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

The Wild Iris: A Breaking Form Revisit

·37 min·2 clips
A flower says, “The great thing is not having a mind.”
The room opens fast. Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall set the mood with poetry, queer life, hot takes, gossip, shade, and laughter. Then Glick walks in, sort of. The Wild Iris shows up as a 1992 book with a 1993 Pulitzer glow and a little literary beef attached. Azure becomes its own bit. The word sends them into memory, early reading, and the odd authority some poets get to carry. They admire Glick, but they do not put her under glass. Jokes about prizes, readings, and big literary names keep the air loose. Then the craft talk gets serious. The hosts spend time on how Glick opens and closes poems, especially the way a poem can move inside itself and then step outside. Clarity is the pressure point. When they get to forcing clarity, they hear submission, power, divine preference, and human confusion rubbing against each other. Witchgrass takes over from there. The reading comes through as survival speech, garden argument, accusation, and refusal. The weed feels tougher than personal passion, older than the garden, and harder to blame. Even Cher gets pulled in. That memoir-title joke is pure Breaking Form: grandeur yanked sideways, poem still intact. By the end, it feels like two friends stuck inside a beloved book and happy to stay there.

As heard by us

A lively return to Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris, with gossip, shade, and close reading.

Breaking Form returns to Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris with its usual blend of gossip, shade, and close attention to the poems. Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall move through the book's clarity, voice, and endings that seem to step just outside the frame, while also noting that…

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Why you'd press play

You want a queer, joke-heavy revisit of Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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