Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

The queens are joined by Randall Mann to discuss discomfort, cage-dancing, and how to deal.

Support Breaking Form, if the spirit so moves you:
Review Breaking Form 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.
Randall Mann is the author most recently of DEAL: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2023). Read a review of the book published here in On the Seawall. And buy the book from Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned indie bookseller, here.
Randy mentions his poem "In the Beginning" which has an epigraph from Laura Jensen. You can read that poem, and a few others, online here.
Laura Jensen is the author of 3 books. Carnegie Mellon republished her second book, Memory, in 2006. You can read her poem "Heavy Snowfall in a Year Gone Past" here. And check out this reconsideration of Memory in The Rumpus here.
Check out this essay on Gwendolyn Brooks's formalism and her literary reputation by A. Van Jordan on the Best American Poetry blog here.
Read Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art" here, or watch John Murillo read the poem here.
North of Boston is Robert Frost's second book of poems. It contains 17 poems, including "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man.
You can read the Marianne Moore poem "What Are Years" along with an essay by Annie Finch here. Or you can watch the poem read by Robert Pinsky.

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 NOTES
Listen 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.

The queens talk diction, the political history of language, and naked octogenarians.
Support Breaking Form, if the spirit so moves you:
Review Breaking Form 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.
Words that we identify as "forbidden" (in case you want to try to write poem/s with them!): verboten; beautiful; the body; dick; cicada; bougainvillea; filament; "Z was all X"; Dear Reader"; dead deer; soul; panties.
You can hear Plath read her poem “Lady Lazarus” here.
You can read James's poem "Portrait of My Mother as Rosemary Woodhouse" here.
Read CP Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” (translated by Edmund Keeley) here.
Aaron references an article he's read about why the word "panties" is objectionably sexist. And while it may not be this one from The Atlantic, it's still an awesome read. The author, Sarah Fentem, writes: "I've heard several people refer to the word as "infantilizing." The addition of the suffix "-ies" (or in the singular form, "-y") converts the word into a diminutive. Literally: "little pants." .... In fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of "panties" is from a 1908 set of instructions for making doll clothes." Read the rest of the article here.

The queens discuss breaking open the closet doors through the work of Paul Monette.
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.
Paul Monette (October 16, 1945--February 10, 1995) was the author of at least 4 novels: Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978), The Gold Diggers (1979), Afterlife (1990), and Halfway Home (1991). He also wrote Sanctuary, a fable, which was illustrated by Vivienne Flesher and published posthumously in 1997.

His first nonfiction book, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) received a National Book Critic's Circle Award nomination and won a Lambda Literary Award. His second memoir is Becoming a Man; his third book of nonfiction is Last Watch of the Night, published in 1994.

His books of poems are The Carpenter at the Asylum, in 1975; No Witness (1981), and Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (1988). His New and Selected Poems is called West of Yesterday, East of Summer (1994). He died of complications due to aids on February 10, 1995.

Watch Monette's iconic 1994 appearance on the Charlie Rose show here (~20 minutes).

Watch this terrific wide-ranging interview with Paul Monette conducted in September 1993 by Sheila James Kuehl (1 hour).

You can see the poet Philip Clark, co-editor of Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS, read Monette’s poem "Your Sightless Days” here. (~5 mins). Recorded live at Bloombars in Washington D.C., June 8, 2011.

The anthology that Aaron references is titled Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS. Aaron is right: Monette has 6 poems in that anthology, which was edited by Michael Klein.

The Best Little Boy in the World was published in 1973 under the pseudonym John Reid. The book was re-released in 1998 alongside its sequel, The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up, under the author’s real name, Andrew Tobias.

Read an essay entitled “Paul Monette’s AIDS Poetry” at the Yale Review.

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession is an intimate knowledge of its ugly underside." --James Baldwin
Our AWP Mean Girls Quiz kicks off!