Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

The Janes

November 13, 2023 Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall Episode 116
Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast
The Janes
Show Notes

The queens play "Just Jane!" featuring a jackpot of J. Kenyon and J. Mead poems. James just can't jank a jackdaw but refuses to be jaded.

Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.
Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Kenyon published four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and Constance (1993), and, as translator, Twenty Poems of Anna Akmatova (1985). A fifth book, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, appeared in 1996.

Jane Mead was the author of five collections of poetry: The Lord and the General Din of the World (1996), The House of Poured-Out Waters (2001), The Usable Field (2008), Money Money Money Water Water Water (2014), World of Made and Unmade (2016), and To the Wren: Collected and New Poems (2019).

Here are the Kenyon poems we discuss:
Having It Out with Melancholy
Private Beach
Climb
The Shirt
Otherwise

You can listen to Jane Kenyon read "Otherwise" here.

Here are the Kenyon poems we discuss:
The Argument Against Us
The Memory
In the Parking Lot at the Junior College on the Eve of a Presidential Election
Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty

If you need a refresher on Brenda Hillman's "Male Nipples"

Read Amy Thatcher's poem "Road Kill" in SWWIM.