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
I love speech! (or anyway, it's complicated): Parsing at 39
Parsing was published thirty-nine years ago in 1976 by Asylum’s Press, the press I started (with Susan Bee) to publish my first book, Asylum. There were under fifty copies made, xerox, side-staple.
The first part of the book, “Sentences,” is composed almost entirely from setences taken from two sources and both are oral histories: Working by Studs Terkel and Yessir, I’ve Been Here a Long Time: Faces and Words of Americans by George Mitchell. I lifted and arranged sentences from these vernacular speech transcriptions and placed them amidst sentences I generated myself. All the sentences in this first part are vernacular and start with an “I” or a “You” or an “It.”