We're talking resistance, joy, and queer communities with Brenda Shaughnessy!

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.

NOTES:

Click here for Brenda’s Queer Resistance Playlist 2025 (Spotify).

Check out Brenda's poem "Panopticon" from Interior with Sudden Joy.

Visit Brenda Shaughnessy’s website . And hear her read from her newest book, Tanya here. 

Read more about UC Santa Cruz closing the Feminist Studies Dept here. 

Read more about Maria Ressa

For more about Roland Barthes’s contribution to literary criticism, read here.

While dated, here’s a list of creative writing programs that are LGBTQ+ friendly.

 Read more about Bettina Aptheker

Read more about Donna J. Haraway

Read on for more about the clubs Brenda mentions: Meow Mix, Clit Club, Henrietta Hudson (still open!), Pandora's Box, and more.

Read more about Angela Davis's work here.

For more about Wendy Brown, read her Guggenheim citation here.

You can learn more about Allan Bérubé here.

 Learn more about the incredible Urvashi Vaid here.

Watch/listen to Cécile McLorin Salvant's "Until" here. 

Read more about Kate Clinton on her website here.

For more about Teresa de Lauretis, click here. 

The queens get to the poetic essence with the help of erasure and re-envisioning.

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.

NOTES:

The Nicole Sealey poem we read at the end of the episode comes from the first four pages of her book The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

We revise poems by:

Robert Bly, "The Beauty of Women"

George Herbet, "Death"

Dean Young, "Belief in Magic"

William Stafford, "Accountability"

Billy Collins, "Design"

The video we mention posted by The New Yorker was posted in April 2023 to FaceBook: "How a New Yorker Poetry Editor Selects Poems"

Watch John Travolta introduce Idina Menzel as "the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem" and then Menzel getting her good-natured revenge.

For more about the feminist practice of erasure poetry, we can recommend Erase the Patriarchy: An Anthology of Erasure Poetry. 

Join the thirsty queens for a gin & Sextonic, in this tribute to the iconic work of Anne Sexton.

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.

NOTES:

Click here for a pdf from the Poetry Society that includes a folio of essays about Sexton's life and work by David Trinidad, Lois Ames, and Maggie Nelson. (Originally published in Crossroads, fall 2001.)

Trinidad talks about Anne Sexton on the podcast here.

And, lastly, we'd be remiss if we did not link to this dishy, well-researched article--again by the fabulous David Trinidad--about the palace intrigue behind Sexton's winning the Pulitzer for Live or Die.

Want to read more about Sexton, faith, and love? Your wait is over. 

Curious about Anne Sexton's houses? Click here! 

Here's an hour of Sexton reading some of her most iconic poems. 

Anne Sexton gave her last public reading at Goucher College in October 1974, three days before she completed suicide. You can find the reading here.

Here are links to some of the poems we mention:

"The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator"

"Menstruation at Forty"

"Her Kind"

"Sylvia's Death"

"The Fury of Cocks"

"Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women"

The queens talk with gay literary icon Edmund White about his new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. (Miguel Murphy joins in the fun, too!)

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.                            

Miguel's SHORE DITCH is available from Barrow Street.

You can purchase Edmund White's new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, at BookWoman here. Bookwoman was founded to increase access to queer and feminist literature in Texas nearly fifty years ago. 

Read Colm Tóibín's essay, "On the Casual Brilliance of Edmund White"

Read a tribute to Gary Indiana  in The Guardian here. 

Need a quick definition refresher of auto fiction? Here you go!

 Miguel mentions that composer Arnold Schoenberg's archive destroyed in LA fires, and you can read more about that here. 

Here's a dishy roundup of Nabokov's insults of Dostoevsky

For a bit more about Larry Kramer's objections to The Farewell Symphony, read on.

Learn more about Richard Howard and his poetry here. 

Edmund White and Michael Carroll talk about their relationship, and their experiences writing gay fiction here.

And here's the Interview Magazine article we mention in the episode, in which gay writers ask Edmund White a question: “Tall Blonde With a Big Dick”: 18 Men Ask Edmund White Some Sexy Questions"

 Finally, check out the fabulous Garth Greenwell's website: https://www.garthgreenwell.com

The queens prove that it's not the size of the ship but the motion etc etc in this episode devoted to short poems.

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

Pretty Please with Aaron's cherry on top.....  Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Poems we mention in the show include:

A.R. Ammons's "Their Sex Life"

Rae Armantrout's "Anti-Short Story" and "Custom"

Mahogany L. Browne's "Marigold." Listen to it read here.

Andrea Cohen's "After" and "Matinee" and "Flight Pattern" and "Ghosting"

Robert Creeley, "The Answer"

Jim Harrison's "Another Country" and "Barking"

Jane Hirshfield's "Like Others" and to "The Woman, The Tiger." You can hear her read that poem here (at the 18:12 mark).

Sandra Lim, "Just Disaster" and "At the Other End of the Wire" and "Endings"

Listen to Sandra Lim read her poems (~40 minutes) with many short poems at the end. 

Samuel Menashe's "Adam Means Earth" and "Apotheosis"

Harryette Mullen's "Way Opposite"

Kay Ryan's "Winter Fear" 

Listen/watch the music video for Gilette's "Short, Short Man" here.

Get out your UV lights & swabs--the queens play a game that fuses poems, then guess the poetic DNA samples. Then we spark up a fusion of a different strain!

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

Pretty Please.....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:

Watch Jools Lebron get mindful and demure here, diva

Don't soak tampons in vodka. 

