Podcast
Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast
Hosted by Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall · EN
James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith talk about their favorite poems and poets, interview amazing writers, laugh a lot, gossip, and get real about life and art.
14episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The Lowells
1w ago00:24:26Tap to summarizeThe queens visit The Lowells in a game of "Amy Robert Lowell"Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Notes:Watch a brief biographical video about Amy Lowell here. Poems we mention include these by Amy Lowell:"Sword Blades and Poppy Seed""Opal""The Letter""A Winter Ride" (which includes the line "Everything mortal has moments immortal"; the poem appeared in her first book, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass [Houghton Mifflin, 1912])."A Decade""September, 1918" (which we discuss at length)And these by Robert Lowell:"Night Sweat""Home After Three Months Away""The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" which includes the line "The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.""Reading Myself"Watch a longer documentary about Robert Lowell here (~60 min).Here's the music video for Chappell Roan's "Casual"Here's an article about Amy and Robert Lowell that's worth reading. Here's a link to "Amy Lowell: Selected Poems" edited by Honor Moore; watch Moore discuss Lowell here (~60 min).Watch Naomi Shihab Nye read Amy Lowell's "The Garden by Moonlight."Watch Kids Magazine TV A bit about hyphenated use of words like "to-day" vs "today." In Old and in Middle English, the practice was to join the time with the preposition, using a hyphen "to-day," and "to-morrow," and "to-night," for instance. As the sense of their use as single notions developed, the two elements were brought together in written language (i.e., to night, to-night, and tonight). Nineteenth-century dictionaries opted for the hyphen in all three words. The OED shows hyphenated examples throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th. Latest examples are of to-day (1912), to-night (1908), and to-morrow (1927, with a possible further example as late as 1959). (Adapted from this article).
Transcribe →I Was Bonnie and Clyde (with Special Guest Laura Kasischke)
2w ago00:42:52Tap to summarizeLaura Kasischke joins the queens to talk about her new collection of poems (and her new novel)!Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Notes:"The Crying Towel" was first published in The Massachusetts Review Volume 57, Issue 4Read a short essay Kasischke wrote about the beginning of her poem "The First Resurrection" Uma Thurman starred in The Life Before Her Eyes (2007), adapted from Kasischke's novel of the same name. Evan Rachel Wood plays the younger version of the Uma Thurman character. Her other novels adapted for film include White Bird in a Blizzard (2014), directed by Gregg Araki and starring Shailene Woodley and Suspicious River (2000), directed by Lynne Stopkewich and starring Molly Parker. Kasischke also co-wrote the screenplay for this dark thriller.Laura Kasischke's novel The Lifeguard is available from Red Hen Press here, Read an interview about the novel here. Alberto Giacometti "Woman with Her Throat Cut (Femme égorgée)" serves as the ekphrastic inspiration for Kasischke's poem of the same name. View the artwork here. Giacometti completed the sculpture in 1932 and used bronze cast. Dimensions are 22.00 x 87.50 x 53.50 cm (or roughly 8.5 x 34.5 x 21 inches). Lucy Flint writes that the human figure is treated brutally in Giacometti's piece, and the woman appears in insectlike form. Woman with Her Throat Cut "is a particularly vicious image: the body is splayed open, disemboweled, arched in a paroxysm of sex and death. The psychological torment and the sadistic misogyny projected by this sculpture are in startling contrast to the serenity of other contemporaneous pieces by Giacometti, such as Woman Walking." (article on the Guggenheim site).Watch Kasischke give a reading here, here, and here.
Transcribe →Mothered into Art
3w ago00:40:17Tap to summarizeThe queens take on two impossible topics: death, and mothers.Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Aaron mentions the Marie Howe poem "Letter to My Sister" from The Good Thief, which Howe talks about here. Aaron reads his poem "After My Mother Apologized for My Childhood, We Went to Brunch," which you can hear him read again here -- on his cd Outside the Lines. You can read James's poem "Family Portrait" here.
Transcribe →The Gay 90s
4w ago00:44:08Tap to summarizeCome with the queens as they travel back to a time of gay bookstores, queer anthems, and a boom in LGBT+ publishing: the gay 90s! Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Check out Michael Nava's wonderful essay "Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing, Part II"Learn more about Gendertrash zineRead Melvin Dixon's essay "I'll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name." Read more about Texas Tech's limitations on studying gender and sexuality.Sabah as-Sabah's work appears in many 90s anthologies, including In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers (1992; edited by Kevin Powell & Ras Baraka), Catch the Fire!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (1998), and The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (ed. Assotto Saint, 1991). Read Audre Lorde's "The Electric Slide Boogie" in The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance: 1987-1992.Read Marilyn Hacker's "The Boy"Justin Chin's "Cocksucker's Blues" is included in his first book of poems, Bite Hard (1997). Watch a tribute to Chin here. Here's the table of contents (with some hyperlinks) of The World in Us, edited by Elena Georgiou and Michael Lassell.You can read Maureen Seaton's "Blonde Ambition" (and the entirety of Furious Cooking)Read Dennis Cooper's "After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade"Read Gerry Gomez Pearlberg's "Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette" Some queer poets/poems we mention: Eileen Myles, "American Poem"JD McClatchy, "My Mammogram"David TrinidadRafael Campo, The Other Man Was MeEloise Klein HealyFrank Paino, The Rapture of MatterPaul Monette, 18 Elegies for RogJoan LarkinJudy GrahnRobin BeckerMaggie AndersonRichard McCann, Ghost LettersWayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's ThroatChrystosCheryl Clarke
Transcribe →Sex Poems
Apr 2700:30:19Tap to summarizeLet's talk about Sex! Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Poems we read and texts we mention include:Dorianne Laux, "The Lovers" (Visit Laux's website here).Jenny Johnson, "Daddy Scene" (published in Cherry Tree Issue 11). Subscribe here. Read Jenny's essay "Butch Blowjob" in Bomb Magazine.sam sax, "Ode to the Belt" can be read in The Nation Sept 2023--or you can watch sam perform the poem here. If you're looking for a theory reading about sexuality, might we recommend Sigmund Freud's "Three Contributions To The Theory Of Sex"Jericho Brown's "Host" appears in The New TestamentTimothy Liu's "The Size of It" appeared in The Paris Review Fall 1994Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's "Sex" Sophie Cabot Black, "Interrogation"You can read Minnie Bruce Pratt's "Peach" here (just scroll down/search for "peach").Aaron reads from this article ("50 interesting sex facts...") in the fact check.
