I Love the Part

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08/29/22 • 29 min

Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Our fearless queens select and dissect favorite poems--to say why and how poems endure.
I Remember is a 1970 memoir written by author and artist Joe Brainard, depicting his childhood in the 1940s and '50s in Oklahoma as well as his life in the '60s and '70s in New York City. Brainard followed I Remember with I Remember More (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both published by Angel Hair. Read Olivia Laing’s short, fabulous review of Joe Brainard’s book I Remember in The Guardian here. Of it, Laing says, “The Bible aside, I can't think of a more original or lovely book.”

Ada Limon’s poem “The Contract Says We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual” appears in Limon’s book The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. You can read the whole poem here.

Hear Terrance Hayes read “Talk” and "The Blue Terrance" at the Folger Library here.

Alexander Pope's sonnet "Sound and Sense" can be read here.

James L. White’s prose poem “An Ordinary Composure” appears in The Salt Ecstasies and you can read it on a blog here.

Rick Barot, “Wooden Overcoat” was featured on The Slowdown, and you can listen to that episode here. And you can read the whole poem here.

Watch Maggie Anderson read from her work here (with Mira Rosenthal; ~16 min).

While I couldn’t find “Let the Boats Drift” online, I can recommend “Let Evening Come,” which you can read here.

Read Larry Levis’s “In the City of Light” here.

Hear Terrance Hayes read “Talk” and "The Blue Terrance" at the Folger Library here.

Alexander Pope's sonnet "Sound and Sense" can be read here.

James L. White’s prose poem “An Ordinary Composure” appears in The Salt Ecstasies and you can read it on a blog here.

Rick Barot, “Wooden Overcoat” was featured on The Slowdown, and you can listen to that episode here. And you can read the whole poem here.

Watch Maggie Anderson read from her work here (with Mira Rosenthal; ~16 min).

While I couldn’t find “Let the Boats Drift” online, I can recommend “Let Evening Come,” which you can read here.

Read Larry Levis’s “In the City of Light” here.

Previous Episode

On Thin Ice (with Jacques J. Rancourt)

The queens spin into a frosty finish with poet and figure-skating stan Jacques J. Rancourt! What a way to celebrate our 50th episode!
Please support the poets mentioned in today's episode by buying their books. Shop indie if you can; we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned bookseller in DC. You can buy Jacques's Brocken Spectre here.
Find Jacques J. Rancourt’s website here. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @jj_rancourt. Read Jacques’s “Golden Gate Park” from Brocken Spectre on Poetry Daily here.

Writing for the Los Angeles Review Erica Charis-Molling says this of Rancourt’s Brocken Spectre: “Much like the phenomenon after which the collection is titled, the search for answers is part ghost hunt and part investigation of an illusion. Through the eyes of these post-AIDS-epidemic poems, we thoughtfully look at the ways the virus is both a thing of the past and very much present.” Read the whole review here.

If you want to know more about what Tonya Harding (who was banned for life from the US Figure Skating Association) is up to these days, here's a pretty great article. Short answer: she's chopping wood, sending Cameo vids, and raising a son with her 3rd husband. Watch Harding become the 2nd woman (and first American) to land a triple axel in competition (1991 US Nationals) here around the 0:50 mark.
You can read several poems by Adélia Prado here, courtesy of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

If you're into incredible jumps, you've got to see Surya Bonali's infamous backflip at the Nagano Olympics. (3:45 mark)

Geri Doran’s first book, Resin, won the Walt Whitman Award and was published in 2005 by LSU. Her second book, Sanderlings, was published by Tupelo in 2011. Doran's third book, Epistle, Osprey was published in 2019 (also by Tupelo) -- and we are sorry not to have gotten that right before the fact check! (Thanks, Katy Didden, for the help!) Read "Tonight is a Night Without Birds" from Resin here.

Watch Carolina Kostner’s 2014 spellbinding “Ave Maria” performance here.
James's favorite Lucie Brock-Broido book is Trouble in Mind. Read "Leaflet on Wooing" from that book here. Watch Brock-Broido read "Freedom of Speech" here, dedicated to Liam Rector.

Hear Lisel Mueller (1924-2020) read "Monet Refuses the Operation" here (~2.5 min).

Check out Aaron Smith's latest book of poems, The Book of Daniel, and James Allen Hall's book of lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well.Because it’s Breaking Form, we'd be remiss if we didn't include at least one scholarly resource. Here's this article titled “Shirtless Figure Skaters: 14 Hot Hunky Men on Ice.”

Next Episode

When Rita Doves Cry

Dig if you will a picture: Rita Dove, Prince, and an infidel poet.
Prince released over 39 of his own albums and won seven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible (2004). In 1993, Prince announced his desire to go by "an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It's all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency," he wrote in a statement at the time. He was born June 7, 1958 and died April 21, 2016.
Rita Dove was born August 28, 1952. In 1987, she won the Pulitzer in Poetry for Thomas and Beulah (becoming only the 2nd African American to win that award, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950). She was US Poet Laureate from 1999-2000. Since 1989, she has taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Watch Rita Dove on the PBS News Hour here (~7 min).

Watch Prince in a 1999 appearance on The Larry King Show here (~40 min)

Regarding Judith Butler, here’s the full quote from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: “Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers.”

You can see Prof. Dove discuss her poetry as well as her first novel in an interview here (~25 min).

Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey present their work and are interviewed by Rudolph Byrd at Emory University and you can watch that conversation here (~75 min)

About the Prince-Michael Jackson feud, Quincy Jones told GQ magazine that the beef dated back to 1983, when the two attended a James Brown concert. Brown invited Jackson up on stage — and after Jackson treated the crowd to a few moments of singing and dancing, he asked Brown to bring up Prince. Jones later alleged that Prince felt like he'd been shown up — and accused him of making a half-hearted effort to run over Jackson after the show.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft, who died within 2 weeks of giving birth to Mary, and William Godwin. While Percy and Mary met when she was 16 (and she became pregnant by him at that time), she didn’t marry him until she was 19. She died of a brain tumor at age 53. She published Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was 20. She was, like her husband, a political radical at the time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792 and was 21 when he met Mary Godwin. You can read more about their courtship and marriage here. Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia while sailing home from a meeting with Byron, when his boat was overtaken by a storm.

During the 19th century, the average age fell for English women, but it didn’t drop any lower than 22. Patterns varied depending on social and economic class, of course, with working-class women tending to marry slightly older than their aristocratic counterparts. But the prevailing modern idea that all English ladies wed before leaving their teenage years is well off the mark. While European noblewomen often married early, they were a small minority of the population, and the marriage certificates from Canterbury show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.

You can listen to Beyonce's “Break My Vogue” [Queens Remix] here (~6 min).