Hot Takes

This episode's got Aaron sweating, then Miguel Murphy joins the queens for some flaming hot poetry takes.

Review Breaking Form on Apple Podcasts here. 

Please support Breaking Form and buy Aaron's and James's  books:
Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Or, if you'd like to shop indie, we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a DC-area Black-owned bookshop.

Read a recent Beckian Fritz Goldberg poem. Or listen to her read at the University of Arizona Poetry Center (from In the Badlands of Desire and Never Be the Horse).

Rilke recalled: "I had to wear beautiful long dresses, and until I started school I went about like a little girl. I think my mother played with me as though I were a big doll." Speaking of dolls, read Eva-Maria Simms's article "Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud" in New Literary History here.

The Bernadette Mayer book Aaron references is Midwinter Day (New Directions, reissued the original 1982 book in 1999). Read more about the book's composition (in one day, as Aaron says) in this interview with Mayer conducted by Fanny Howe.

Read more about Eric McHenry's discovery of Langston Hughes's real birthday

Heather McHugh's poem that Aaron references is "I Knew I'd Sing" from her first book, Dangers. Visit McHugh's website: https://www.heathermchugh.com

For more about gay sincerity, here's a Gawker article by Paul McAdory called "Gay Sincerity is Scary" and has a tagline that is too shady to not quote: "When it comes to popular gay fiction, on earth we're briefly cringe."

Visit the online Whitman archive (which documents the many, many photographs of Whitman, many of them nudes), thus validating what Miguel says when he calls Walt our first Instagram poet.

Richard Hugo talks about public and private poets in his essay "The Triggering Town"

Read Plath's "Letter in November" and her poem "Berck-Plage" or listen to her read that poem here.

Miguel references Lucille Clifton's poem "Leaving Fox," which begins "so many fuckless days and nights."