Breaking Form Selects: Tommye Blount (A Summer Poetry Salon)
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What is the premise of the Breaking Form Summer Poetry Salon and who is the featured poet?
Welcome to Breaking Form, a podcast of poetry and culture, where we get real about queer life and art. We're your host, I'm Aaron Smith. And I'm James Allen Hall. If you're listening for the first time, we play spicy literary games. We revisit poems that we love.
We serve hot takes on poetry and pobiz.
We read you to filth. We gossip. We shade. We laugh and we are not for everyone.
Welcome to Breaking Form Selects, a summer poetry salon. Each week over the summer, we are picking one poet to celebrate and read from. And we're reading four poems from that poet. There's no fact check. The bio will be in the show notes, and we may chat a little bit depending. And today we are going to discuss Friend of the Show, Tommy Blount.
And uh Tommy is an incredible poet. Hit he was a finalist for the National Book Award uh for a a a book called Fantasia for the Man in Blue. And I wanna read that title poem. Fantasia for the man in blue. You know good and well you can't be out here in the dark morning to take in the moon, full as the bowl of light attached to this police cruiser. Like a gray elephant shoots air through its trunk before it charges off to safety from a mouse in one of those old black and white cartoons you shriek in a debutant's pitch even though there are reports. reports you are as large as an elephant. Cartuffs in the area, the man in blue explains after he asks, Where do you think you're going? It's unusual to see your kind walking at this hour.
You're an elephant, who's really just a man sweating away in a mascot's costume. You mumble an address, you fumble for an address that isn't your address, but mine. Oh, you've done it now, don't say anything else. Let me take over this body, soften what letters will bend. I am a poet, after all, and Don't worry. You'll see. He'll wish us a good morning and let us go. After he bends us over the black hood. I love just the ranginess of the point of view and the vantage point, right? Like it feels so desperate to get out of that body, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
I am going to read Leroy Auditions for the Fame School. I recently like bought the movie Fame again because I hadn't seen it since I was like a little kid. So I got so happy when I saw the title. I was like, this is one that I must read. So It's also from the book Fantasia for the Man in Blue. Leroy Auditions for the Fame School. Oh, they never should have told me to cut my hands over my eyes. The kind of boy I was, I knew all too well our bodies are tricky constructions. So little I knew my body's argument for wanting to want could not be trusted. But where did he come from? Leroy, barely in a shirt, hardly in gym shorts. wielding a snare that makes even Debbie Allen swoon wicked. wickedness is something to day I have mastered.
No Ask me now and I will tell you the names of every muscle it took for Leroy's waist to roll him from one end of that parquet to the other. What did I know about him then that they didn't think I knew already? Bodies are not walls. Shield us from what? Oh bless their hearts. I watched all of his pieces trouble themselves and Apart, only to resolve themselves back together through hands not large enough to shield a thing like desire. Did they not see my feet pedaling the air as Linda Clifford sang, I work so hard to get me a man, don't try and take him away? I love, I mean, as as a you know, queer kids are objects of desire are often that's why I love pop culture. I mean, it's like shapes so much. It's where we get the illicit, you know, it's where we learn, you know, the vocabulary of our desire.
And um, you know, really studying every muscle of how he moved across the floor. And then Debbie Allen, I remember she's like watching, she's thirsty, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, uh the it's a beautiful dance in in his poems. And um yeah, I was thinking about a poem that we read before.
How does Tommye Blount’s title poem “Fantasia for the Man in Blue” explore the perspective of a police officer?
Uh I think in Say Yes to the Dress, um the the poem of of Tommy's called Carla Carl Lagerfeld's Line of Beauty.
Yeah.
Yeah. So we'll throw that one in the show notes too as a sort of little boner bonus.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
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