Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Breed Me (with Special Guest Richie Hofmann)

Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall Season 4 Episode 23

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0:00 | 24:59

Richie Hofmann returns for a game that shows the queens that being well-versed can mean getting well-bred.


Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

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


 Notes:

Visit Richie Hofmann's website here: https://www.richiehofmann.com/ which includes links to many of the poems Richie reads for us in the episode.

Purchase The Bronze Arms 

Check out a reading Richie gave at LA's Hammer Museum in April 2022 here (~45 minutes)


Poets we mention in this episode include:

John Ashbery

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a Pisces. A portrait of EBB hung in Emily Dickinson's bedroom.

Robert Browning, especially "My Last Duchess"

Elizabeth Bishop

Anne Bronte, author of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Charlotte Bronte, author of  5 novels, including Villette, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, which was published posthumously in 1857. Upon her death, she left two chapters of an unfinished narrative called Emma. 

Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights

Catullus threatens two friends who have insulted him with both irrumatio and pedicatio in his "Carmen 16

Amy Clampitt

Allen Ginsberg

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Robert Lowell, particularly his poem "Skunk Hour." For more about Lowell's violence towards his wives, receipts are here and here.  

J.D. McClatchy

Frank O'Hara, particularly his manifesto "Personism"; his poem "Having a Coke with You,"; several poems titled "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday," like this one; and the 56 poems he titled simply "Poem," including "Poem [I will always love you]," "Poem [I live above a dyke bar and I'm happy.]," "Poem [Dee Dum, dee dum, dum dum, dee da]," and "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)."

Christina Rosetti, whose middle name is Georgina.

Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

The Rossetti children were quite artistic. There were two others in addition to Dante and Christina: Maria Rossetti, who published A Shadow of Dante (1871), and William Michael Rossetti, who became an editor, man of letters, and memoirist.

Gertrude Stein  

We also mention Susan M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's landmark book, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, published by Yale UP in 1979 and reissued in 2020.