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

Lucille Clifton

·37 min·2 clips

"What is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger?"

They start with mischief. The opening ricochets through queer art, spicy literary games, Debbie Boone, family lore, and the show's affectionate refusal to behave. Then Clifton arrives, and the air changes. The hosts move into poems that stare at political violence and human cruelty without giving up music. Birmingham takes over the room. Aaron reads Clifton's poem on the church bombing, with Cynthia, Carol, Denise, and Addie May named in a song that hurts. The reaction is immediate. That last image of brightness and sound hits hard enough that one host half-jokes about quitting poetry altogether. Jasper, Texas comes next. James reads the 1998 poem for Jay Bird, where a body speaks from the road and asks who gets to be called human. Nobody softens the horror. Clifton's force is in the compression, in how a few plain words can pull history right up to the table. The talk still feels lived-in. Even with the subject this grave, the hosts keep their sideways rhythm, wandering through Plowshares, Mark Doty, and the envy of a perfect line. Their admiration has teeth. Clifton is not handled like homework or a monument, but as a working poet whose choices still bother and teach living writers. Then the close swerves back: oracle cards, David Trinidad's Emily Dickinson deck, and comic Southern wordplay. The whiplash is the show. Grief, craft, gossip, and queer fabulosity all fit in the same room.

As heard by us

Clifton's poems get read with jokes, gossip, and real care.

Breaking Form places Lucille Clifton at the center of a conversation about poetry, queer life, art, and the stubborn work of reading poems shaped by political violence and human cruelty.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Lucille Clifton, read with jokes, shade, and a lot of feeling.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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