Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall

The art of losing isn't hard to master in this episode devoted to the loves and losses of Elizabeth Bishop's life.

If you'd like to support Breaking Form:
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.
Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Read Bishop's villanelle (the only one she ever published!)  "One Art." Read about her drafting process (at least 16 versions) here.

You can listen to Bishop read a few of her poems, including "In the Waiting Room" here--recorded at the 92nd Street Y in October 1977. And here's a much younger Bishop reading "The Fish."

Bishop's Paris Review interview is absolute gold. 

For more on Lota and Samambaia, the house she built north of Rio, read this Paris Review article on two recent movies made about Bishop and Lota.

Other receipts for what we say in the show are found in this New York Times article, "The Love of Her Life"

For more about the acrimonious "war of the legal wills" between Bishop and Macedo Soares, I recommend David Hoak's article "Proofs of Love: The Last Letters of Lota de Macedo Soares," published in PN Review Volume 42 Number 2 (Nov-Dec 2015). The link contains a paywall.

See more photographs of Samambaia, the glass butterfly-shaped house Lota built in Petrópolis.

Here are the receipts about Judy Flynn.

Receipts for the Louise Crane-Billie Holiday tryst are here and here.

Read "The Loneliness of Elizabeth Bishop" in The Nation. 

Crusoe in England" was a coded coping with grief over Soares' death. when the repatriated Robinson Crusoe recalls the loss of “Friday, my dear Friday,” who “died of measles / seventeen years ago come March.” Had Soares lived to one more March birthday, the couple would have spent seventeen years together. You can hear Bishop read (and follow along the text of) "Crusoe in England" here. 

Jericho Brown returns to finish the conversation about Reginald Shepherd, (in)formalism, and inspiration.

If you'd like to support Breaking Form:
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.
Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.
     Jericho's THE SELECTED SHEPHERD is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.

We talk about Shepherd's "The Gods at 3am" on another episode of Breaking Form in "Mona in the Corner."

Read more about Papa Legba, a figure in voodoo traditions in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Louisiana.
Read Jericho's poem "Again" from his first book, Please.

Jericho mentions his poem "Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry" which appeared in The New York Times early on in the pandemic.

Daniel Black's book title is titled Black on Black: On Our Resilience and Brilliance in America. Read the NPR review by Gabino Iglesias here, and follow him on Instagram @drdanielblack

Some fabulous essays on Shepherd or reviews of his books can be found in the resources listed below:
John Gallagher on Shepherd
Joan Houlihan, In Memoriam of Reginald Shepherd
Brian Henry on Wrong

As always, check out Shepherd's own blog.


 
 

If you bring along to Breaking Form Book Club an extra bottle of chardonnay,  we'll read some poems from books you may have missed....

If you'd like to support Breaking Form:
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.
Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Read more about Zando and Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP Lit: https://zandoprojects.com/imprints/sjp-lit/

Read the entirety of Marilyn Chin's poem "How I Got that Name"

Read the title poem of Denis Johnson's collection The Incognito Lounge.

You can read more about the poet 'Annah Sobelman here, including a few poems.

Randall Jarrell's poem "Losses" appeared in August 1944 issue of Poetry Magazine. It is the title poem of his 1948 book (Harcourt). You can read Jarrell's NY Times obit here.

If you'd like to support Breaking Form:
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.
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 purchase The Selected Shepherd edited by Jericho Brown directly from the press at: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822948216/

Check out Jericho Brown's website. Read the title poem from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Tradition here.

Reginald Shepherd's blog can be found online here. The specific posts on the AWP Panel "Gay Male Poetry: Post Identity Politics?" Can be found here:
    Part 1
    Part 2
Shepherd also wrote a post for Harriet, the blog for the Poetry Foundation, as he was getting ready to deliver the panel. You can read that post here.

Robert Philen's remarks about Reginald Shepherd's memoir were delivered at the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society in 2013. You can read them here.

In the show, Jericho references Frank O'Hara being gay/putting phallic things around his mouth. You can read O'Hara's poem "Homosexuality" here.

Richard Hugo's book of essays The Triggering Town was published in 1979 and reissued in 2010. You can read an essay from the book about "the triggering subject" here.

Read Reginald Shepherd's poem "Syntax."

Watch Shepherd read his poems at Berry College here. (~1 hour.) Poems include "Difficult Music," "White Sargasso Sea," "Slaves," "The Friend," "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair," "Unused," "Tantalus in May," "Maritime," and "The Gods at 3am" (at the 30:55 min mark). 

The queens love to love you--but it didn't always start out like that. Stick around for our game: "Pulitzer Prize Winning Titles from an Alternate Universe."

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.
Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

If you have library access, Ena Jung's 2015 article "The Breath of Emily Dickinson's Dashes" is worth the time.

Watch Bill Murray read two of the more obscure Wallace Stevens poems here.
 
Watch Jonathan Pryce read Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"

Watch James Wright read some of his iconic poems, including "A Blessing" (at 33:15--he calls the poem "a description") here.

John Ashbery's Flow Chart is a book-length poem comprising 4,794 lines, divided into six numbered chapters, each of which is further divided into sections or verse-paragraphs, varying in number from seven to 42. The sections vary in length from one or two lines, to seven pages. It includes at least one double-sestina (and one of them references oral sex between men).

Hear Linda Gregg read and be interviewed in 1986 (~25 mins).

Here's a quick book-trailer of C. Dale Young's The Halo, including a reading of one of the poems by Young.

Listen to a few minutes of Archibald Macleish's Conquistador here.

We can recommend Peter Maber's 2008 article about John Berryman's Dream Songs, "'So-called black': Reassessing John Berryman’s Blackface Minstrelsy" as a good starting place to think about the racism in that book.

Jazz Age poet, translator, and Poetry editor George Dillon was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1906.

At 24, Audrey Wurdemann is the youngest person to win the poetry Pulitzer (for Bright Ambush). Read a few poems here.

Read Robert P. Tristram Coffin's poem "Messages"

Here's Mark Strand reading "Sleeping With One Eye Open"

We reference  Stevie Nicks (a Gemini) singing her iconic song "Landslide"

Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin controversially  included letters from Elizabeth Hardwick (Lowell's former wife). The letters were sent to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that “art just isn’t worth that much.”

The queens remake the endings of iconic poems, then play a round of "Gay or Homophobic?"

Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.
Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Read William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Or hear it read by Dame Helen Mirren here. 
 Read Emily Dickinson's Poem 479 ("Because I could not stop for death"). James makes a reference to Linda Gregg's iconic "The Poet Goes About Her Business."

Hear Creeley read "I Know a Man" here and read the text of the poem here.

Here's the text of Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay." Watch Ponyboy in The Outsiders recite the poem here. Stay golden, Ponyboy.

In the episode, James recites the last line of Robert Pinksy's "Shirt."

We love this interview where Jericho Brown talks about line breaks (starting at the 7-minute mark).