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Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

By: Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall
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Summary

James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith talk about their favorite poems and poets, interview amazing writers, laugh a lot, gossip, and get real about life and art.© 2026 Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast Art Entertainment & Performing Arts Literary History & Criticism
Episodes
  • The Gay 90s
    May 4 2026

    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

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    44 mins
  • Sex Poems
    Apr 27 2026

    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.

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    30 mins
  • On Explicitness
    Apr 20 2026

    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 More Show Less
    28 mins
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