Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast · Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall

I Myself Am Hell

·32 min·2 clips

Gwendolyn Brooks writes, “abortions will not let you forget,” and James Allen Hall says the line keeps returning in daily life.

Auden lights the match. James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith begin with the claim that poetry is memorable speech, then haul that grand idea straight into friendship, texting, games, queer life, and art. The setup sounds simple: which lines stay in the head, and what makes a poet's language recognizable before the byline shows up. Then the talk gets loose in the best way. A private line about understanding a mother's rage becomes one of those off-page sentences they treat almost like a poem. They laugh, but the joke is not throwaway. It shows how spoken language, embarrassment, intimacy, and recognition can stick as hard as verse. That is the craft lesson hiding inside the bit. From there, the episode turns to the rain-and-small-hands line. Aaron lets the romance be romance. The last stanza, the parenthetical movement, and the tenderness that almost goes too far all get careful attention. They hear how close the poem gets to excess, and how that pressure helps the remembered line survive. The show keeps dodging neat categories. A literary game turns into gossip. Gossip turns into a theory of voice. Voice becomes the thing that lets someone spot a poet before anyone names them. The friend-talk is the criticism. Tommy and Belinda make the same point from outside the poem: memorable speech does not have to stay on the page. That is where the episode feels most alive. Poems, personal lines, comic timing, and love for Diane Seuss all sit in the same charged room. Nobody floats above the mess. So when the hosts say they are not for everyone, it does not sound defensive. It sounds accurate. This one is for people who like poems with laughter still clinging to them.

As heard by us

A raunchy, nimble conversation that uses one cummings line to think about what makes speech stick.

Breaking Form turns memorable lines into a small test: which ones lodge in the mind, and why do they last? James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith begin with a late-night texting game about whether contemporary poets can be told apart, then drift through Auden and cummings toward a…

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Why you'd press play

You want a poetry chat that jumps from raunchy jokes to a cummings line without losing the thread.

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