Riddles of Form - Ten

Using the Poem to Think With

‘Joe Brainard’s Painting “Bingo” ’

Ron Padgett

*


I suffer when I sit next to Joe Brainard’s painting “Bingo”

I could have made that line into a whole stanza

I suffer
When I sit
Next to Joe
Brainard’s painting
“Bingo”

Or I could change the line arrangement

I suffer when I sit

That sounds like hemorrhoids
I don’t know anything about hemorrhoids
Such as if it hurts to sit when you have them
If so I must not have them
Because it doesn’t hurt me to sit
I probably sit about 8/15 of my life

Also I don’t suffer
When I sit next to Joe Brainard

Actually I don’t even suffer
When I sit next his painting “Bingo”
Or for that matter any of his paintings

In fact I didn’t originally say
I suffer when I sit next to Joe Brainard’s painting “Bingo”
My wife said it
In response to something I had said
About another painting of his
She had misunderstood what I had said

*


I like Ron Padgett’s poems – one of my earliest discoveries due to his friendship with Ted Berrigan. Berrigan talked about Padgett in his lectures so I thought I should look into the work. Actually, it’s hard to believe anyone could actively dislike Padgett’s poems – or Padgettt himself, for that matter. The poems are affable, cheerful, self-effacing – like the man himself (judging by podcast interviews and his way of reading his poems)*. Maybe that’s why I took to his poems so quickly: they seem to be accessible, unintimidating, about his world and reading and friends. They’re very welcoming.

I’ve deliberately chosen ‘Joe Brainard’s Painting “Bingo”’ since it seems so user-friendly. Padgett talking about a painting by his great friend Joe Brainard. Yet it’s easy to fall for such writing and miss the subtlety of Padgett’s art.

Let’s have a look.

i.

The first thing to notice is how the poem invites being read as part of the ekphrastic poetic tradition. The title leads us to assume this will be a poem ‘about’ Joe Brainard’s painting entitled ‘Bingo’. Normally, such a poem would describe the painting and – by its use of words – ‘reveal’ the painting more truly. Words ‘painting’ the images upon our minds – a complex (and daunting) psychological-philosophical-linguistic act in itself. The tacit assumption is that language allows us to ‘see through’ to the art work itself.

What I would like to argue is that from the very first line, Padgett’s poem rips apart the conventional assumption of words’ connections to objects. That the poem will ‘show’ us the painting. However, unlike the aggressive and disruptive experiments of early Ashbery and Coolidge, Padgett carries this off with a gentle charm – even insouciance.

ii.

That first line:

“I suffer when I sit next to Joe Brainard’s painting “Bingo” “

Typing out the poem, I sense how poetic writing can approach calligraphy (in the sense of revealing an individualistic handling of words). I admire this line for its shape, its syntax, the disposition of its sounds – and its ordinariness.

The conversational tone; the grammatical balancing of subject and verb (“I suffer” = “I sit”); the shared short ‘e’ sound within “when” and “next”; the carrying ‘ay’ vowel sound from “Brainard” to “painting”; the close echo of ‘ing’ in the last syllable of “painting” and the first syllable of “Bingo”; the delayed echo from “Joe” to the last syllable of “Bingo”.

Would O’Hara – someone who, for me at least, has superficial similarities in his writing to Padgett – phrase it like this?

“I’m sitting and I’m suffering looking at ...”

Wouldn’t that be more O’Hara? Forcing the phrase more at the reader, more insistently present tense and urgent. Greedier? Whereas the phrase “when I sit” has the effect of slowing down the line, makes it more meditative, contemplative, perhaps even a little uncomfortable.

iii.

I’d then argue that the poem becomes a poem about this line. Duchamp-like, Padgett isolates an ‘object’ – here not a urinal or wine rack but a strip of language – and places it on the page. Effectively, we forget the painting. It’s a sentence we’re looking at.

In doing this, Padgett foregrounds the process of poetic composition, turning the poem upon itself and raising all sorts of profound questions concerning a poem’s status, poetic language, the very way language functions in everyday life. And it is all done in such a genial way.

“I could have made that line into a whole stanza”

As indeed, these two lines could form the basis of a book on linguistics or semiology. Notice how the sounds are evolving: the ‘ay’ sound now occurring in “made”, the long ‘o’ in “whole”. Just enough to give shape to the writing and to maintain the poetic logic parallel to the argument being developed.

iv.

“I suffer
When I sit
Next to Joe
Brainard’s painting
“Bingo” “

Now Padgett’s page becomes a notebook, a manuscript sheet – the process of composition and re-drefting is now incorporated into the poem itself. There are several consequences worth considering.

