Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Ai 
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 poet Ai was noted for her uncompromising poetic vision and dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, poor, and abused speakers. She  legally changed her name to Ai which means “love” in Japanese. Ai self-identified as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche. Her collections include: Cruelty (1973), Killing Floor (1978), Sin (1986), Fate (1991), Greed (1993), Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999) which was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry, and Dread (2003).
Read more about her (as well as poems by her) here. 
Read her obituary in the New York Times here, and this recollection essay by Tamiko Beyer in Kenyon Review here.
Watch Ai read from her first book here (~6 min; recording made in November 1974).
We discussed Ai in our episode "We Can Shift the Canon"
Poems we read by Ai include:
"The Hitchhiker" - hear Ai read it here. 
"Twenty-Year Marriage"
"James Dean"
"True Love"

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Lucie Brock-Broido.
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:
Lucie Brock-Broido was born in Pittsburgh. Her collections include: A Hunger (1988), The Master Letters (1995), Trouble in Mind (2004), and Stay, Illusion (2013), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Read more about her, and more poems, here. 
Read this interview with Elizabeth Metzger on Brock-Broido.
Read Askold Melnyczuk's eulogy for LBB here. 
And read Joelle Biele's review of Stay, Illusion in Harvard Review here.
Read LBB"s poem "After the Grand Perhaps"
Read about the evolution of the Lady Godiva story here. 

Poems we read include:
"Jessica, from the Well" (Jstor / Virginia Quarterly Review subscription required) -- this version is slightly different than the published version included in A Hunger.
"Domestic Mysticism"
"After Raphael"
"Dove, Interrupted"

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.