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
A slowing 7: The necessary elusive
Transience, that fleeting way of everything not staying: how can we understand the very condition as it slips through the mind’s slippery fingers? Once awake to its pervasiveness, transience appears everywhere: in poems, in spiritual doctrines, in life’s disappointments, in everything. This attention is a chasing sort of attention, moving always toward what is out of reach, trying to understand what is slipping past understanding. Yet to know this unknowable as pervasive fixes something. A perpetual chasing.