Breaking Form Selects: Melvin Dixon (A Summer Poetry Salon)

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Melvin Dixon.

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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:

Scholar, novelist, and poet Melvin Dixon was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MA and a PhD from Brown University. His poetry collections include: Change of Territory (1983) and Love’s Instruments (1995, published posthumously. He's the author of two novels, Trouble the Water (1989) and Vanishing Rooms (1991). 

Read Dixon's most-anthologized poem "Heartbeats" Watch Danez Smith read the poem here. 

CM Burroughs is joined by Adrian Metejka on this panel celebrating Melvin Dixon's work. Watch here (~30 min). CM Burroughs reads her essay published in Poetry Magazine, the text of which is here: "Poetic Kin: Meeting Melvin Dixon"

Read "Looking Back: The AIDS Epidemic" for a bit more about the AIDS pandemic.

Poems we read include:

"Turning 40 in the Nineties"

"Change of Territory" 

"The 80s Miracle Diet"

"One by One"

"I'll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name"