"Dawns are heartbreaking," as is the queer love story of Arthur Rimbaud & Paul Verlaine.

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 Verlaine was born in 1844. Read more about him here. Verlaine was an Aries sun, Leo Moon, and Scorpio ascendant.

Arthur Rimbaud was born on October 20, 1854, and you can read more about him here. Rimbaud was a triple Libra (sun, moon, ascendant).

Rimbaud met Verlaine in September 1871, a month before his 18th birthday. Following his tumultuous relationship with Paul Verlaine, which ended in 1873, Rimbaud traveled extensively through Europe, often on foot. He became a trader/merchant, selling coffee, hides, and eventually guns, becoming a "soldier of fortune." In 1891, a tumor developed on his right knee and forced him to return to Paris and died later that year at 37, without knowing how popular his poems had become in Symbolist circles. The gun Verlaine used to shoot Rimbaud recently went up for auction.

One of the poems Rimbaud sent to Verlaine in 1871 was "Le Dormer du Val," which you can watch recited as part of the Favorite Poem Project here. (Recited by chef Jacques Pépin.)

Rimbaud and Verlaine wrote a collaborative poem, "Sonnet to the Asshole" which you can read (and read about) here.

In 2016, the poet Eileen Myles told The New York Times, "I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years. Sounds great." Read the interview here.

When we reference "tongue in the butt," we are talking about a segment from an early Breaking Form season 1 show called "Bad Animals." Check it out here, and hit the 14:30 mark.

If you've never read Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," stop what you're doing and read it here.

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 the London Review of Books praising Aracelis Girmay's volume, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton.

Watch Girmay read Clifton's poem "praise song."

Learn more about Lucille Clifton here, here, and here.

Explore more about The Clifton House, and learn more about Clifton's life in Baltimore.

Watch Debby Boone sing her 1977 hit, "You Light Up My Life"

Listen to Deborah Ann Gibson sing "On My Own" from Les Misérables.

Here is the trailer for Boxing Helena, directed by Jennifer Lynch.

Read more about the friendship between Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

For more about Clifton's children's book series, Everett Anderson, read here.

Here is a partial list of the poems we read and discuss on the show:

"my friends"

"a poem written for many moynihans"

"5/23/67 RIP" (for Langston Hughes)

"alabama 9/15/63" (which appeared in a 1999 special folio of Callalo)

"jasper Texas 1998" in Ploughshares Issue #78 Spring 1999

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49491/jasper-texas-1998

"If I should (to clark kent)"

"further note to clark"

"hag riding"

"to my last period"