Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast
Arts:Books
Aaron and James correct history and re-award the Pulitzer Prize. Hindsight is 20/20 and we definitely are hind-oglers.
Support the poets we mention by buying their books. We recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned indie bookseller in the DC area.
Read David Trinidad's dishy and detailed account of how Anne Sexton got her Pulitzer here.
More/other insight into the Pulitzers can be had in reading this July 1957 article by Arthur Mizener that appeared in The Atlantic.
After Forest Gander won the Pulitzer, he gave a 5-book recommended reading list that included C.D. Wright's last book. (Wright and Gander were married; Gander's prizewinning collection Be With is largely elegiac.) You can read his recommendations here.
if you haven't listened to Jericho Brown's interview with the On Being Project, do yourself a favor and listen here. (The interview discusses sexual violence.) Brown won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for his book The Tradition).
Adrienne Rich was a 3-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Before winning in 1998 for Black Zodiac, Charles Wright was a finalist for the prize four times.
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