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
Ivan Sokolov on Clayton Eshleman (1935-2021)
Ivan Sokolov
The Poet Is Always under Arrest: A Study in Cave Tones
Published as part of a feature in NLO (Russia), edited by Vladimir Feschenko: "American Experimental Poetry: The Poetics of Language and Ethnopoetics."
Beware: This is a (human assited) machine translation from Russian. Consult the orginal in NLO (2021)
Published here with the permission of the Ivan Sokolov.
where vallejo césar
let open sesame
Аleksandr Skidan
We will burn the ultimate essence!
César Vallejo
Clayton Eshleman's name (1935-2021) says little to the Russian reader, though this author's work runs a red and blue vein through the solar plexus of contemporary American literature. Author of dozens of books of poetry, several collections of essays, and a striking combination of ambition and meticulous translation projects, Eshleman is recognized and appreciated both as a writer and as a literary figure. From 1967 to 1973, he published the magazine Caterpillar, where Zukofsky, Brakhage, and Duncan were published, and from 1981 to 2000, Sulfur (with a title referring both to sulphur and, continuing the insect line, to the yellow butterfly), a major contribution to post-war avant-garde poetry that drew Eliot Weinberger, Michael Palmer, Marjorie Perloff and others. Most of his poetry collections have appeared at two publishers marked, curiously, by a sign of dark bestiality –– Black Sparrow (publisher of Bowles and Creeley) and Black Widow (which also publishes books by
Pierre Joris, Jerome Rothenberg). To date, Eshleman has had three volumes of selected poems (1986, 2008, 2015), a monograph (Minding the Underworld: Clayton Eshleman and Late Postmodernism by Paul Christensen, 1991) and a collection of articles (Clayton Eshleman: The Whole Art, edited by Stewart Kendall, 2014). The poet has won many awards. [Image: Eshleman and Joris]