Poems we discuss in the episode include:

Philip Levine's "Bitterness"

Laura Kasischke's "Champagne"

Kay Ryan's "Shark's Teeth"

Kenneth Koch's "One Train May Hide Another"

Annie Finch's "Wild Yeasts"

Dorothea Lasky's "Toast to my friend or why Friendship is the best kind of Love"

Danusha Laméris's "Bonfire Opera"

Marie Ponsot's "Among Women"

Tina Chang's "God Country"

Campbell McGrath's "Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas"

Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish"

W.B. Yeats's "Leda and the Swan"

Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Windhover"

Anne Sexton's "Jesus Awake" & "Wanting to Die" 

Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" & "I, Too"

Philip Larkin's "Sad Steps" 

And Beyonce's "You Won't Break My Soul [Queens Remix]," in which she sampled Madonna's song "Vogue," returning it to the culture where it rightly belongs.

The queens get sassy and sissify toxic cisheteronormative gender ideas about poetry.

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

Pretty Please.....Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

The site in such desperate need of sissification (and better poets) can be found here. Or just skip to a queer critique here and/or to Esther Wang's super smart deep-dive takedown "My Brief Hero's Journey into the 'Art of Manliness,' Which Unfortunately Did Not Teach Me to Chop Wood" (on Jezebel, so you know that shit's good).

Bill Waterson is the creator and writer of Calvin and Hobbes, which also includes poems over the years. 

Sam Elliott chews the scenery with Cher in Mask--watch a great scene here. 

For some terrifically sissy poems, read on:

"Sissy" by Aaron Smith

"Hypothesis" by Paul Tran

"Sissy Aqueducts" by Brandon Menke

"LISP" by sam sax

The queens discuss gay icon status with Brenda Hillman--and then launch in to a revisit of several of her poems, including her fabulous "Male Nipples."


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

Pretty Please.....Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

 You can see readings by Brenda Hillman here (one poem, ~4 min, 2020), here (20min, 2012), and here (2024, poetry and conversation with Jesse Nathan).

For a review and discussion of Hillman's new book, Three Talks, check out this episode of The Only Property. (~30 min).

(Re)read Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

Learn more about Kathleen Fraser here. 

Discover more about Barbara Guest and her 9 collections of poetry here.

If you'd like to know more about Kelsey Street Press's mission and history, it's a fascinating journey that you can start here.

A basic introduction to gnosticism can be had here. 

Learn more about the Black Mountain Poets here.

Read about Objectivist Poetics here.

Candle-extinguishing butts, 3am afterparties, collections of seamen (and semen)--this dishy tour of Langston Hughes's love life will leave you gagging with the gays.


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

Pretty Please.....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:

Watch Hughes recite his poem, "The Weary Blues" to jazz accompaniment on tv in 1958.

You can check out troves of Hughes's poetry here, here, and here.

Read Langston Hughes's poem "Café: 3AM"

Listen to Hughes read "Harlem."

Langston Hughes's first memoir, The Big Sea, about his seafaring travels--including upon the West Hesseltine where he said he had that fateful encounter with a sailor--can be found here.  It includes  the essay "Spectacles in Color" in which Hughes describes queer ballroom scene and Countee Cullen's wedding  to Yolanda Du Bois (with Harold Jackson, his boyfriend, serving as best man).

Faith Berry's biography of Hughes is Before and Beyond Harlem. Her papers are at the Library of Congress.

Read more about Arnold Ampersad's biography of Hughes:
Volume 1 (which covers 1902-1940 and does have a snazzy subtitle: I, Too, Sing America).
Volume 2 (which covers 1941-death and also has a snazzy subtitle: I Dream a World).

Other receipts for the episode can be found in the following essays and scholarship:
Hilton Als, "The Elusive Langston Hughes" (The New Yorker, 2015)

Juda Bennett, "Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes" (Biography, vol 23.4, 2000).Link through Project Muse.

Andrew Donnelly, "Langston Hughes on the DL" (College Literature, Volume 44, Number 1, Winter 2017). Link through Project Muse.

Mason Stokes, "Strange Fruits: Rethinking the Gay Twenties" (Transition , 2002, No. 92). Link through JSTOR.

Shane Vogel, "Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Poetics of Harlem Nightlife," in Criticism (Vol 48.3, 2006). Link through Project Muse.

Jennifer Wilson, "Queer Harlem, Queer Tashkent" (Slavic Review , FALL 2017). Link through JSTOR.

Finally, visit Ann Patchett's bookstore online here: https://www.parnassusbooks.net/

Whet your appetite with half a poem from 3 fabulous poets and choose your own poetic fulfillment!

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

Pretty Please.....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:

Read Catherine Bowman's poem "1-800-Hot-Ribs."
Read Catherine Barnett's poem "'Have You Ever Written a Poem About Death?' My Mother Asks."
Read Catherine Pierce's poem "The Curator of the Earth Museum Speaks of People."

Watch Catherine Bowman’s read her poem "Makeshift" (~1.5 mins) from Can I Finish, Please (Four Way Books, 2016). Bowman's title poem from 1-800-HOT-RIBS  which we read on the show can be found on the blog “Read Good Poetry,” which was updated through 2022.

Watch Nicole Sealey read Catherine Barnett's poem "Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid" (1 min). You can catch Catherine reading (about 7 min) here. Click here to read another Barnett poem in APR called “Envoy” (also from Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space).  Visit Barnett's website here.

Catherine Pierce reads four poems from Danger Days here (~20 mins) and talks craft on the Wednesday Night Sessions show. Visit Pierce's website here, and check out episodes of Mississippi Poetry Podcast (which Pierce hosts) here.