Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Tim Dlugos.
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:
 Tim Dlugos was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. From 1968 to 1970, he was a Christian Brother at LaSalle College in Philadelphia. He left LaSalle and moved to Washington, DC, but later lived in New York City where he was a contributing editor to Christopher Street magazine and on the Poetry Project staff.

Dlugos’s books of poetry include High There (1973), Je Suis Ein Americano (1979), Incredible Risks (1980), Entre Nous (1981), A Fast Life (1982), Strong Place (1992), Powerless: Selected Poems 1973–1990 (1995), and the posthumous A Fast Life: Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad. 
Marked by witty observation, narratives that recount life’s daily minutia, and heavily enjambed lines, Dlugos’s poetry shares its immediate, offhand style with the work of Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. Dlugos’s work is also noteworthy for its firsthand depiction of the AIDS pandemic.
Read this essay about Dlugos and Danez Smith.
Poems we read include:
"G9"
"An Undelivered Class Presentation on the Subject of Gay Consciousness"
"Incredible Risks" (scroll down)
"Healing the World from Battery Park," which you can read in the 1993 Best American Poetry, available here on the Internet Archive.

Watch Ry Dunn read "G-9" here (~15 min). 
And watch Tim Dlugos read a swath of poems here (~30 min).

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Melvin Dixon.
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:
Scholar, novelist, and poet Melvin Dixon was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MA and a PhD from Brown University. His poetry collections include: Change of Territory (1983) and Love’s Instruments (1995, published posthumously. He's the author of two novels, Trouble the Water (1989) and Vanishing Rooms (1991). 
Read Dixon's most-anthologized poem "Heartbeats" Watch Danez Smith read the poem here. 
CM Burroughs is joined by Adrian Metejka on this panel celebrating Melvin Dixon's work. Watch here (~30 min). CM Burroughs reads her essay published in Poetry Magazine, the text of which is here: "Poetic Kin: Meeting Melvin Dixon"
Read "Looking Back: The AIDS Epidemic" for a bit more about the AIDS pandemic.

Poems we read include:
"Turning 40 in the Nineties"
"Change of Territory" 
"The 80s Miracle Diet"
"One by One"
"I'll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name"

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Larry Levis--one of our favorite straight guys!

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:
Larry Patrick Levis (September 30, 1946 – May 8, 1996) was an American poet and teacher who published five books of poetry during his lifetime. Two more volumes of previously unpublished poems appeared posthumously. A collected volume called Swirl & Vortex (Graywolf, 2026, edited by David St. John) makes all of Levis’s poetry available in one volume, including the five books published in Levis’s lifetime, a brilliant reconfiguration of Levis’s posthumous books, and unpublished late poems, with an afterword by St. John. 

Watch this 1984 reading Levis gave with Phil Levine (~67 min; Levis reads first).
Watch the book launch for Swirl & Vortex here (~2 hours).
Watch Analicia Sotelo read Levis's "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" (with a brief commentary; ~6 min).
Read "Winter Stars" here.

Poems Read include:
"The Smell of the Sea"
"Unfinished Poem" 
"The Blue Hat Band"
"My Story in a Late Style of Fire"
Read how to seduce a Libra here. 
If you've never seen Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, here's the trailer.

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Tommye Blount.

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:
Tommye Blount was born and raised in Detroit. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the National Book Award, and the chapbook What Are We Not For (Bull City Press, 2016). Blount is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Kresge Arts in Detroit and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2023, he received a Whiting Award in Poetry. A Cave Canem Fellow, Blount lives in Novi, Michigan.
Visit Tommye's website: https://www.tommyeblount.com/home
Buy the book Fantasia for the Man in Blue from Four Way Books.

Poems we mention include:
"Fantasia for the Man in Blue" (one of four title poems in the book). Watch Tommye read this poem here. 
"Leroy Auditions for the Fame School"
"Ku Klux Klan Robe and Hood, Circa 1925" in Massachusetts Review 
"Palmer Park"
"Karl Lagerfeld's Line of Beauty"

Read two poems by Tommye in Four Way Review here.
See Tommye read his poem "Grand Dragon" at the Whiting Awards here (~1 min)
Watch Leroy Johnson's audition in Fame here!
Read this interview with Tommye in Adroit Journal

Our summer salon series is here! Please enjoy this episode of Breaking Form Selects: Lynda Hull

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:
Lynda Hull was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1954. Her collections include Ghost Money (1986), recipient of the Juniper Prize; Star Ledger (1991), which won the 1991 Carl Sandburg and 1990 Edwin Ford Piper awards; and The Only World: Poems, published posthumously in 1995 and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In 2006, Graywolf Press published her Collected Poems, edited by her husband, David Wojahn. 
We read these Lynda Hull poems:
"Night Waitress"
"Adagio" from Star Ledger (the poem is dedicated to Mark Doty)
"Chiffon" 
"Midnight Reports" (which was first published in Agni, alongside "Black Mare" and "Visiting Hour") also from Star Ledger.
And check out this video of Erika Meitner reading Hull's poem "At Thirty" and Gary Jackson reading "Magical Thinking"