Transcribe →On Explicitness
Apr 2000:27:56Tap to summarizePlease Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.
Transcribe →Sex Lives of Poets: Frank O'Hara
Apr 1300:27:21Tap to summarizeAll the queens want is boundless love in this episode about the love life of Frank O'Hara.Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Read Frank O'Hara's "Homosexuality"For more about Chester Kallman, read here. Kallman was a poet, librettist, and writer who was also Auden's partner (and, later, his estate's executor). He published three collections of poems: Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). Grace Hartigan's relationship with Frank O'Hara is detailed a bit more in this Sebastian Smee essay in Washington Post: "Portrait of a Poet." Read O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings"Much of Frank O'Hara's papers are at the Museum of Modern Art in NYCRead a review of Ada Calhoun's memoir "Also a Poet," about her father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who was working on a memorial project about O'Hara when he died. Calhoun believes that her father’s book was torpedoed by O’Hara’s sister and literary executor, Maureen Granville-Smith Calhoun. For more about The Glory Hole Café in Buenos Aires (which we mention in the show), go here.
Transcribe →Boy in Video Arcade
Apr 600:36:04Tap to summarizeThe queens talk about writing through sadness and grief in order to move forward and gain a different vantage point. Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Take a look at the Tracey Emin sculpture "My Bed." It was sold at auction by Christie’s in July 2014 for £2.5 million to German collector Count Christian Duerckheim.Read Larry Levis's poem "Boy in Video Arcade"Read Dickinson's 670 ("One Need not be a Chamber to be Haunted"). For more variations she included on the fascicle, visit the Emily Dickinson Online archive at Harvard's Houghton Library here. In an interview with Melanie Brooks and published in Creative Nonfiction (Winter 2017), Mark Doty says about grief: "It was like just pushing my way up this very tall, spirally staircase. I'd write and cry and write and cry and write and cry." Read the essay here (jstor access required).
Transcribe →Say Yes to the Dress
Mar 3000:29:07Tap to summarizeDress shopping is cardio & life for the Breaking Form fashionistas. Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Paul Tran's "Provenance" appeared first February 22/March 1, 2021 issue of The Nation and was included in All the Flowers Kneeling, which was published by Penguin in 2022 and was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Visit Tran's website here: https://iampaultran.com/The poem "'What Do Women Want?'" is from Kim Addonizio's Tell Me (2000)Read "Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown" by Saeed JonesRead "Esta Noche" by Mark DotyThe poem we read of Allison Benis White's is from “Please Bury Me in This” [Maybe my arms lifted ...]"In recollection of a first memory in A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf wrote: "My mother would come out onto her balcony in a white dressing gown. There were passion flowers growing on the wall; they were great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full."Read torrin a. greathouse's "Ekphrasis on My Rapist's Wedding Dress" and visit their website: https://www.torringreathouse.com/Read Victoria Chang's "OBIT [The Blue Dress]" from her 2020 book, Obit. You can watch Chang read from Obit here (~43 min).
Transcribe →Horsepower (with Special Guest Joy Priest)
Mar 2300:52:43Tap to summarizeGet set for a poetry gabfest for the ages! The fabulous Joy Priest joins us for the Breaking Form Interview.Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Buy Joy's prizewinning collection of poems, Horsepower, from the University of Pittsburgh Press here or from Loyalty Books, a Black, Queer, and Asian owned independent bookstore in DC.Visit Joy Priest's website: https://www.joypriest.comYou can see Joy reading from her work here, here, and here. Or read this interview with her here.Read Joy's ode to Whitney Houston, "When I See the Stars in the Night Sky"Nikky Finney won the 2011 National Book Award for her book Head Off and Split. Watch her iconic speech here. Read more about American Honey, a film by Andrea Arnold starring Sasha Lane We mention a few forms, including the Abecedarian and the Sestina. Click the links for more information about them. Poets we mention:Emily Dickinson and Poem 269 ("Wild nights!")Hear poet Jane Kenyon read her poem "Otherwise."Donald HallTerrance HayesRoss GayLouise Glück's "Anniversary"
Transcribe →