore
Our hysterical homosexuals pit quotes by Julianne and Marianne Moore, then play a game of fuck, marry, kill: the poetic form edition.
You can read the Marianne Moore poems we reference by clicking on the links below:
Read a small essay by Annie Finch on (as well as Ms. Moore's poem) "What Are Years?" here.
One correction: James gets a word wrong when he quotes Marianne Moore saying, "I have no sympathy for people who find unpopularity embittering," but she says she has "no sympathy with people." The quote is from her Selected Letters.
We reference Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Cunningham is a Scorpio and was the first out gay man to win the Pulitzer for Fiction (though many queer writers before him won, they had not publicly acknowledged their queerness).
For readers and writers looking for books on form and craft:
A great resource about the ghazal is Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, edited by Agha Shahid Ali. Another anthology about craft is Of Color: Poets' Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System, 2019; much of the anthology is available for download on TOS's website).
We also recommend Lewis Turco's The New Book of Forms, as well as Annie Finch's and Kathrine Lore Varnes's An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. And David Lehman's edited collection called Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.
Please support the poets and writers we mention, and support indie bookstores. If you need a good one, we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a black-owned bookstore in Washington, DC.