Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

The queens issue a BOLO for  poetry red flags before getting around to a satisfying Jack-Off.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.Watch Lucie Brock-Broido read her poem "You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World," from Stay, Illusion at the National Book Award Finalists' reading (~3 min). Whitney Houston performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" on January 27, 1991. (We recorded the fact-check for this episode 33 years to the day from that performance!) Watch Whitney sing it here. And then watch Cher's rendition here.The Friends episode "The One with the Joke" aired Jan 13, 2000 in Season 6, Episode 12. You can watch the clip we reference here (~4 min).Poems by Laura Riding Jackson we quote from include:"The World and I""The Spring Has Many Silences""Voices"Listen to Laura Riding Jackson read her poems at the U. of Florida in 1975  (~30 min).Poems by Jack Spicer we quote from include:"Helen: A Revision""Concord Hymn""A Poem For Dada Day At The Place April 1, 1958"Just for fun, check out this fabulous reading of Spicer's "For Mac," read by CA Conrad (~2 min). The last line is utterly devastating.Here's a compilation of Sandra stealing the scenes of 227 with just one word: MARY.

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.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.Read Rick Hilles's "A Visionary's Company"Listen to Seduction's hit song "Two To Make It Right." Of the six songs on the 13-track Bodyguard soundtrack, Whitney Houston sings 6. Michelle Visage's group The S.O.U.L.S.Y.S.T.E.M. performs "It's Going to Be a Lovely Day" on the album.Read Linda Bierds's poem "Ghost Trio"Watch a live performance of Tori Amos's "Putting the Damage On." Check out the Tori-licious website Toriphoria, containing all things Amos. Rita Dove's poem "Soup" is from her latest collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse and you can listen to her reading it here.Read Jane Kenyon's poem "Three Songs at the End of Summer"Read Robert Penn Warren's poem "Tell Me a Story." Watch Natasha Trethewey's final lecture in her 2-term Poet Laureateship, "The World of Action and Liability: On Saying What Happens," in which she contends with Penn Warren, violent and racist histories, and the role of poetry in social justice. (1 hour). Trethewey later published the text of the lecture under the title "The Quarrel With Ourselves."Listen/watch Ani DiFranco's fabulous "Untouchable Face"Watch Sandra Cisneros read her poem "After a Quote from My Father."Read Darnell Arnoult's "Outrageous Love." Check out the fabulous Brenda Shaughnessy's poem "Card 19: The Sun."

It's the love song of J. Alfred Prufcock--er, Prufrock this week as the queens discuss the sex life of T.S. Eliot.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.Valerie Eliot died in 2012 at age 86. Her net worth was about 17.5 million dollars. She first memorized Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" at 14, and from the age of 18 she tried to get into his orbit, even going to the same church and then becoming his secretary at Faber & Faber. You can read her obit here. You can read Eliot's letters to Emily Hale for free here.The tea about Eliot's letters are here and here.Read Louis Menad's "The Women Come and Go" in The New Yorker, which forms the basis of many of the facts we detail in the episode.Another New Yorker article by William H. Pritchard that focuses particularly on the relationship between Haigh-Wood and Eliot is "The Hollow Man and His Wife."This Guardian article discusses Vivienne's diaries.

Get frankly franking frank with the queens this week--then let's talk about sex, baby! 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.Read more about Frank O'Hara. And read here about Tim Dlugos.  Frank O'Hara wrote "Personism: A Manifesto" that was both manifesto and send-up of manifestos. In it, he advocates for poems that sound like they've got a real person in mind as an audience. In one part of it, he writes, "You just go on your nerve'." You can read the whole manifesto here. Read O'Hara's poem "F. (Missive & Walk) I. 53" which appeared in The Paris Review in Summer 1970. Read  O'Hara's "Pearl Harbor"Watch the official video for the INXS song "Suicide Blonde" ( which includes the line, "You want to make her suicide blonde") here. Read Diane Seuss talk about O'Hara in this Adroit Journal interview: "On Frank O'Hara and Marilyn Monroe."Frank O'Hara's poem "Avenue A" begins "we hardly ever see the moon anymore." Read the whole poem.Hear Tim Dlugos read "The Nineteenth Century is 183 Years Old"Read a review of Tim Dlugos's collected poems edited by David Trinidad called A Fast Life. In the segment "Sex Lives of Poets" we mention the following books/poets:Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours & Glass, Irony and GodSandra Cisneros, Loose WomanMegan Fernandes, I Do Everything I'm ToldBeckian Fritz Goldberg, Never Be the HorseBenjamin Garcia, Thrown in the ThroatAllen Ginsberg, Howlfrancine j. harris, Play DeadTom Healey, What the Right Hand KnowsBrenda Hillman, Loose SugarThylias Moss, Last Chance for the Tarzan HollerNaomi Shihab Nye, Mint SnowballMary Oliver, ThirstWillie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon BonKevin Prufer, The Finger Bone & Strange WoodAdrienne Rich, Diving Into the WreckWesley Rothman, Subwoofer

The queens help you start your new year off right: with some fierce, unapologetic, fabulous queer writers!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.J Jennifer Espinoza's first full-length collection of poems, I Don't Want to Be Misunderstood, is available for pre-order at Alice James Books and will be released in 2024. You can read her poem "Birthday Suits" here.Read James L. White's "Making Love to Myself." The poem is included in White's book The Salt Ecstasies, published postmortem by Graywolf in 1982.You can follow Deon Robinson on Instagram: @djrthepoet and read more about him here. Check out Celeste Gainey (we read her incredible poem "In Our Nation's Capital" on the show) at her website: https://celestegainey.comElise D'Haene is Celeste's screenwriter, novelist, and professor partner, and you can read more about her here. Read Justin Chin's obit. And read his epic poem "Lick My Butt." Watch Chin read his poem "The Glitters" here (~2.5 min).Read Dennis Cooper's "After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade." You can watch Dennis Cooper interviewed on More Than a Mouthful: Queer Culture TV here.  

