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
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Poyesis genética and the Aztec ethno-cyborg
For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents. His phantasmagoric essays, poems, manifestoes, and theater pieces all offer up a mutant, cross-splicing take on race, just as his “genetically engineered Mexicans” and “ethno-cyborgs” use the language of bio-manipulation and robotics to undermine prefabricated notions of racial “belonging.” In such work, the human figure “enhanced with prosthetic implants” is a recurring trope for neocolonial incursions and resistance to such incursions at once. This is achieved by way of a Fourth-World “virtual barrio” of an ethnoscape trying to take back the rhetoric of “borderlessness” from the profiteering of the post-national, corporate world.
For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents.