Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Settle in for this fourth poetry salon, a show as jam-packed with radiant pleasure as a dark room in Rehoboth.If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

This Summer Salon has zero tan-lines and a ton of fabulous poetry! If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Who wears short shorts? Celebrate summer with the queens as we read poets we haven't focused on before.If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

The Breaking Form girls are taking a little August break, but we still want to brighten your summer with poems! 

Spill all the tea but spill it slant with the Breaking Form queens in this episode dedicated to the art of secrets.If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTESCougar Town is an American television sitcom that ran for six seasons, from 2009 to 2015. See the best moment of Laurie Keller (played by Busy Phillips) here.The music journalist Hugh McIntyre is indeed gay. Patsy Stone's full name is: Eurydice Colette Clytemnestra Dido Bathsheba Rabelais Patricia Cocteau Stone. See some of her best moments from Absolutely Fabulous here.Read Lucille Clifton's "Lost Baby Poem"Read Nomi Stone's poems "La Ghriba (“The Stranger”) Tells How and Why," "Waiting for Happiness," and "Archiving What We Saw" Read Ruth Stone's "Speculation," "Shapes," and "As Real As Life" Read Bianca Stone's "Cutting Odette's Fingernails,"Marcus Aurelius," and "The Request of the Doe" 

Aaron and James revisit an iconic poem about queer duty and erasure by Essex Hemphill.If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTESRead Hemphill's biographical sketch on the Poetry Foundation.We reference Hemphill's canonical poem, which you can read: "American Wedding" (listen to Justin Smith read the poem here).Hemphill's Ceremonies was published by Cleis Press in 1992.Hit the 1:04 mark on this clip to hear Hemphill read a poem as part of Tongues Untied. Hemphill took part in a panel during the Black Nations/Queer Nations Conference in the early 90s alongside Samuel R. Delaney and Coco Fusco. His talk is about HIV, Blackness, and queerness. 

Spill all the tea but spill it slant with the Breaking Form queens in this episode dedicated to the art of secrets.If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTESMadonna's "Secret" was the lead single off of her sixth album, Bedtime Stories. Watch the video here. Read Sharon Olds's "Killing My Sister's Fish"Len Roberts's "The Problem" appeared in APR March/April 2001 and can also be found in The Silent Singer.Julia Kasdorf's "Eve's Curse" appears in her book Eve's Striptease. You can watch her give a reading (from As Is) here. Read Emily Dickinson's 260. And check out her handwritten copy here. Dickinson published TEN poems and a letter in her lifetime. Aaron reads the July 17, 1996 entry from Letters to Wendy's and you can read the text of that here. Read CP Cavafy's "The Afternoon Sun" (trans. Edmund Keeley). Cavafy's complete literary corpus includes the 154 poems that constitute his poetic canon; his 75 unpublished or "hidden" poems, that were found completed in his archive or in the hands of friends, and weren't published until 1968; his 37 rejected poems, which he published but later renounced; his 30 incomplete poems that were found unfinished in his archive; as well as numerous other prose poems, essays, and letters.[16] According to the poet's instructions, his poems are classified into three categories: historical, philosophical, and hedonistic or sensual.[10]Here's W.H. Auden's "If I Could Tell You" & you can hear him read it.Read Laura Kasischke's "Bike Ride with Older Boys" (from her book Dance and Disappear). Check out Cathy Linh Che's "The German word for dream is trauma."

Knock knock, darlings! Join the queens as we talk about funny poems.If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTESWatch Stacey Waite give a full reading here (at 38:00); here's Stacey reading one poem: "The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV." Watch Gary Jackson's poem "Tryouts" in Motionpoems (Button Poetry) here.Read Tim Dlugos's "David Cassidy, I Want to Fuck You"; listen to Terence Winch read "Incredible Risks" (the title of one of Dlugos's books) here. Read "Note Passed to Superman" as well as some other of Lucille Clifton's "Clark Kent Poems" here.Here's an interview in Adroit Journal with Denise Duhamel, in which she discusses the craft of chattiness and comedy in her poetry. Visit Nick Lantz's website.You can read Aaron Smith's "Jennifer Lawrence" here (scroll down).Watch Anita Bryant get some queer comeuppance here. James's poem about this is: "On Dark Days, I Imagine My Parents' Wedding Video." Their poem, "A Fact Which Occurred in America" can be read here.Read Matthew Olzmann's "Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session After the Reading, Asked for Career Advice" (from Constellation Route).Go read A.R. Ammons's poem "Their Sex Life" here.Read Ed Ochester's "Monroeville, PA."

Celebrating the art of the poetic punch & helping Form Breakers everywhere say "f*ck you" to their nemesissies. If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTESListen to Taylor Swift sing a mash-up of "thanK you aIMee" (about Kim Kardashian) and "Mean" on the Eras tour in London here. Read John Dryden's "MacFlecknoe"Visit Lisa Glatt online. Read "Wanda in Worryland" by Wanda Coleman (scroll down). Aaron reads her poem "What it Means to Be Dark." Read this consideration of Coleman's work by Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker.You can read Catallus's fuck you poem (#33 translated by AZ Foreman) here. The link here has a recording of the poem recited in Latin too.Adrienne Rich's poem "Song" is the 9th poem in Diving Into the Wreck. The first poem is "Trying to Talk With a Man." And you can read "The Phenomenology of Anger" here. The receipt about Rich driving Bishop is here.Read Jayne Cortez's "There it Is." There It Is is also the title of the album released in 1982 by Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters, which contains Cortez's poem as the lead track. Listen to the poem set to music here. And you can watch Cortez perform here.

Are you a friend of Dorothy? This episode pays tribute to The Golden Girls, but in the most Breaking Form way possible!If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTESChristian Wiman's book Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. It's part memoir and part a collection of his poems and poems by others related to the book's themes. Hear Wiman interviewed on Fresh Air Read Brenda Shaughnessy's "Panopticon" first published in Ecotone.Read Aaron Smith's poem "Blue Exits" (about self-harming and self-exiting)A gay couple had an epic, viral meltdown in an airport. If you haven't seen the original TikTok go "Remember Them: Shelby and Dolly"We reference Dana Levin's fourth book, Banana Palace. Read the title poem.Read Erin Belieu's poem "Erections"