The queens revisit and sing the praises of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poem "Song." 

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

You can read the text of "Song" here. And read more about BPK here. 

James was wrong: "Song" was published in the Autumn 1993 issue of The Southern Review. Thanks to C.Dale Young for the correction!

In ancient Greece, a tragoidia was a poem or play that was written and performed in formal language and that had an unhappy ending. The word combines tragos ("goat") and oide ("song").  A tragedy is literally a “goat song.”

The journal West Branch published "This Long Winding Line: A Poetry Retrospective" about Kelly's book Song. The collection includes essays by Amit Majmudar, David Baker, C. Dale Young, Gabrielle Bates, and Shara Lessley, who also edited the portfolio. 

Watch Hiba Tahir on "Song" (including a prompt)

Read this remembrance of BPK by two friends in Plume. And read this remembrance by Ryo Yamaguchi (who was BPK's student) in Michigan Quarterly Review. 

Gabrielle Bates talks about "Song" on Keep the Channel Open Podcast

Nickole Brown reads and discusses "Song" here.

Read GC Waldrep's essay on another poem from the book Song ("All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer") here. 

Emilia Phillips reads and discusses "Song" here. 

You can hear Brigit Pegeen Kelly read (unfortunately, not "Song") here, at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2004. 

The queens put the SIS in ekphrasis!

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

The Greek word ekphrasis (ἔκφρασις) is derived from the Greek prefix ek- ("out") and the verb phrazein ("to speak," "to explain," or "to show"). The combination translates to "to speak out," "to speak clearly and completely," or "to show clearly." 

In the movie Showgirls, Kyle MacLachlan's character, Zack Carey, corrects Nomi Malone (played by Elizabeth Berkley) when she mispronounces "Versace" as "Ver-sayce." Watch the iconic scene here.

"Faithfully" is a song by American rock band Journey, released in 1983 as the second single from their album Frontiers. Go behind the music with some more info about the song's origin story.

The receipts about Karl Lagerfeld's hateful (racist, fat phobic) ass are here.

Some of the poems and poets we mention include:

Jorie Graham, San Sepolcro

Paul Tran, Like Judith Slaying Holofernes -- and listen to Tran talk about their inspiration for this poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo"

Tommye Blount, "Karl Lagerfeld’s line of beauty"

Amy Gerstler, "Dear Boy George"

Anne Sexton, "Starry Night"

 David Trinidad's "Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera" (excerpt)

Walta Borawski, "Watching Sting on Saturday Night Live." Check out this review of Borawski's Collected Poems. 

The queens talk with David Duchovny about poetry, Lacanian psychotherapy, love, the future perfect, and the lost past. 

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

David Duchovny's new book, About Time, is just out from Akashic Books. David was interviewed about the book on PBS--watch it here. 

You can catch some of David's music here. 

For more about the Aymara of the Andean highlands, check out this NPR story.

Randall Jarrell's poem "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" ends, "You see what I am: change me, change me!" Read it here.

Check out the Fail Better Podcast interviews with Aimee Mann, Melissa Febos, and Jack Halberstam

For more about Lacan's short therapy sessions, click here.  

For more about the future perfect tense, read here. 

Christopher Walken talks here about his resentment of punctuation.

David talked with writer Chris Carter about ellipsis and his writing of the character Fox Mulder here. 

If you'd like to check out Matthew McConaughey reading his poems, here's a link for you.

The queens select some very poetic bachelors and decide where they'd read them on their date.

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

Poets and poems mentioned include:

"blessing the boats" by Lucille Clifton

Joe Wenderoth's book, Letters to Wendy, "June 3, 1997"

Li-Young Lee, "This Room and Everything In It"

Frank O'Hara, "Having a Coke with You" 

Carolina Ebeid, "Reading Celan in a Subway Station"

Raymond Antrobus, "Echo"

"Why Whales Are Back in New York City" by Rajiv Mohabir

Arthur Sze, "At the Equinox"

Jim Whiteside, "Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature"

Ari Banias, "The Feeling"

Steven Duong, "Ho Chi Minh City"

"Offerings Iphis Pledged as a Girl and Paid as a Boy" by Oliver Baez Bendorf 

James Ciano, “Coney Island Baby”

 Oak Morse, "A Portrait of Black Man Wrestling with His Secret Self (or, an inner cosplay ode to the singer Brandy" 

The queens descend upon Pittsburgh for a bittersweet (but dishy) tribute for Ed Ochester (1939-2023).

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

For more about the weekend events and about Ed Ochester's impact on American poetry, read here and here and here.

The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize carries a cash award of $5,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. Submissions are accepted March 1--April 30. 

For more about Southern Methodist University's Project Poetica, read here. 

Read more about the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature here. 

Damon Young is a writer, critic, humorist, satirist, and (as he says on his website) "professional Black person." He's a co-founder and editor in chief of VerySmartBrothas—coined "the blackest thing that ever happened to the internet" by The Washington Post and recently acquired by Univision and Gizmodo Media Group to be a vertical of The Root—and a columnist for GQ. Visit his website at https://www.damonjyoung.com

According to CruisingGays.com, the Cathedral of Learning's 2nd and 8th floor bathrooms were popular cruising spots. 

The International Poetry Forum launched in 1966 with a reading that featured Archibald MacLeish. Since then, alumni of the series include nine Nobel Laureates, 14 Academy Award recipients, 28 U.S. Poets Laureate, 39 National Book Award winners, and 47 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). Visit her website here.

