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

OnlyForms

November 24, 2025·30 min·1 clip

Jericho Brown’s duplex repeats each couplet line into the next, and the poem ends where it began.

1. Breaking Form’s “OnlyForms” episode focuses on fixed poetic forms and how James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith use them in contemporary poetry. 2. James Allen Hall is the co-host and Aaron Smith is the co-host, and both matter because they read poems, explain forms, and name poets they admire. 3. The episode asks what happens when traditional rules like refrains, couplets, and syllable counts become tools for reading and writing poems. 4. Hall introduces the rondelay as a French form with seven lines, refrains on lines 1, 3, and 7, and an A-B-A-B-B-A rhyme scheme. 5. Hall notes that both the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation are useful places to look up forms. 6. Hall reads Maureen Seaton’s “Death in Paradise, Rondelay with Shorebirds,” and Seaton’s line “I’m thrilled to be still alive in paradise” shows how the form can be bent. 7. Smith describes the hustle as a seventh-century Persian form revived in the 19th and 20th centuries through Agha Shahid Ali. 8. Smith says the hustle uses at least five separate couplets, repeated end phrases, and a final couplet that uses the poet’s name. 9. The episode includes Smith’s memory of Agha Shahid Ali at Bennington, where Ali told students they would “never get it” right. 10. Hall reads Agha Shahid Ali’s “Tonight,” which opens with Lawrence Hope’s line “Pale hands I loved. Beside the Shalimar.” 11. Smith introduces tanka as a 31-syllable Japanese form linked to courtship and to lovers leaving a poem the morning after an evening together. 12. Hall reads Sonia Sanchez’s “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman,” where repeated “picture” and “imagine” openings build a portrait of Tubman through accumulation. 13. Hall describes the triole as an eight-line poem with two repeated lines, and he says some students, especially “Scorpio or Virgos,” handle it well. 14. Hall reads Rachel Hadas’s “Fortress,” where the repeated line “before we reach the top” returns through the poem. 15. Hall introduces Terrance Hayes’s golden shovel as a form that borrows a line from an existing poem and uses each word as the last word of each line in a new poem. 16. Smith reads from Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel after Gwendolyn Brooks,” and the repeated line-end words from Brooks’s “We Real Cool” shape the new poem’s movement. 17. Hall and Smith describe Jericho Brown’s duplex as seven couplets where the second line of one couplet becomes the first line of the next. 18. The reading from Brown’s The Tradition includes the repeated opening and closing line, “A poem is a gesture toward home,” which makes the form easy to hear. 19. The tone stays playful and conversational, with grading jokes, references to illness, and sexual humor alongside detailed craft talk. 20. Listeners who enjoy poetry craft, queer literary banter, and formal experiment will like this episode, while people wanting a strictly serious or plot-driven show may skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast