Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

The queens are all lubed up and waiting for you in the badlands that is Breaking Form.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 NOTESSee Beckian Fritz Goldberg read poems here (at 1:04 mark)Our friend Maureen Seaton died on August 26, 2023. Watch her read poems for Alaska Quarterly here. You can listen to our tribute episode to Maureen here, and our Breaking Form episodes with her here and here. Anne and Nancy Wilson of Heart have actually reunited and will tour all over the US in 2024. Watch them sing with Kelly Clarkson here.Here's a short interview with Ellen Bryant Voigt.Here's a short interview and reading with Frank O'Hara.Crisco is 113 years old. Watch this 1981 ad for it, featuring Loretta Lynn.Throb Magazine can be found online at: https://www.throbmag.com/aboutListen to Ander Monson in this short poetic video "PREDATOR vs. Alien vs. Predator"Here are three clips from Julianne Moore that we reference in the show:Julianne Moore and Robert Pattinson (Maps to the Stars) talking about gloves and sex.Maps to the Stars: bleeding on the $12,000 couchHeather Graham and Julianne Moore doing coke together in Boogie Nights.

Go tell it on the mountain, darlings! Join the queens for a special Breaking Form report on the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.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 NOTESIf you don't know about Absolutely Fabulous, which first ran from 1992-95, you're missing out. Catch Edina and Patsy's best moments here. Mona van Duyn taught at Bread Loaf at least once--according to this poster. Check out audio recordings of Bread Loaf readings and lectures here. I can also recommend the reading by Adrian Matejka & Paul Lisicky, both of whom read from work about celebrity icons (it was like a class on how to do that well).The t-slur has been recognized as an offensive slur for at least 10 years, if not more, as this Advocate article about the slur indicates.Daniel Mendelsohn's review ("A Striptease Among Pals") of Hana Yanagihara's A Little Life can be read here (sorry about the paywall!) and the whole dustup gets further press in this Guardian article.For more information about and to apply to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences (there are other conferences in environmental writing and in translation), visit their website here.

Join the queens for this last poetry salon, where we highlight fabulous poets we haven't discussed much on the show.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.

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."