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:

Read the London Review of Books praising Aracelis Girmay's volume, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton.

Watch Girmay read Clifton's poem "praise song."

Learn more about Lucille Clifton here, here, and here.

Explore more about The Clifton House, and learn more about Clifton's life in Baltimore.

Watch Debby Boone sing her 1977 hit, "You Light Up My Life"

Listen to Deborah Ann Gibson sing "On My Own" from Les Misérables.

Here is the trailer for Boxing Helena, directed by Jennifer Lynch.

Read more about the friendship between Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

For more about Clifton's children's book series, Everett Anderson, read here.

Here is a partial list of the poems we read and discuss on the show:

"my friends"

"a poem written for many moynihans"

"5/23/67 RIP" (for Langston Hughes)

"alabama 9/15/63" (which appeared in a 1999 special folio of Callalo)

"jasper Texas 1998" in Ploughshares Issue #78 Spring 1999

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49491/jasper-texas-1998

"If I should (to clark kent)"

"further note to clark"

"hag riding"

"to my last period"

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.

NOTES:

Gwendolyn Brooks published "The Bean Eaters" in Poetry Magazine in 1959. Check out the video of this interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.

Here is Sylvia Plath's "Aftermath." Listen to this October 1962 interview with Plath by Peter Orr for the British Council.

Read Gary Soto's "Avocado Lake."

Linda Pastan published her poem "Waiting Room" in the October 1984 issue of Poetry.

Here's Suji Kwok Kim's "Occupation" which appeared in the July 1994 Poetry. Here is a 2008 reading by Kim (~28 min).

Watch Cher introduce her song "Just Like Jesse James" during her Farewell Tour.

Read "The Speed of Darkness" by Muriel Rukeyser.

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.

NOTES:

Read "Hap" by Thomas Hardy. And watch a here's a video enactment/reading of "Hap" by Thomas Hardy. And watch a reading/enactment of the poem here.

Read a terrific essay about Hardy's poem published by the Thomas Hardy Society here.

Thomas Hardy wrote 947 poems, and you can read them all online here.

For more about Taylor Swift's newest album's variations, read this piece in Vareity.

Tom Brady does not have a brother who plays football.

Gayle King interviewed Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams at the Golden Globes. See the viral-video exchange here.

Here's a reddit thread on being rejected on Christmas Eve.