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

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

·33 min·2 clips

James Allen Hall describes dropping his voice around his dad and asks why poetry needs to be "manly."

The cowboy question starts in the throat. Before the article shows up, Aaron and James linger on the weird survival move of dropping a voice when fathers, partners, or locker rooms enter the room. Then they get their target: an article called Why We Must Make Poetry Manly Again. It is dumb, anxious, puffed up with masculine certainty, and almost too easy to tease. Almost. They get irritated fast, because the piece keeps acting as if young men need to be rescued into poetry through backbone, wisdom, common sense, Homer, and one thudding chant of manliness after another. The jokes sharpen as the literary roll call begins. Kipling, Yates, Elliot, Frost, and Whitman get lined up like a masculinity starter pack, and Aaron and James answer with eye rolls, actual literary correction, and queer side-eye. Homer refuses to behave. Achilles and Patroclus become the obvious trouble with any tidy fantasy that classical poetry is straight, uncomplicated, or useful for macho branding. Dead Poet Society wanders in next. James admits the movie once made him want to be a poet, which is sweet and a little embarrassing in the exact right way. They still poke at the boys, the death-haunted romanticism, and the very polished idea of literary awakening. The article keeps missing the ground under its own feet. Aaron and James point out that poetry submissions and manuscript contests are not empty of men, and the Submittable guestimate sounds much less lopsided than the article's panic needs it to be. That gap is the joke: the piece invents a crisis without asking around, checking the field, or noticing the men already writing and submitting poems. Code-switching comes back with more weight near the end. They trace the term through bilingual speech, sociolinguistics, and the way people move through social, cultural, and racial rooms to stay safe. The banter has a bruise by then. What started as voice-dropping comedy lands on the pressure to perform safety, masculinity, queerness, and literary authority for rooms listening for the wrong thing. Still, they keep laughing. Breaking Form is messy, quick, affectionate, fed up, and serious enough about poetry to reject every silly costume someone tries to shove onto it.

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A sharp, funny takedown of a Fox News plea for manly poetry, with a brisk detour through code switching and queer literary banter.

Breaking Form takes a sharp swing at a Fox News piece arguing for manly poetry, and Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall clearly enjoy the target.

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Want a queer poetry rant that tears into a "manly poetry" hot take?

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