Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

The queens take on two impossible topics: death, and mothers.

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

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

Show Notes:

Aaron mentions the Marie Howe poem "Letter to My Sister" from The Good Thief, which Howe talks about here. 

Aaron reads his poem "After My Mother Apologized for My Childhood, We Went to Brunch," which you can hear him read again here -- on his cd Outside the Lines. 

You can read James's poem "Family Portrait" here. 

Come with the queens as they travel back to a time of gay bookstores, queer anthems, and a boom in LGBT+ publishing: the gay 90s! 

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

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

Show Notes:

Check out Michael Nava's wonderful essay "Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing, Part II"

Learn more about Gendertrash zine

Read Melvin Dixon's essay "I'll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name." 

Read more about Texas Tech's limitations on studying gender and sexuality.

Sabah as-Sabah's work appears in many 90s anthologies, including In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers (1992; edited by Kevin Powell & Ras Baraka), Catch the Fire!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (1998), and The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (ed. Assotto Saint, 1991).  

Read Audre Lorde's "The Electric Slide Boogie" in The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance: 1987-1992.

Read Marilyn Hacker's "The Boy"

Justin Chin's "Cocksucker's Blues" is included in his first book of poems, Bite Hard (1997). Watch a tribute to Chin here. 

Here's the table of contents (with some hyperlinks) of The World in Us, edited by Elena Georgiou and Michael Lassell.

You can read Maureen Seaton's "Blonde Ambition" (and the entirety of Furious Cooking)

Read Dennis Cooper's "After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade"

Read Gerry Gomez Pearlberg's "Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette"

Some queer poets/poems we mention:

 Eileen Myles, "American Poem"

JD McClatchy, "My Mammogram"

David Trinidad

Rafael Campo, The Other Man Was Me

Eloise Klein Healy

Frank Paino, The Rapture of Matter

Paul Monette, 18 Elegies for Rog

Joan Larkin

Judy Grahn

Robin Becker

Maggie Anderson

Richard McCann, Ghost Letters

Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat

Chrystos

Cheryl Clarke

Let's talk about Sex! 

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. 

Show Notes:

Poems we read and texts we mention include:

Dorianne Laux, "The Lovers" (Visit Laux's website here).

Jenny Johnson, "Daddy Scene" (published in Cherry Tree Issue 11). Subscribe here. Read Jenny's essay "Butch Blowjob" in Bomb Magazine.

sam sax, "Ode to the Belt" can be read in The Nation Sept 2023--or you can watch sam perform the poem here. 

If you're looking for a theory reading about sexuality, might we recommend Sigmund Freud's "Three Contributions To The Theory Of Sex"

Jericho Brown's "Host" appears in The New Testament

Timothy Liu's "The Size of It" appeared in The Paris Review Fall 1994

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's "Sex" 

Sophie Cabot Black, "Interrogation"

You can read Minnie Bruce Pratt's "Peach" here (just scroll down/search for "peach").

Aaron reads from this article ("50 interesting sex facts...") in the fact check. 

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

All the queens want is boundless love in this episode about the love life of Frank O'Hara.

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. 

Show Notes:

Read Frank O'Hara's "Homosexuality"

For more about Chester Kallman, read here. Kallman was a poet, librettist, and writer who was also Auden's partner (and, later, his estate's executor). He published three collections of poems: Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). 

Grace Hartigan's relationship with Frank O'Hara is detailed a bit more in this Sebastian Smee essay in Washington Post: "Portrait of a Poet." 

Read O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings"

Much of Frank O'Hara's papers are at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC

Read a review of Ada Calhoun's memoir "Also a Poet," about her father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who was working on a memorial project about O'Hara when he died. Calhoun believes that her father’s book was torpedoed by O’Hara’s sister and literary executor, Maureen Granville-Smith Calhoun. 

For more about The Glory Hole Café in Buenos Aires (which we mention in the show), go here.

The queens talk about writing through sadness and grief in order to move forward and gain a different vantage point. 

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

Take a look at the Tracey Emin sculpture "My Bed." It was sold at auction by Christie’s in July 2014 for £2.5 million to German collector Count Christian Duerckheim.

Read Larry Levis's poem "Boy in Video Arcade"

Read Dickinson's 670 ("One Need not be a Chamber to be Haunted"). For more variations she included on the fascicle, visit the Emily Dickinson Online archive at Harvard's Houghton Library here. 