Check out Pittsburgh's City of Asylum here: https://cityofasylum.org

Monroeville is about 15 miles east of Pittsburgh. Read Ed's poem titled "Monroeville"; several others can be found online at the Poetry Foundation here.

Thanks to Nancy Krygowski and Jeffrey McDaniel and Terrance Hayes for putting together an incredible, moving weekend to a brilliant editor, mentor, and friend. We miss you, Ed.

The ladies pair poets together that prove complementary--or contrarian!

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

Visit Gary Jackson's website.

In this interview, Marie Howe talks a bit about Lucille Clifton and feminist poetry.

You can listen here to Carl Phillips read and engage in conversation after with Lia Purpura at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in February 2021. 

Read this great, short essay by Carl Phillips on Linda Gregg.

Read Irene McKinney's poem "The Only Portrait of Emily Dickinson"

Visit Jehanne Dubrow online at https://jehannedubrow.com

Rebecca Lindenberg's website is https://www.rebeccalindenberg.com. Read "Catalogue of Ephemera."

Visit Erika Meitner's website. And read her poem "Jesus is the Reason." 

You can watch Ange Minko read her villanelle "Escape Architecture"  or read it here. 

Essex Hemphill's new and selected is called Love Is a Dangerous Word. 

Finally, Charlie Sheen does indeed identify as bisexual, and apparently there is a lot of ick in the new Netflix documentary about him. 

The judgy Judies play Toss or Keep to help their friend Tommy downsize his poetry library.

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

Some of the poems/poets/people mentioned in this episode include:

Robert Creeley, "I Know a Man" which you can read here and listen to Creeley read here. And here's a roundtable discussion of the poem (~11 minutes, with a recording of Creeley reading it during a visit to Harvard).

The poet Ai's book, Vice. Experience a video that includes her reading her poem "The Good Shepherd" here. 

Matthew Dickman, All-American Poem

Elizabeth (betsy) Cox, I Have Told You and Told You.   Read more about Cox's books with Penguin/Random House here. 

Loiuse Glück. "First Memory" is the last poem in Ararat. Watch this dramatic reading of the poem by Eisa Davis. 

Diane Gilliam Fisher, Kettle Bottom. Read more about Fisher here. 

Carrie Fountain, Burn Lake. Read the title poem here.

Bob Hicok, Words for Empty, Words for Full. Read the poem "A Primer" mentioned in the show.

James's poem "Portrait as My Mother as the Republic of Texas" appears in their first book, Now You're the Enemy (U of Arkansas, 2008). Read that poem and a short interview about it here. 

Watch this shady interview conducted with Paulina Porizkova about being fired by America's Next Top Model.

 The comic Beth Littlefield conducted very funny interviews forThe Daily Show in which her interviewer persona sent up Barbara Walters's interviews. In her interview of Dionne Warwick, she started one question this way:"In 1985, you participated in 'We Are the World,' which gathered together some of the top performers of our day, and Latoya Jackson." Watch Warwick fall out here, at the 2:30 mark.

The ladies get manifesto on that butt! (And mouth.) 

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

Read more about D.H. Lawrence here. 

Read William Carlos Williams's "Paterson" here and "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"  here.

Jericho Brown writes about A.E. Housman in Mentor to Muse here

Read Dylan Thomas's poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"

Here's a link to Stevie Smith's poem "Not Waving But Drowning"

For more about Keith Douglas, visit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/keith-douglas

Aaron tosses off a quote from "Mayakovsky" by Frank O'Hara, which you can read here. 

Read poems by Louise Bennett here. 

Read Charles Olsen's "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You"

Here's Alan Dugan's "Internal Migration: On Being on Tour"

Learn more about Judith Wright here. 

The queens summon lines designed to stop readers in their tracks. 

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

Sharon Olds says that early in her poetic career, when she'd send out her poems, "[t]hey came back often with very angry notes." Receipt here.  

W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues", or "Stop all the clocks" appeared in his book Another Time. The poem experienced renewed popularity after being read in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). "Funeral Blues" has since been cited as one of the most popular modern poems in the United Kingdom. Watch the poem read in the movie here. 

Auden's "First Things First" appeared in The New Yorker in 1957. Hear Auden read the poem here. 

Watch the incredible Michael Sheen read Auden's "September 1, 1939" here. Receipts about Auden's struggle with the end are here. 

Read Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Mother" and listen here to Diane Seuss talk about this poem with us on Breaking Form. 

Read Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour" or listen to him read it here. (It'll be a memorable experience!)

The poem we reference of Lynda Hull's is "Chiffon" which opens her book The Only World (HarperCollins 1995).

Read Robinson Jeffers's "Birds and Fishes"

Here's Frost's "Birches"

Aaron Smith's poem is "Jennifer Lawrence" can be read here.

Mark Doty's poem "Visitation" first appeared in The Paris Review. 

Aiden Shaw appeared in Roll in the Hay, but did not grace the sets of Big River.

The queens are joined by poetry crush Richard Siken, & talk heroes, rabbits, robots, & healing.

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

You can order I Do Know Some Things here. Visit Richard Siken's website here, and read work from the new book.

Read Christopher Nelson's review of I Do Know Some Things here.

Some interviews with Richard we can recommend:

   This one in Adroit Journal

   This one in BOMB Magazine

   And this one in Gulf Coast from 2005, with James Allen Hall.

Paratext is the text surrounding the main published text (like the book jacket copy, the blurbs, the cover text, etc).

For more about War of the Foxes, check out this short video "Postcards from Richard Siken"

Louise Glück (1943-2023) selected Siken's first book Crush for the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize. For more about Glück, including her period of silences, read here.

For more about the tester straw we mention, click here.