Ron Padgett, "Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo" & "The Austrian Maiden"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Al Filreis brought together James Berger and Richard Deming (who traveled together from Yale) and Sophia DuRose to talk about two poems by Ron Padgett. The poems are “The Austrian Maiden” and “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo.” Our recording of “The Austrian Maiden” comes from a February 26, 2003, reading Padgett gave at the Kelly Writers House; the poem had just recently been published in Padgett’s book You Never Know (2002). The recording of “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo” — a poem published in Great Balls of Fire (1969) — was performed at a November 20, 1979, reading given at a location that is now (sadly) unknown. That reading in its entirety is available at Padgett’s PennSound page; the recording comes to us courtesy of the Maureen Owen Collection of Greenwich Village Poetry, now housed at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
April 17, 2024
This is the color of my dreams
Philippe de Montebello — whose long career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art spanned nearly a third of the institution’s entire history — retired a few years ago after more than thirty-one years as director. At the time of his reitrement the curators of the various departments each dug around in their collections and chose to feature acquisitions made during the de Montebello years, their favorites. And that's one of the exhibits I saw with my wife Jane in late December 2008. Some pieces were chosen more because the story of the acquisition is fascinating than because the artwork itself is tops. So the show was a hodge podge, arranged, room by room, according to the date the work came to the museum rather than its year of creation. Exhibit goers got a bit of whiplash moving from the 18th-c. wooden bust of a powerful Russian politician to Segovia's favorite Spanish (actually Austrian) guitar to some Tahitian faces drawing by Gauguin in 1899.