Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

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).