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Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast cover art

Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Written by: Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall
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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
Episodes
  • Breed Me (with Special Guest Richie Hofmann)

    Breed Me (with Special Guest Richie Hofmann)
    Jun 22 2026
    Richie Hofmann returns for a game that shows the queens that being well-versed can mean getting well-bred.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:Visit Richie Hofmann's website here: https://www.richiehofmann.com/ which includes links to many of the poems Richie reads for us in the episode.Purchase The Bronze Arms Check out a reading Richie gave at LA's Hammer Museum in April 2022 here (~45 minutes)Poets we mention in this episode include:John AshberyElizabeth Barrett Browning was a Pisces. A portrait of EBB hung in Emily Dickinson's bedroom.Robert Browning, especially "My Last Duchess"Elizabeth BishopAnne Bronte, author of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell HallCharlotte Bronte, author of 5 novels, including Villette, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, which was published posthumously in 1857. Upon her death, she left two chapters of an unfinished narrative called Emma. Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering HeightsCatullus threatens two friends who have insulted him with both irrumatio and pedicatio in his "Carmen 16" Amy ClampittAllen GinsbergGerard Manley HopkinsRobert Lowell, particularly his poem "Skunk Hour." For more about Lowell's violence towards his wives, receipts are here and here. J.D. McClatchyFrank O'Hara, particularly his manifesto "Personism"; his poem "Having a Coke with You,"; several poems titled "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday," like this one; and the 56 poems he titled simply "Poem," including "Poem [I will always love you]," "Poem [I live above a dyke bar and I'm happy.]," "Poem [Dee Dum, dee dum, dum dum, dee da]," and "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)."Christina Rosetti, whose middle name is Georgina.Dante Gabriel Rosetti.The Rossetti children were quite artistic. There were two others in addition to Dante and Christina: Maria Rossetti, who published A Shadow of Dante (1871), and William Michael Rossetti, who became an editor, man of letters, and memoirist.Gertrude Stein We also mention Susan M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's landmark book, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, published by Yale UP in 1979 and reissued in 2020.
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    25 mins
  • The Bronze Arms (with Special Guest Richie Hofmann)

    The Bronze Arms (with Special Guest Richie Hofmann)
    Jun 15 2026

    The ladies are joined by Richie Hofmann for one hell of a Breaking Form interview!

    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:

    Visit Richie Hofmann's website here: https://www.richiehofmann.com/ which includes links to many of the poems Richie reads for us in the episode.

    Purchase The Bronze Arms

    Check out a reading Richie gave at LA's Hammer Museum in April 2022 here (~45 minutes)

    Watch Bette Middler sing "Rose's Turn" from Gypsy here.

    To see the clip from Absolutely Fabulous we reference in the show, go here.

    For more about the recent sandals Chanel showed in their 2027 resort collection, read this article in Vogue.

    Read Richie's essay remembering Louise Glück, published in CNN, here.

    REduardo Corral published Guillotine with Graywolf in 2020; it was Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry and was a Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Buy it here!

    Richie references the Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) poem "Whoso List to Hunt"

    Carl Phillips wrote on Instagram about The Bronze Arms: "Novelistic, cinematic…It’s been more than a moment since I read a book of poems so accomplished not only poem by poem but as a book with a sensibility so clear and at the same time so layered in different shades of mystery — as if torn between withholding, craving, and demanding intimacy, all three at once…Congratulations @richiehof — I read the whole book last night, and here I am, starting all over —"

    Read more about the poet Kara van de Graaf, author of Spitting Image (SIU Press, 2018) on her website here: https://www.karavandegraaf.com

    Learn more about the poet Will Brewer via his website: https://www.williambrewer.net

    Anne Carson's translations of Sappho are collected in her book If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho first published in 2002. It contains Greek text on facing pages, based on Eva-Maria Voigt's 1971 critical edition. Carson's translation closely follows the word-order of Sappho's Greek, and marks lacunae in the manuscripts with square brackets.
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Queer Emergence

    Queer Emergence
    Jun 8 2026
    The queens shine a rainbow spotlight on some fabulous, emerging queer poets.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:Xavier Searle is a poet and educator. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets University & College Prize, their work has appeared in The Broken Plate, Stone of Madness, and the anthology Broken Olive Branches. They hold an MFA from North Carolina State University. Read their poem "Elegy." Deon Robinson (he/him) is a Queer Afro-Latino poet born-and-raised in The Bronx. He received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University, where he was a two-time recipient of the Janet C. Weis Prize for Literary Excellence. Currently, he is a first year MFA Candidate in Poetry at the University of Urbana-Champaign where he is a recipient of a Graduate College Master's Fellowship and selected by Adrian Matejka for the 2022 Hobart L. and Mary Kay Peer Memorial Award. Read Deon Robinson's "(Pleasure-Knowledge) (Knowledge-Pain)" from The Adroit Journal. Visit his website: https://djrthepoet.weebly.com Kaitlin Hsu 徐欣 (she/她) is a queer Taiwanese poet, translator and editor from the Bay Area. Her work can be found in A Public Space, Poet Lore, Peach Mag and elsewhere. She is a 2024 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and works at Kaya Press as an associate editor. Hsu was also a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Check out Hsu's website at https://myrefoli.github.io and read her poem "As a Child, I Pretended to Be a Tree" here.Stefania Gomez is a 2025 Luminarts Fellow in Poetry and a 2023 Fulbright Research Award Grantee, and a finalist for the 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and 2023-2024 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship Semifinalist. She has received additional fellowships from the Dirt Palace, Sewanee Writers Workshop, Lambda Literary, and the International Quilt Museum. She received her MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and teaches Creative Writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts, Chicago’s first public arts high school. Read her poem "Wreck" here and check out her website here. Another Gomez poem worth your time is "At the New York City AIDS Memorial"John Bonanni founded and edits the Cape Cod Review. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, Washington Square Review, Florida Review, and Gulf Coast, and his literary criticism has been featured in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, and The Kenyon Review. He teaches on Cape Cod. Visit his website and read "Elegy for Gaeton Dugas" here. Bonnani's book Retrovirology, won the Donald Hall Prize (judged by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers) and will be available in September from the Pitt Poetry Series. Alec Hershman is the author of the chapbooks Permanent and Wonderful Storage (2019) and The Egg Goes Under (2017), both from Seven Kitchens Press. He lives in Michigan where he teaches literature and writing to college students. His poetry appears widely in literary journals and magazines such as Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Journal, Sycamore Review, DIAGRAM, Columbia, The National Poetry Review, and Harpur Palate. You can find links to his work online at https://alechershmanpoetry.com. Read Hershman's "Mercury Fields." Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. She has received support from The Pew Center for the Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poem-A-Day, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Currently, she is developing her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, which centers the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. Read or listen to Frohman's poem "Lady Jordan" here and check her website out here: https://www.denicefrohman.comZachary Scalzo (he/they) is a queer writer, translator, and theatremaker. They can be found at azachofalltrades.com and on Instagram at @zjscalzo. Their poetry has appeared in journals including Dear Poetry, Ghost City Review, and &Change. Read their poem “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly.” Journalist Randy Shilts popularized the concept of "Patient Zero" in his 1987 book, And the Band Played On. By 1987, however, it was known that an infected individual might not display symptoms for several years, and that the study on which Shilts based his assumption was unlikely to have revealed a network of ...
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    29 mins
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