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

That's What She Said

·32 min·2 clips

A.E. Housman says poetry should "transfuse emotion, not to transmit."

The title is the game, and James wastes no time turning it loose. He sets up a multiple-choice round made from authors talking about their poetry, their aesthetic, and the little thunderclouds behind both. Aaron plays it suspicious and delighted at once, which gives the episode its engine: quiz-night chaos with just enough actual attention to how poets talk about truth, knowledge, and what poetry is. Nobody gets to stay solemn for long. A.E. Housman arrives first, attached to an athlete dying young and the strange romance people make out of youth-facing death. Then the room cools down a bit. The conversation drifts toward movies and stories that make early death look beautiful, until the blunt correction lands: getting older makes death much harder to romanticize. Poetry keeps cutting through the bits anyway. A quoted idea of poetry as an uncovering of fundamental truth sends Aaron toward Laura Riding, with admiration tied up in the plain fact that loving the work is not always easy. That is very much the show. The guessing game turns into a place to admit taste, holes in reading, and the awkward little crushes people develop on poets they barely know. James keeps feeding it. Sterling Brown, Stevie Smith, and Laura Riding sit in the multiple-choice mix, less as trivia answers than as little tests for what counts as poetic knowledge. Aaron gets one right, and the win is tiny but loud: literary competence with mock outrage, callbacks, and no museum hush. By the end, even book-design fantasy gets pulled in. James imagines a title page promising original woodcuts, then admits there would be no woodcuts at all, because the joke matters nearly as much as the book-object dream. The close stays scrappy. "Greeny flower" and Aspidelle linger as ugly-pretty bits of poem-talk, before the familiar signoff brings the room back to itself. The episode has receipts under the nonsense: when poets explain poetry, are they opening the work up, dressing it up, or just making another little poem?

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