Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Karaoke may be where the party goes to die, but Poetry Karaoke will give you life!Please consider supporting the poets we mention in today's show! If you need a good indie bookstore, we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a DC-area Black-owned bookshop. Constant Craving is a great song by kd lang. Read Marianne Moore's iconic poem "Poetry" here. Show You the Shape of My Heart, Backstreet Boys. Watch a fabulous interview with Mona Van Duyn here (~30 min).You can watch Robert Bly read three of his poems in his writing studio here (~5 min).Watch Galway Kinnell give a reading and an interview about his influences here (~30 min). You can read his poem "The Bear" here. Listen to Air Supply's "Sweet Dreams" here.  Here's an interview with Ron Silliman in which he discusses his relationship with Ezra Pound (~5 min).Watch Kylie Minogue sing "Your Disco Needs You" live at Royal Albert Hall (~4 min). And you can watch the official video for "Into the Blue" here.Watch Yusef Komunyakaa's answer to how writing and art has changed him here. (~3 min).Here's Heart's "These Dreams" -- a great karaoke ballad!Kevin Killian was interviewed in 2011 as part of the "Big Joy" collection at Georgia State University (~50 min). Listen to Idina Menzel talk about her Wicked injury here. Frankie and Ariana Grande cover "Seasons of Love" here. Or, since we mention a nuptial ceremony in the show, here's a wedding-party cover of the song with the most washed-out bridesmaids who ever did bridesmaid. (You're welcome, Aaron!)

The shady ladies tackle a  misogynistic poem about Emily Dickinson, then consult her tarot  for responses. It's Tea, Shade, & Amherst Lemonade, so lace up your gloves and let's get into it!The offending poem can be read here. For CA Conrad’s takedown of this poem (and some comments by Metres), see this blog post of Phil Metres’s here.If you haven't read TERFy Adrienne Rich's essay on Dickinson, "Vesuvius at Home," it's worth your time here. You can purchase the Divining Poets: Dickinson tarot deck here. For more about the EBay auction of Dickinson's hair and the troublesome history of its possession, read this fascinating and disturbing article in LitHub.The hair is still on eBay, and going for 450,000 as of this writing.Amherst College holds the original of the only currently authenticated photograph of Emily Dickinson. The daguerreotype was included in Millicent Todd Bingham's gift of Dickinson material to Amherst College in 1956. Bingham acquired it from Wallace Keep (AC 1894) whose brother, Austin Baxter Keep (AC 1897), received the photograph directly from Lavinia Dickinson sometime in the 1890s. Read more here. In an "Fresh Air" interview with Terry Gross, Collins details what "inspired" him to write the poem:"I mean, I actually at one point, when there were so many books out about speculating particularly on Emily Dickinson's sexuality, you know, was she lesbian, was she celibate, did she have an affair, I was driven actually by all of that curiosity and speculation to write a poem called "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," in which I attempted, in a kind of playful way, to put the matter at rest by having sex with her.

We all have to check in some time to the Grief Motel. The queens talk about grief and how poetry helps us cope.Please support indie bookshops, like Loyalty Bookstores. Aaron Smith’s new book, Stop Lying, is out on January 31, 2023 and is available for pre-order here.You can buy James’s book of personal essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, here.Watch Thom L. Higgins throw a pie in Anita Bryant's face here.  He was one of four activists who disrupted the press conference (held on Oct. 14, 1978). Anita said, “At least it’s a fruit pie,” before she broke down into tears. Her husband immediately joined hands with Anita and said, “Anita, let’s pray for him.” Anita said, “We forgive you and we love you, and father, please deliver him from his demon lifestyle.” The husband said, “I don’t want this man harmed in any way,” and afterwards found found the queer activists out in the parking lot and threw some of the pie in one of their faces too. Read more about Higgins here and his papers here. What Keeps Me Here by Rebecca Brown was published in 1996 by Harper Collins. Watch this incredible interview with Lucy Grealey on The Charlie Rose Show (~15 min).If you or someone you love needs some mental health resources:Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has a hotline (English and Spanish) as well as a list of resources.American Counseling Association has some great articles on coping mechanisms for different kinds of grief here. The Center for Grief Recovery and Therapeutic Services has a terrific resource guide here. I recommend the The Trevor Project for LGBTQIA folks, though the Trans Lifeline is perhaps the best resource for TGNC folks.

The queens discuss the craft of coping with grief.James misattributes to Coleridge the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,  which defines poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." The real author is, of course, Wordsworth, who also writes:  "I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Read the entire Preface here. Aaron's book, Stop Lying, is available for pre-order here. It will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry Series on January 31. 2023.James's book of lyric personal essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, is available here. A terrific depot of mental health resources can be found at Mental Health America, an organization driven by its commitment to promote mental health as a critical part of overall wellness, including prevention services for all; early identification and intervention for those at risk; integrated care, services, and supports for those who need them; with recovery as the goal. For trans and non-conforming gender folks, we recommend Trans Lifeline. They have a hotline  (information here) where you can talk to a trans/nonbinary peer with full anonymity and confidentiality. They promise no nonconsensual active rescue (calling 911, emergency services, or law enforcement)

Polish your crystal balls and buckle up, ladies! We get downright divinatory with Maureen Seaton leading the charge.As always, please consider supporting the poets and writers we mention in the episode and buying indie! Breaking Form recommends Loyalty Booksellers, a Black-owned DC-area indie bookshop. Peruse them here. Taurus poets mentioned in the Fact Check include Phillis Wheatley, Yannis Ritsos, Robert Browning, Joy Harjo, Natasha Trethewey, Randall Jarrell, Carolyn Forche, William Shakespeare, Jayne Cortez, and Aurelia Plath.The archetype card deck we used in the podcast is "The Wild Unknown: Archetypes," deck and guidebook by Kim Krans, inpsired by Carl G. Jung.  Two others that Maureen uses and recommends are "The Goddess Oracle," by Amy Sophia Marashinsky, illustrated by Hrana Janto; and "Daughters of the Moon Tarot," by Fiona Morgan. Sylvia Plath’s poem is simply called “Mirror” and it begins, “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions./ Whatever I see I swallow immediately ....” Read it here.  Jewelle Gomez is a Virgo, born Sept. 11. Watch her give a reading on her birthday here (~12 min).Kairos is Greek for “right time” or “season” and in modern parlance describes a rhetorical strategy that considers the timeliness of a message and its place in the zeitgeist. Like when we say, “In a patricia? During a panorama? In this economy?” We’re employing kairos. With thanks to the viral tik-tok user @hotdaddyissues, who's original video can be found here. The poet Christopher Deweese writes and edits The Weather Channel's very entertaining Morning Brief. To sign up for the newsletter and learn delightful and informative things about weather every day, go here.The Bangels’s “Eternal Flame” was co-written by lead singer Susanna Hoffs for their 1988 album Everything. Watch the video here. 

The queens are joined by Empress Maureen Seaton to discuss pushing the envelope....Buy Maureen's books from Loyalty Bookstore, a DC-area Black-owned indie bookstore.Maureen Seaton earned an MFA from Vermont College in 1996. She is the author of the more than 25 poetry collections, some of them authored in collaboration with writers like Samuel Ace, Denise Duhamel, and Neil de la Flor. Seaton, Duhamel, and David Trinidad edited an anthology titled Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (2007). Seaton is author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning memoir Sex Talks to Girls (2008), in which she addresses motherhood, sobriety, and sexuality. Her most recent books are Undersea and Genetics, which she published in 2021. Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk called “Your Elusive Creative Genius" confirms the story about Ruth Stone visualizing a poem as a sort of weather system. You can hear the whole talk here. Read a poem by Maureen's teacher Mark Cox here.  A triolet is an eight-line poem, French in origin, with only two rhymes used throughout. A rondelet's basic structure is:Line 1: A—four syllablesLine 2: b—eight syllablesLine 3: A—repeat of line oneLine 4: a—eight syllablesLine 5: b—eight syllablesLine 6: b—eight syllablesLine 7: A—repeat of line oneThe refrained lines should contain the same words, however substitution or different use of punctuation on the lines has been common.In 1965, Jack Spicer gave a talk on poetry as "dictation." The poet Michael Peterson, whose online post I'm linking to below, writes: "By Spicer's theorem, the poet was not a kind of inspired genius, but rather a "medium" for a psychic, spiritual, poetic message. The poem, in turn, was like a radio which picked up the transmission. This lecture became the stuff of poetry legend, the recording passed from person to person until it was finally made available online almost fifty years later. This is an early recording which I have edited down from almost three hours to just under thirty minutes."You can watch Levine read Lorca's poem "New York (Office and Denunciation)" at the New York Public Library here (~5 min).Marilyn Hacker read and discussed her career at the National Book Festival in 2016, and you can watch it here (~40 min).

Dig if you will a picture: Rita Dove, Prince, and an infidel poet.Prince released over 39 of his own albums and won seven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible (2004). In 1993, Prince announced his desire to go by "an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It's all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency," he wrote in a statement at the time. He was born June 7, 1958 and died April 21, 2016. Rita Dove was born August 28, 1952. In 1987, she won the Pulitzer in Poetry for Thomas and Beulah (becoming only the 2nd African American to win that award, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950). She was US Poet Laureate from 1999-2000. Since 1989, she has taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.Watch Rita Dove on the PBS News Hour here (~7 min).Watch Prince in a 1999 appearance on The Larry King Show here (~40 min)Regarding Judith Butler, here’s the full quote from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: “Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers.”  You can see Prof. Dove discuss her poetry as well as her first novel in an interview here (~25 min).Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey present their work and are interviewed by Rudolph Byrd at Emory University and you can watch that conversation here (~75 min) About the Prince-Michael Jackson feud, Quincy Jones told GQ magazine that the beef  dated back to 1983, when the two attended a James Brown concert. Brown invited Jackson up on stage — and after Jackson treated the crowd to a few moments of singing and dancing, he asked Brown to bring up Prince. Jones later alleged that Prince felt like he'd been shown up — and accused him of making a half-hearted effort to run over Jackson after the show. Mary Shelley was the daughter of philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft, who died within 2 weeks of giving birth to Mary, and William Godwin. While Percy and Mary met when she was 16 (and she became pregnant by him at that time), she didn’t marry him until she was 19. She died of a brain tumor at age 53. She published Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was 20. She was, like her husband, a political radical at the time.Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792 and was 21 when he met Mary Godwin. You can read more about their courtship and marriage here. Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia while sailing home from a meeting with Byron, when his boat was overtaken by a storm. During the 19th century, the average age fell for English women, but it didn’t drop any lower than 22. Patterns varied depending on social and economic class, of course, with working-class women tending to marry slightly older than their aristocratic counterparts. But the prevailing modern idea that all English ladies wed before leaving their teenage years is well off the mark. While European noblewomen often married early, they were a small minority of the population, and the marriage certificates from Canterbury show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.You can listen to Beyonce's “Break My Vogue” [Queens Remix] here (~6 min).

Our fearless queens select and dissect favorite poems--to say why and how poems endure.I Remember is a 1970 memoir written by author and artist Joe Brainard, depicting his childhood in the 1940s and '50s in Oklahoma as well as his life in the '60s and '70s in New York City. Brainard followed I Remember with I Remember More (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both published by Angel Hair. Read Olivia Laing’s short, fabulous review of Joe Brainard’s book I Remember in The Guardian here. Of it, Laing says, “The Bible aside, I can't think of a more original or lovely book.”Ada Limon’s poem “The Contract Says We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual” appears in Limon’s book The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. You can read the whole poem here. Hear Terrance Hayes read “Talk” and "The Blue Terrance" at the Folger Library here. Alexander Pope's sonnet "Sound and Sense" can be read here. James L. White’s prose poem “An Ordinary Composure” appears in The Salt Ecstasies and you can read it on a blog here. Rick Barot, “Wooden Overcoat” was featured on The Slowdown, and you can listen to that episode here. And you can read the whole poem here. Watch Maggie Anderson read from her work here (with Mira Rosenthal; ~16 min). While I couldn’t find “Let the Boats Drift” online, I can recommend “Let Evening Come,” which you can read here.  Read Larry Levis’s “In the City of Light” here. 