The queens have a mind of winter in this showcase of iconically cold poems. Ice, ice, baby!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.Read "Those Winter Sundays" or listen to Robert Hayden read it here. Read more about A Ballad of Remembrance. Read Robert Frost's poem "Birches." Frost reads it (audio only) here (~3 minutes). You can read "More" by Marie Howe here. Watch a sock puppet read Timothy Liu's poem "Winter" -- because like why not? Poetry is for puppets, too, girl. Or read the text of it here. Read Jennifer Chang's "The World." Here is Christina Rossetti's "In the Bleak Midwinter."Read "Paul Revere's Ride" here. 

Write with the Breaking Form queens before we play a game of poetry homonyms.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. You can read more about and poems by Thomas Centolella here. The poems we mention in "Homonyms" are:"Yellowjackets" by Kimiko Hahn"Nothing Gentle Will Remain" by CA Conrad "Disillusion" by Langston Hughes"Peach" by D.H. Lawrence "Forgiveness, Perhaps" by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. At the link, you can also read my favorite of Marci's poem "Even America's Dearest Underdog." Visit her website to read more of her fabulous work!"Reading to My Father" by Jorie Graham"What It Look Like" by Terrance HayesJames references the movie Desperado in his poem "Villain" in Romantic Comedy.The Todd Haynes quote we reference in tandem with Terrance Hayes's poem, is from I'm Not There, written by the director. 

The queens talk more True Crime poems in an episode so good, it'll feel like you're breaking the law!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. Read Natasha Trethewey's "Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath." Listen to Trethewey interviewed by NPR here--it's a riveting and utterly heartbreaking story.You can read Sharon Olds's poem "Photographs Courtesy of the Fall River HistoricalSociety" in the journal Calliope here and browse the Borden house crime scene photos reference in the poem here. The poem is from Satan Says.  You can also read her poem "Death of Marilyn Monroe," from The Dead & the Living.We mention Allison Benis-White's haunting and beautiful book of poems (about 5 Wendy's, including Wendy Coffield--the Green River Killer's first victim). Buy it here!We also mention Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno's book Slamming Open the Door--which you can also buy (of course from an indie!) here. Watch Mark Doty read his powerful poem "Charlie Howard's Descent." Charlie Howard, as Mark explains, was thrown off a bridge to his death in a 1985 hate crime.For more about the Smiley Face Murders (not to be confused with the Smiley Face Killer), listen to this Crime Junkie episode.Watch bigot Anita Bryant pied by Tom Higgins. You can read James's poem about it, "On Dark Days, I Imagine My Parents' Wedding Video," from The Iowa Review Online.

The queens play poetry detective in this episode devoted to true crime-inspired poems.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.You can check out the Killer Psyche podcast here, hosted by  retired FBI agent Candice DeLong.You can read more about Kenneth Patchen as well as some of his poems here. It's worth taking a look at the poem Aaron reads ("The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-Colored Gloves") since the visual experience is part of the poem's drama.You can read the entirety of Browning's The Ring and the Book for free. You can also experience an audio play of the book (serially; start here.)Check out more poems from Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder here. Julia Shiota's piece "The Humanity of True Crime's Victims" (here on the Ploughshares blog) uses Nelson's Jane: A Murder and the subsequent book about the trial, The Red Parts, to discuss the ethics in true crime.Read Monica Youn's "Stealing the Scream." Read more about the true story behind the poem here and here.You can listen to recorded calls made by the Golden State Killer here.Read Linda McCarriston's "To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons" from Eva-Mary.

The queens' Kissing Booth is now open! We talk poetic kisses and then read some recent poetry crushes.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.Read more about Rimbaud here, and watch Patti Smith's video about preparing for "Rimbaud Month" here (5min).To really understand the life & times Akhmatova lived through, watch Semeon Aranovitch's film The Anna Akhmatova File (in Russian with subtitles ~70 min) here. The actor and singer Jonathan Groff is a spitter and you can read the receipts here. Watch this video comprising a short bio about Jane Hirshfield and then a videorecording of Hirshfield reading "For What Binds Us." Watch Tomas Transtromer read his poem "Allegro"  (2 min). Read an English translation of "Allegro" here.Watch Cher perform her song "DJ Play a Christmas Song" on Berlin's Wetten Dass here and at the 2023 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade here.If you don't know much about Dorothy Parker, here's a great video to get you started.Here's Mariah Carey saying about J Lo, "I don't know her" here. The unfolding is here.For more about Louise Glück's essay "The Forbidden" and the shade she casts on Linda McCarriston and Sharon Olds, read on here. And W i lli am L0g an receipts about shoeshine kits can be had here. Read William Ward Butler's "I Got that Dog in Me" here & order his chapbook Life History from Ghost City Press here. Read Gustavo Hernandez's "Summer, You're a Boneyard," picked by Diane Seuss for Poem-A-Day. Buy Flower Grand First from Tide Moon Press here. Visit Ruth Madievsky's website. Read her poem "In High School" here.  Buy Emergency Brake here.Read Amy Thatcher's poem "Road Kill" here and her poem "Our Lady of Sorrows" here.