All the queens want is boundless love in this episode about the love life of Frank O'Hara.

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press.

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

Read Frank O'Hara's "Homosexuality"

For more about Chester Kallman, read here. Kallman was a poet, librettist, and writer who was also Auden's partner (and, later, his estate's executor). He published three collections of poems: Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971).

Grace Hartigan's relationship with Frank O'Hara is detailed a bit more in this Sebastian Smee essay in Washington Post: "Portrait of a Poet."

Read O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings"

Much of Frank O'Hara's papers are at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC

Read a review of Ada Calhoun's memoir "Also a Poet," about her father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who was working on a memorial project about O'Hara when he died. Calhoun believes that her father’s book was torpedoed by O’Hara’s sister and literary executor, Maureen Granville-Smith Calhoun.

For more about The Glory Hole Café in Buenos Aires (which we mention in the show), go here.

The queens talk about writing through sadness and grief in order to move forward and gain a different vantage point.

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press.

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

Take a look at the Tracey Emin sculpture "My Bed." It was sold at auction by Christie’s in July 2014 for £2.5 million to German collector Count Christian Duerckheim.

Read Larry Levis's poem "Boy in Video Arcade"

Read Dickinson's 670 ("One Need not be a Chamber to be Haunted"). For more variations she included on the fascicle, visit the Emily Dickinson Online archive at Harvard's Houghton Library here.

In an interview with Melanie Brooks and published in Creative Nonfiction (Winter 2017), Mark Doty says about grief: "It was like just pushing my way up this very tall, spirally staircase. I'd write and cry and write and cry and write and cry." Read the essay here (jstor access required).

Dress shopping is cardio & life for the Breaking Form fashionistas.

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

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. And BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press.

James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Show Notes:

Paul Tran's "Provenance" appeared first February 22/March 1, 2021 issue of The Nation and was included in All the Flowers Kneeling, which was published by Penguin in 2022 and was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Visit Tran's website here: https://iampaultran.com/

The poem "'What Do Women Want?'" is from Kim Addonizio's Tell Me (2000)

Read "Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown" by Saeed Jones

Read "Esta Noche" by Mark Doty

The poem we read of Allison Benis White's is from “Please Bury Me in This” [Maybe my arms lifted ...]"

In recollection of a first memory in A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf wrote: "My mother would come out onto her balcony in a white dressing gown. There were passion flowers growing on the wall; they were great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full."

Read torrin a. greathouse's "Ekphrasis on My Rapist's Wedding Dress" and visit their website: https://www.torringreathouse.com/

Read Victoria Chang's "OBIT [The Blue Dress]" from her 2020 book, Obit. You can watch Chang read from Obit here (~43 min).