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

Language of Survival

November 10, 2025·45 min·5 clips

The opening is rude, tender, and a little twitchy. James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith describe the show as poetry, culture, queer life, gossip, games, and a refusal to sand itself down for everybody. A childhood insult lights the fuse. The memory shifts from middle school cruelty to porch-side cruelty, where homophobic language sounds like childish performance until it does real damage. Then poetry takes over. Aaron talks through the odd experience of reading a poem before every formal or narrative piece has clicked. The episode takes that feeling seriously: gut recognition, rereading, and delayed understanding all count as ways into a poem. Julia Kasdorf enters by name. Her sonnet "Eve's Curse" is read as a poem about leaving, longing, and the hurt of becoming strange to home. The craft talk stays bodily and plain. Pennsylvania fields, family distance, and the curse itself become ways to talk about what art can ask of a person. Poetry is not only rescue. One host says it also became a wall between him and his family, a private language he kept partly hidden so he could get through. That admission changes the air. The episode treats poetry as help and separation at once, something that lets you live while moving you away from the life other people expected for you. Then the ending swerves. A dictionary-style explanation of an anti-gay insult turns into mock ritual, comic defiance, and the show's signoff. It is messy because the episode wants the mess. Language wounds, gets stolen back, and makes survival more complicated than a clean rescue story.

As heard by us

Queer poetry talk that turns bullying, memory, and survival into a sharp, bruised exchange.

Breaking Form turns a queer memory conversation into something bruised, funny, and plainspoken. James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith move from middle-school cruelty and homophobic taunts into the harder work of survival, then settle into Julia Kasdorf's "Eve's Curse," where home and…

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Why you'd press play

Queer poetry talk that starts with bullying and ends with the ache of leaving home.

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