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
Moscow plays itself
A preamble
In a conversation with the Moscow poet Maria Stepanova, she noted that “unlike Petersburg, which preserves the surface of its history and so forgets everything, Moscow remembers itself in a way by forgetting — by tearing down its buildings and putting up new ones. It remembers itself by being destroyed, preserves itself in crenulations.” This peculiarly “Muscovite” image of memory and history undergirds Stepanova’s work as well, in both its form and content — her poems very often enact what they describe — and it haunts the work of other Moscow poets I’ll be writing about in the coming weeks. Because Moscow is central to this series and to the poets that figure in it, and because it is often — not only in the west, but to itself! — obscured behind a gloss of stereotypes, fictions, and historical positionings, in this preliminary post I try to give a sense of the place, however provisional and subjective. Further posts will focus more scrupulously on poets and their work and on poetry events across the city.