Ron Padgett reads Blaise Cendrars’s poem “Studio,” 1913.
Blaise Cendrars’s poem references Marc Chagall and his studio in the artist colony La Ruche (The Beehive) in Paris.
Transcript
Padgett: "Studio," by Blaise Cendrars.
The Beehive
Stairways, doors, stairways
And his door opens like a newspaper
Covered with visiting cards
Then it closes.
Disorder, total disorder
Photographs of Léger, photographs of Tobeen, which you don’t see
And on the back
On the back
Frantic works
Sketches, drawings, frantic works
And paintings . . .
Empty bottles
“We guarantee the absolute purity of our tomato sauce”
Says a label
The window is an almanac
When the gigantic cranes of lightning empty the booming barges of the
sky and dump buckets of thunder
Out fall
Pell-mell
Cossacks Christ a shattered sun
Roofs
Sleepwalkers goats
A lycanthrope
Pétrus Borel
Madness winter
A genius split like a peach
Lautréamont
Chagall
Poor kid next to my wife
Morose delectation
The shoes are down at heel
An old jar full of chocolate
A lamp that’s split in two
And my drunkenness when I go see him
Empty bottles
Bottles
Zina
(We’ve talked about her a lot)
Chagall
Chagall
In the graduations of light