The queens spin into a frosty finish with poet and figure-skating stan Jacques J. Rancourt! What a way to celebrate our 50th episode!Please support the poets mentioned in today's episode by buying their books. Shop indie if you can; we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned bookseller in DC. You can buy Jacques's Brocken Spectre here.  Find Jacques J. Rancourt’s website here. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @jj_rancourt. Read Jacques’s “Golden Gate Park” from Brocken Spectre on Poetry Daily here. Writing for the Los Angeles Review Erica Charis-Molling says this of Rancourt’s Brocken Spectre: “Much like the phenomenon after which the collection is titled, the search for answers is part ghost hunt and part investigation of an illusion. Through the eyes of these post-AIDS-epidemic poems, we thoughtfully look at the ways the virus is both a thing of the past and very much present.” Read the whole  review here. If you want to know more about what Tonya Harding (who was banned for life from the US Figure Skating Association) is up to these days, here's a pretty great article. Short answer: she's chopping wood, sending Cameo vids, and raising a son with her 3rd husband. Watch Harding become the 2nd woman (and first American) to land a triple axel in competition (1991 US Nationals) here around the 0:50 mark. You can read several poems by Adélia Prado here, courtesy of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.If you're into incredible jumps, you've got to see Surya Bonali's infamous backflip at the Nagano Olympics. (3:45 mark)Geri Doran’s first book, Resin, won the Walt Whitman Award and was published in 2005 by LSU. Her second book, Sanderlings, was published by Tupelo in 2011. Doran's third book, Epistle, Osprey was published in 2019 (also by Tupelo) -- and we are sorry not to have gotten that right before the fact check! (Thanks, Katy Didden, for the help!)  Read "Tonight is a Night Without Birds" from Resin here. Watch Carolina Kostner’s 2014 spellbinding “Ave Maria” performance here.  James's favorite Lucie Brock-Broido book is Trouble in Mind.  Read "Leaflet on Wooing" from that book here.  Watch Brock-Broido read "Freedom of Speech" here, dedicated to Liam Rector.Hear Lisel Mueller (1924-2020) read "Monet Refuses the Operation" here (~2.5 min).Check out Aaron Smith's latest book of poems, The Book of Daniel,  and James Allen Hall's book of lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well. Because it’s Breaking Form, we'd be remiss if we didn't include at least one scholarly resource. Here's this article titled “Shirtless Figure Skaters: 14 Hot Hunky Men on Ice.”

The queens defy Big Sonny and play an associative game that leads to a lot of poetry love -- and some hot dish.Please support the poets we mention in today's show by buying their books! You can shop indie at Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned DC-area independent bookseller. Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself" ends with these lines:If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.{....}Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,Missing me one place search another,I stop somewhere waiting for you. Mark Doty has a great book on Whitman called What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (Norton, 2021). In My Alexandria, there is only one “Days of….” poem and it is “Days of 1981,” as James correctly said.  Benjamin Garcia’s Thrown in the Throat was selected for the National Poetry Series by Kazim Ali and published by Milkweed (2020). Read more about Garcia at his website here. You can learn more about Darnell Arnoult and her fabulous work on her website.  Maggie Smith kicks off the 16th Palm Beach Poetry Festival in this video (~20 min). Rebecca Morgan Smith is the editor of Memorious, and you can learn more about her own writing at her website here. Learn more about Jacques J. Rancourt’s fabulosity by visiting his website (and ordering his latest book, Brocken Spectre).  Read Olena Kalytiak Davis’s poem “Sweet Reader, Flanneled and Tulled” here.   Susan Mitchell is not the highest paid professor in American poetry. Her salary is searchable since public universities publish salary information. sam sax’s poem we mention is “Ode to the Belt,” which was published in The Nation in 2018. You can read it on sam’s twitter feed here.  Read James Tate’s “Goodtime Jesus” here. James also likes “The Lost Pilot,” which you can read here.