Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall
  • 5.0 (96)
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James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith talk about their favorite poems and poets, interview amazing writers, laugh a lot, gossip, and get real about life and art.

  1. 1d ago

    Queer Passages

    Travel through time with the Breaking Form ladies as we revisit some queer times and places. 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.   Notes: Check out Felice Picano's website https://www.felicepicano.net/, and this tribute to the writer, who died in 2025 at the age of 81.  For more about how Saint Sebastian became a queer icon, read here.  Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues is available in many formats on Feinberg's website: https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/ In addition to publishing poetry and prose, Darrell g.h. Schramm writes for national and international rose publications, especially on heritage roses. He edits Rose Letter, a small quarterly of the Heritage Roses Group, and a newsletter The Vintage Rose for The Friends of Vintage Roses. For many years, he taught rhetoric at the University of San Francisco. Member of the Family: Gay Men Write About Their Families was edited by John Preston and published by Plume in 1994. Check out "The Truth That Must Be Told: Gay Subjectivity, Homophobia, and Social History in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'" by Dean Shackleford in The Tennessee Williams  Annual Review (available through jstor).  Read more of Richard McCann's poem "Days of 1990" from Ghost Letters (buy it from Alice James Books here). The book David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side was edited by by Sylvère Lotringer, Giancarlo Ambrosino, Chris Kraus, Hedi El Kholti, Justin Cavin, and Jennifer Doyle, and it was published by Semiotext(e). The book resulted from Wojnarowicz's meetings with Lotringer; they'd arranged to meet In February 1991 to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz’s work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms–a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views.  Check out this video of Wojnarowicz reading "All I Can Feel Is the Pressure"

    37 min

  2. May 25

    The Lowells

    The queens visit The Lowells in a game of "Amy Robert Lowell" 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.   Notes: Watch a brief biographical video about Amy Lowell here.  Poems we mention include these by Amy Lowell: "Sword Blades and Poppy Seed" "Opal" "The Letter" "A Winter Ride" (which includes the line "Everything mortal has moments immortal"; the poem appeared in her first book, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass [Houghton Mifflin, 1912]). "A Decade" "September, 1918" (which we discuss at length) And these by Robert Lowell: "Night Sweat" "Home After Three Months Away" "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" which includes the line "The Lord survives the rainbow of his will." "Reading Myself" Watch a longer documentary about Robert Lowell here (~60 min). Here's the music video for Chappell Roan's "Casual" Here's an article about Amy and Robert Lowell that's worth reading.  Here's a link to "Amy Lowell: Selected Poems" edited by Honor Moore; watch Moore discuss Lowell here (~60 min). Watch Naomi Shihab Nye read Amy Lowell's "The Garden by Moonlight." Watch Kids Magazine TV  A bit about hyphenated use of words like "to-day" vs "today." In Old and in Middle English, the practice was to join the time with the preposition, using a hyphen "to-day," and "to-morrow," and "to-night," for instance. As the sense of their use as single notions developed, the two elements were brought together in written language (i.e., to night, to-night, and tonight). Nineteenth-century dictionaries opted for the hyphen in all three words. The OED shows hyphenated examples throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th. Latest examples are of to-day (1912), to-night (1908), and to-morrow (1927, with a possible further example as late as 1959). (Adapted from this article).

    24 min

  3. May 18

    I Was Bonnie and Clyde (with Special Guest Laura Kasischke)

    Laura Kasischke joins the queens to talk about her new collection of poems (and her new novel)! 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.   Notes: "The Crying Towel" was first published in The Massachusetts Review Volume 57, Issue 4 Read a short essay  Kasischke wrote about the beginning of her poem "The First Resurrection"  Uma Thurman starred in The Life Before Her Eyes (2007), adapted from Kasischke's novel of the same name. Evan Rachel Wood plays the younger version of the Uma Thurman character. Her other novels adapted for film include White Bird in a Blizzard (2014), directed by Gregg Araki and starring Shailene Woodley and Suspicious River (2000), directed by Lynne Stopkewich and starring Molly Parker. Kasischke also co-wrote the screenplay for this dark thriller. Laura Kasischke's novel The Lifeguard is available from Red Hen Press here, Read an interview about the novel here.  Alberto Giacometti "Woman with Her Throat Cut (Femme égorgée)" serves as the ekphrastic inspiration for Kasischke's poem of the same name. View the artwork here. Giacometti completed the sculpture in 1932 and used bronze cast. Dimensions are 22.00 x 87.50 x 53.50 cm (or roughly 8.5 x 34.5 x 21 inches). Lucy Flint writes that the human figure is treated brutally in Giacometti's piece, and the woman appears in insectlike form. Woman with Her Throat Cut "is a particularly vicious image: the body is splayed open, disemboweled, arched in a paroxysm of sex and death. The psychological torment and the sadistic misogyny projected by this sculpture are in startling contrast to the serenity of other contemporaneous pieces by Giacometti, such as Woman Walking." (article on the Guggenheim site). Watch Kasischke give a reading here, here, and here.

    43 min

  4. May 11

    Mothered into Art

    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.

    40 min

  5. May 4

    The Gay 90s

    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 "C********r'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

    44 min

  6. Apr 27

    Sex Poems

    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 B*****b" 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.

    30 min

  7. Apr 20

    On Explicitness

    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.

    28 min

  8. Apr 13

    Sex Lives of Poets: Frank O'Hara

    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.

    27 min
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James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith talk about their favorite poems and poets, interview amazing writers, laugh a lot, gossip, and get real about life and art.

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