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

Pairings

·34 min·2 clips

A survey segment cites 75% of younger adults and 71% of cisgender women in a sexual-behavior study.

The premise is pairing. The hosts open with celebrity mischief, with Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez bouncing around before the literary conversation takes over. What first sounds like a party game turns into a way to talk about influence, taste, shame, formal education, and why imperfect matches can be more useful than tidy ones. Marie Howe becomes the warm center for one kind of lyric intensity: personal experience pressed into language, pressure, and shape. Then the useful friction arrives. Creeley, Notley, and D.A. Powell become poets who tug a reader out of a favorite lane and into weirder form. The hosts chase that idea through the potato chips on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is exactly as scrappy and right as it sounds. Bernadette Mayer enters next. The Golden Book of Words, reissued by New Directions, gives them a reason to talk about books that come back and change what a reader wants. The teaching talk has real affection in it. Dianelli Antigua and Sharon Olds get paired through NYU, and the praise for Olds as a teacher feels earned, not ornamental. Shame keeps resurfacing. In Antigua and Olds, the hosts hear nerve around experience, body, feeling, and disclosure. Ashbery stirs the pot, naturally. Pairings with Lucille Clifton, Rae Armantrout, and Brenda Hillman let them test mystery, density, slant rhyme between sensibilities, and the risk of being too obvious. The episode stays pleasingly untidy, moving through gossip, craft, classroom memory, queer irreverence, and real admiration for poems that do not match neatly but still spark.

As heard by us

Charlie Sheen opens into a funny look at queer taste and poetic reading.

Breaking Form starts with Charlie Sheen and quickly turns that saucy pairing game into a sharp, lively talk about queer life and art. James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith move with ease from the prompt to the poets and books shaping their reading, bringing in Marie Howe, D.A.

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You want a saucy gay pairing game that turns into poetic taste.

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