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 conversation with Alice Notley on the poet's novel
Laynie Browne: In your recent book, Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, you write:
“Poetry tells me I’m dead; prose pretends I’m not” [1].
Can you elaborate on this statement? To put it in context, this line is embedded in a section where there is a momentary switch from prose to poetry: “I’m afraid prose won’t go deep enough.” A few lines later “And yet I go on in prose.” You suggest limitations of prose but a choice to continue in prose. Or maybe what is necessary is the movement between the two forms within the work?
Alice Notley: “The Book of Dead” contrasts two states, that of Dead and that of Day. Day is what we have generally agreed life is; Dead is a world where boundaries are erased. It resembles dreams and is where the ghouls live.Poetry is more like Dead than like Day, but prose is more useful for describing what goes on in Dead — how it works. Prose is more useful for flat and general statement. Poetry tends to abolish time and present experience as dense and compressed. Prose is society’s enabler, it collaborates with it in its linearity. A poem sends you back into itself repeatedly, a story leads you on.
Browne: I am especially fascinated with your statement “A poem sends you back into itself repeatedly, a story leads you on.”