Statements and Questions

Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

The queens get stately in this episode devoted to poetic queries and statements.
Please consider supporting the poets we mention by buying their books at an indie bookstore. We can recommend Loyalty Books, a black-owned DC-area bookseller.
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry is edited by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. It's essential reading.
You can read the entire Linda McCarriston poem, “Healing the Mare” here.
Read Chen Chen’s “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me” (first published in Pank) here. Chen’s book When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (selected by Jericho Brown) and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry. Follow him on Twitter @chenchenwrites and visit his official website.
Read “Effort at Speech Between Two People” by Muriel Rukeyser here.
Watch Erika Meitner, Victoria Redel, and Patricia Smith here (~90 min)
Cortney Lamar Charleston’s book Dopplegangbangers is his second book, published by Haymarket Books in 2021. His first book is Telepathologies, winner of the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Visit his website here.
Read Larry Levis’s poem “In the City of Light" here.
Read Jennifer L. Knox’s poem “Old Women Talking About Death” here. Another of her great poems: “how to manage your adult adhd” appears here in American Poetry Review. Visit Knox's website here.
Brenda Hillman's website can be visited here. You can read “First Thought” (from the book Bright Existence) here. And watch her read from multiple books in this 2013 reading here (~17 min).

Mark Doty writes about the class he shared with Brenda Hillman on his blog here.