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.

Frankly, our dears, all we want is boundless love for Frank O'Hara. We also discuss radical poetic embodiment, and ponder whether or not Dickinson's "Wild Nights" (269) is a fisting poem.

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.
Frank O’Hara was born Francis Russell O'Hara in Baltimore, MD, but grew up near Worcester, MA. As a kid, he studied music in hopes of being a concert pianist. After a stint in the navy (shocking!) he went to Harvard, where Edward Gorey was his roommate. Imagine what those bunk sessions were like.
Watch Jenny Xie read “My Heart” here (~1.5 min).
Read O’Hara’s “Ave Maria” here, and “you will have made the little tykes/ so happy....”
There's a film called "Wild Nights with Emily" (watch a 10 minute clip here), starring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson. The film's description says it is informed by Dickinson's private letters and is a "timely critique of how women's history is rewritten."
Watch Ruth Stone read her poem "Where I Came From" here (~2 min).
For more about Beverly Pepper's work, watch this brief (2 min) video. Pepper died in 2020.
We reference an Instagram video post that Jorie Graham made about Pepper (her mother) making art. The post is captioned thusly: "My mother beginning to draw again with a partly mended broken arm. She holds one arm with the other for a moment, as if her wounded arm is a tool. Certainly she knew enough to know her wound was always her tool. She is so comfortable because Greg Whitmore is behind the camera, but, after a point, she is gone from us—all of us—I can see it as it happens—because she totally enters the work. It used to scare me as a child when she disappeared from this realm, and went into that one. It was strange to realize that there WAS an other realm into which one could go. Into which I could lose her. Of course, years later, I realized it was one of the greatest gifts she gave me. When she would leave me “alone” in this world knowing I had to find the other world in this one & find my way to it. Which is one’s fate. And one’s journey." You can see the post here.
The video in the post was made in 2014 and can also be watched online here.

Join the queens as they go spelunking in some of their favorite openings.
You can buy books mentioned in the show at Loyalty Books, a Black-owned indie bookstore in Washington, Dc.
Watch Louise Glück read "The Wild Iris" here (~2 min)

A terrific interview between Glück and Peter Streckfus can be found here (they also read together; scroll down for that) (~30 min)

Watch Hanif Abdurraqib read from A Fortune for Your Disaster here (~10 min)

Olena Kalytiak Davis "A Few Words for the Visitor in the Parlor" from And Her Soul Out of Nothing. You can watch Eloisa Amezcua read "The Unbosoming" from OKD's 2nd book, Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities. (~3 min)

Watch Jane Mead give a reading at Texas State U here, which begins with the poem Aaron mentions, "Concerning That Prayer I Cannot Make" from The Lord and the General Din of the World, here (~40 min)

Listen to Brigit Pegeen Kelly read "Dead Doe" from Song here

Watch an interview with (with interspersed readings by) Irene McKinney here (~25 min). A longer celebration of Dr. McKinney was recorded in 2013, and you can watch that here (~1 hour)

Watch Diane Seuss read from Frank: sonnets, including the opening poem here (~20 min).

You can read an interview with Reginald Shepherd here.

Watch Shane McCrae read Brock-Broido's "Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements" here (~5 min)

Nicanor Parra reads "Hombre Imaginario" to an adoring crowd here (~3 min),

Watch Eduardo C. Corral read at the 2021 Sewanee Writers' Conference (with Arhm Choi Wild; ~30 min total) here. You can view Tino Rodriguez's piece Our Completion: oil on wood 5"x7" here (note: directs to artist's website; piece has a different title there).