Ron Padgett, "Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo" & "The Austrian Maiden"
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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 cubicle diced irony ox': Genetics and poetics in the letter-blender
Feeding “deoxyribonucleic acid” into an anagram generator, one receives results like “a crucible decoy dioxin” and “a cubicle diced irony ox” and “a cubic code dioxin lyre” and “a bouncily dicier codex.” These lettristic recombinations fittingly suggest animals turned into conundrums on laboratory workbenches and harps made from humanly concocted chemicals playing geometric melodies and books sliced up into elusive components.
Feeding “deoxyribonucleic acid” into an anagram generator, one receives results like “a crucible decoy dioxin” and “a cubicle diced irony ox” and “a cubic code dioxin lyre” and “a bouncily dicier codex.” These lettristic recombinations fittingly suggest animals turned into conundrums on laboratory workbenches and harps made from humanly concocted chemicals playing geometric melodies and books sliced up into elusive components. This is tellingly ironic, as the science of genetics and the genre of bio-poetic art intersect most productively at the level of the malleable, protean letter.