In an interview with Melanie Brooks and published in Creative Nonfiction (Winter 2017), Mark Doty says about grief: "It was like just pushing my way up this very tall, spirally staircase. I'd write and cry and write and cry and write and cry." Read the essay here (jstor access required).

Dress shopping is cardio & life for the Breaking Form fashionistas. 

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

Paul Tran's "Provenance" appeared first February 22/March 1, 2021 issue of The Nation and was included in All the Flowers Kneeling, which was published by Penguin in 2022 and was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Visit Tran's website here: https://iampaultran.com/

The poem "'What Do Women Want?'" is from Kim Addonizio's Tell Me (2000)

Read "Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown" by Saeed Jones

Read "Esta Noche" by Mark Doty

The poem we read of Allison Benis White's is from “Please Bury Me in This” [Maybe my arms lifted ...]"

In recollection of a first memory in A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf wrote: "My mother would come out onto her balcony in a white dressing gown. There were passion flowers growing on the wall; they were great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full."

Read torrin a. greathouse's "Ekphrasis on My Rapist's Wedding Dress" and visit their website: https://www.torringreathouse.com/

Read Victoria Chang's "OBIT [The Blue Dress]" from her 2020 book, Obit. You can watch Chang read from Obit here (~43 min). 

Get set for a poetry gabfest for the ages! The fabulous Joy Priest joins us for the Breaking Form Interview.

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

Buy Joy's prizewinning collection of poems, Horsepower, from the University of Pittsburgh Press here or from Loyalty Books, a  Black, Queer, and Asian owned independent bookstore in DC.

Visit Joy Priest's website: https://www.joypriest.com

You can see Joy reading from her work here, here, and here. Or read this interview with her here.

Read Joy's ode to Whitney Houston, "When I See the Stars in the Night Sky"

Nikky Finney won the 2011 National Book Award for her book Head Off and Split. Watch her iconic speech here. 

Read more about American Honey, a film by Andrea Arnold starring Sasha Lane

We mention a few forms, including the Abecedarian and the Sestina. Click the links for more information about them.

 Poets we mention:

Emily Dickinson and Poem 269 ("Wild nights!")

Hear poet Jane Kenyon read her poem "Otherwise."

Donald Hall

Terrance Hayes

Ross Gay

Louise Glück's "Anniversary"

The queens kindly request your presence for some piping hot tea as they recap the AWP Conference in Baltimore. 

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

James posted some AWP tips on Facebook here. 

For the curious, AWP has posted its "Community Participation in #AWP26 Conference & Bookfair" stats here.

The journals mentioned on the "Editing for Change and Community" panel were:

Small Orange edited by Carlie Hoffman. Carlie's poems were included in our Breaking Form episode "The Hof[f]man[n]s" which you can listen to here.

Georgia Review edited by Gerald Maa. 

Brink edited by Nina Lohman 

Hopkins Review edited by Dora Malech

Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal at Washington College, by James. 

AWP has said it will post the video of John Waters's keynote address for conference registrants to view, but we can't find it yet. But if you're curious, here's a written recap of the event by Baltimore Fishbowl.

You can find The Adroit Journal online at  https://theadroitjournal.org. They're open for submissions currently (til April 1, 2026). They are a paying market. 

That which you call death, the queens remember in this episode that revisits The Wild Iris, Louise Glück's Pulitzer-Prize winning volume from 1992.

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. 

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

While the recording released by the Academy of American Poets of Glück reading from The Wild Iris and other work can be purchased online, you can also hear many of these poems read on SoundCloud here.  

Much of our information about Glück's process comes from this interview with the poet Devin Becker, who was also her former student.

Read Richie Hofmann's remembrance here. 

 Some of the poems from The Wild Iris that we mention (and links to read them) are:

Witchgrass

The Red Poppy

Clear Morning

The Garden

Vespers

Retreating Light

The White Lilies, which you can hear read by Glück here.

We also mention the poem "Purple Bathing Suit" from Meadowlands, the book which follows The Wild Iris. 

Louise' Glücks astrological chart is here. (Taurus sun, Leo rising, Scorpio moon.)

Watch interviews with Glück:

1982, for Kalliope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAB-JqABvq8

2004, at Smith College: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw0nlVYZ39A

 2012, Academy of Achievement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1rpGy8XRzU

 2016, with Peter Streckfus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeoaLNGy_Ms

2020, for NYPL with Colm Tóibín, on writing The Wild Iris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3kQGM_KhHQ