The queens get to the poetic essence with the help of erasure and re-envisioning.

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Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

NOTES:

The Nicole Sealey poem we read at the end of the episode comes from the first four pages of her book The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

We revise poems by:

Robert Bly, "The Beauty of Women"

George Herbet, "Death"

Dean Young, "Belief in Magic"

William Stafford, "Accountability"

Billy Collins, "Design"

The video we mention posted by The New Yorker was posted in April 2023 to FaceBook: "How a New Yorker Poetry Editor Selects Poems"

Watch John Travolta introduce Idina Menzel as "the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem" and then Menzel getting her good-natured revenge.

For more about the feminist practice of erasure poetry, we can recommend Erase the Patriarchy: An Anthology of Erasure Poetry.

Join the thirsty queens for a gin & Sextonic, in this tribute to the iconic work of Anne Sexton.

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

NOTES:

Click here for a pdf from the Poetry Society that includes a folio of essays about Sexton's life and work by David Trinidad, Lois Ames, and Maggie Nelson. (Originally published in Crossroads, fall 2001.)

Trinidad talks about Anne Sexton on the podcast here.

And, lastly, we'd be remiss if we did not link to this dishy, well-researched article--again by the fabulous David Trinidad--about the palace intrigue behind Sexton's winning the Pulitzer for Live or Die.

Want to read more about Sexton, faith, and love? Your wait is over.

Curious about Anne Sexton's houses? Click here!

Here's an hour of Sexton reading some of her most iconic poems.

Anne Sexton gave her last public reading at Goucher College in October 1974, three days before she completed suicide. You can find the reading here.

Here are links to some of the poems we mention:

"The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator"

"Menstruation at Forty"

"Her Kind"

"Sylvia's Death"

"The Fury of Cocks"

"Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women"

The queens talk with gay literary icon Edmund White about his new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. (Miguel Murphy joins in the fun, too!)

Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Miguel's SHORE DITCH is available from Barrow Street.

You can purchase Edmund White's new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, at BookWoman here. Bookwoman was founded to increase access to queer and feminist literature in Texas nearly fifty years ago.

Read Colm Tóibín's essay, "On the Casual Brilliance of Edmund White"

Read a tribute to Gary Indiana in The Guardian here.

Need a quick definition refresher of auto fiction? Here you go!

Miguel mentions that composer Arnold Schoenberg's archive destroyed in LA fires, and you can read more about that here.

Here's a dishy roundup of Nabokov's insults of Dostoevsky

For a bit more about Larry Kramer's objections to The Farewell Symphony, read on.

Learn more about Richard Howard and his poetry here.

Edmund White and Michael Carroll talk about their relationship, and their experiences writing gay fiction here.

And here's the Interview Magazine article we mention in the episode, in which gay writers ask Edmund White a question: “Tall Blonde With a Big Dick”: 18 Men Ask Edmund White Some Sexy Questions"

Finally, check out the fabulous Garth Greenwell's website: https://www.garthgreenwell.com