A Silent Climb (interview w/ Miguel Murphy pt. 1)

Explicit content warning

03/14/22 • 24 min

Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Aaron and James interview Miguel Murphy, author of 3 books of poetry who teaches at Santa Monica College. Miguel reads and discusses his poems "A Love Like Auto-Sodomy" and "Greg Louganis." We discuss queer subjectivity and the notion of the reader.
Miguel Murphy's most recent book, Shoreditch, can be purchased through Barrow Street.

You can check out more of his work here.

Or buy his books at Loyalty Bookstore.
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Greg Louganis is an Aquarius and an American Olympic diver. He won gold medals at the 1984 and '88 Summer Olympic Games. He is the only man and the second diver in Olympic history to sweep the diving events in consecutive Olympic Games. He has been called both "the greatest American diver" and "probably the greatest diver in history."
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We reference the title poem of Adrienne Rich's Diving Into the Wreck and you can read that poem here.

You can check out more of his work here.

Previous Episode

Banned

What happens when a voice is silenced? Who holds power to account for itself?
Some support & info resources:
The Trevor Project:
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
BIPOC mental health resources:
https://www.thementalhealthcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/BIPOC-Mental-Health-Resources.pdf
National Alliance on Mental Illness: https://www.nami.org/Support-Education
National Mental Health Association (Mental Health America), including phone line & chat:
https://www.mhanational.org/finding-help
Carl Phillips’s poem “All the Love You’ve Got” can be read here.: https://poets.org/poem/all-love-youve-got
Aaron Smith’s poem “Shallow” was published in Allium & can be read here: https://allium.colum.edu/fall-2021-poetry-1/aaron-smith

Next Episode

Saving All My Love for You (interview w/ Miguel Murphy pt. 2)

Miguel Murphy's most recent book is Shoreditch, which you can buy here.
Arthur Hugh Clough is best known, according to the Poetry Foundation, "for his early, shorter poems and for the longer, later work that sprang from his intense religious doubts. He was an important influence on later poets such as T.S. Eliot, and his best work hints at the radical experiments and split subjectivities that would become the hallmarks of Modernism." The Encyclopedia Britannica says that the "long, incomplete poem Dipsychus most fully expresses Clough’s doubts about the social and spiritual developments of his era..." You can read it here.
William Shakespeare wrote plays and poems.
Cormac McCarthy published Suttree in 1979.
Thomas Bernhard's novel Frost was originally published in German in 1963. Michael Hofmann published a translation in 2006. Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. Monsieur Pain was originally published in 1994 under the title La senda de los elefantes.
You can watch the BBC filming of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth with Judi Dench here. Judi's "Out, out damn spot" speech as Lady Macbeth starts around the two-hour mark (and the wail around 2 hours and 4 minutes).
Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. He is considered one of the most important 20th century Japanese writers. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's political activities made him a controversial figure. Masakatsu Morita was Mishima's lover; he was 25 when Mishima completed seppuku.