First, how Padgett reveals affinities with modern art movements in New York – de Kooning’s way of collaging drawings into paintings or (later) Jean-Michel Basquiat’s doodle erasures. (I stress, however, Padgett’s poem embodies painterly process rather than describes).

Second, how Padgett foregrounds the artifices of poetic language – here, the effect of enjambment. Momentarily, Padgett is sat “Next to Joe”; momentarily “Brainard’s painting” – the noun comes alive as a verb; momentarily we hear someone cry with joy “Bingo”.

Third, in contrast to what I was arguing as an O’Hara technique of achieving immediacy, Padgett manages it here simply through placement of words on the page. (I’m reminded of further modern art techniques of flattening the canvas space so the painitng becomes simply a surface – e.g. Cy Twombly). We seem to be looking over Padgett’s shoulder seeing the words take shape on the page.

Fourth, the delight in watching a poem emerge from the ‘seed’ of its first line. Padgett is using the poem to think with. (“The poet thinks with his poem . In that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity.” - W. C. Williams cited by Creeley in Contexts (96))

“Or I could change the line arrangement”

Constantly you hear Padgett’s ear at work – leading and reinforcing the thought (who can say which is first?).

Write the line differently :

“Or I could alter the line arrangement”
and you lose the balancing of vowels that’s been established from line one.

v.

Padgett then digresses – a key tactic of his poems in general and one that raises still further questions as to what is or is not the principal subject matter of his – any – poem?

There’s undeniable comic effect, the reader enjoying the Woody Allenish neurotic worrying:

“I suffer when I sit

That sounds like hemorrhoids
I don’t know anything about hemorrhoids
Such as if it hurts to sit when you have them
If so I must not have them
Because it doesn’t hurt me to sit
I probably sit about 8/15 of my life”

Yet there’s another device at work - deliberate use of redundancy. Each line takes up from the preceding line in a manner completely at odds with more radical styles of disruptive syntax yet – here – threatens to become equally disconcerting: “hemorrhoids” ... “hemorrhoids” ... “them” ... “them” ... “sit” ... “sit”... . It’s an effect reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s dizzyingly exhaustive permutations in a novel such as Watt. Also, of the kind of giving over to language seen in Ashbery’s poem ‘The Instruction Manual’.

vi.

“Also I don’t suffer
When I sit next to Joe Brainard

Actually I don’t even suffer
When I sit next his painting “Bingo”
Or for that matter any of his paintings”

Padgett is now riffing off the first chord – part of his achievement the way his language manages to combine conversational veracity with poetically shaped sound. It’s so easy to miss the technique (“also” – “Joe” – “don’t” – “Bingo” just one of the little sound logics still at work).

vii.

“In fact I didn’t originally say
I suffer when I sit next to Joe Brainard’s painting “Bingo”
My wife said it”

We’re into the last section of the poem and Padgett has very nearly managed to saw off the branch he’s sitting on. Having taken the initial phrase for a walk he now turns it inside out like the music hall magician with a glove to show us there was nothing there all along.

It’s winning in a raised eyebrow kind of way – yet serious, too. For Padgett’s opened up the citational nature of language. As Denis Potter once said: the trouble with words you never know who else’s mouth they’ve been in.

You said ... ? But I said ... She told me that ...

We’ve all been there – and family life is particularly prone to such crossed wires. But here’s Barrett Watten making much the same point in a more astere L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E laboratory way. I quote:

“There is no language but “reconstructed” imaged parentheses back into person “emphasizing constant” explanation “the current to run both ways.” The ocean he sees when as “sour frowns of the ancients’ ‘signifier’” that person jumps in. We are at liberty “to take ‘the’ out of ‘us’,” to have selves “not here” in the machinery ...” (‘Statistics’, from 1-10)

So is it “I suffer” or “ “I suffer” ”? When suffering itself becomes eased (or increased) by being revealed as a verb handed around between husband and wife.

Yet there’s a final flourish:

“She had misunderstood what I had said”

The key word here is “misunderstood”. Padgett now gives us a little lesson in etymology (incidentally, there are several poems testifying to to his dictionary appetites) making us reflect upon the origins of ‘to understand’. How appropriate in a poem so preoccupied with sitting (and unpleasant consequences thereof), the pay off is a moment of mis-under-standing.

The bottom falls out of language?
__

* check out http://www.thirdfactory.net/media/Ron_Padgett-
Joe_Brainards_Painting_Bingo-Studio.mp3 to hear Ron Padgett read the poem.