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
Finding poetry on Twitter
For many Internet users, social media constitutes the extent of their regular textual encounters. As a result, Web 2.0 platforms are increasingly becoming spaces that facilitate expressions of imagination and the processing of human experience. Hashtags on Twitter - # and word combinations that link 140-character messages called tweets - trend regularly on the site, reflecting the most popular topics identified by the platform’s algorithm. Those who use hashtags may tweet for a range of reasons, from participating in flash-in-the-pan controversies over the color of a dress to weaponized hashtags linked to ongoing protest movements like #BlackLivesMatter. Are tweets simply expressions of the Internet's id or might we find among them some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”— poets?