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When someone we love dies, most of us do something to keep them from completely vanishing. We summon up memories of them, we talk about them, we visit their graves, we treasure photographs of them, we dream about them, and we cry, and for those brief moments they are in some way with us. But when my friend Joe Brainard died, I knew I was going to have to do something beyond all these.
So begins Ron Padgett's warm, conversational memoir--the unlikely and true story of two childhood friends, one straight and one gay, who grew up in 1950s Oklahoma, surprised their families by moving to New York City in search of art and poetry, and became a part of the dynamic community of artists and writers whose work continues to shape American culture.
Much of this intimate memoir is told in Joe's own direct and unforgettable voice. Dozens of letters, journal entries, poems, photographs, and artworks create a stirring portrait of the times--one that illuminates not only Joe Brainard's life and art, but the influence that his kindness and insight had on the lives of his contemporaries, including Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Frank O' Hara, Joe LeSueur, Anne Waldman, John Ashbery, Kenward Elmslie, and countless other friends, lovers, and admirers.
As Ron Padgett generously shares his memories, he allows us all to get to know Joe Brainard, a truly great person who just happened to be a brilliant artist and poet. Above all, Joe is a gentle reminder that love, life, and art matter every second.
Poet Ron Padgett, the son of an Oklahoma bootlegger, grew up in Tulsa where he met Joe Brainard at the age of 6. His recent books include the memoir, Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers and the collection of poems You Never Know.
Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.--Robert Creeley
Ron Padgett has reenergized modern poetry with exuberant and tender love poems, with exceptionally lucid and touching elegies, and with imaginative and action-packed homages to American culture and visual art. He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have always imparted a contagious sense of joy.
In this new collection of poems, Padgett hasn't forsaken his beloved Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the alarm. Here, he asks, What makes us so mean? And he really wants to know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving. Humanity, Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still has to take it one step at a time.
In this new poetry collection, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett illuminates the wonders inside things that don't even exist--and then they do.
In Dot, Ron Padgett returns with more of the playfully profound work that has endeared him to generations of readers. Guided by curiosity and built on wit, generosity of spirit, and lucid observation, Dot shows how any experience, no matter how mundane, can lead to a poem that flares like gentle fireworks in the night sky of the reader's mind.
Following Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett's 2013's Collected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) Alone and Not Alone offers new poems that see the world in a clear and generous light.
From The World of Us
Don't go around all day
thinking about life--
doing so will raise a barrier
between you and its instants.
You need those instants
so you can be in them,
and I need you to be in them with me
for I think the world of us
and the mysterious barricades
that make it possible.
On one hand, the book is a quick read, and yet what Padgett does with his sentences is to be savored ... He takes a deep pleasure in the words, their sounds and variable meanings ... All of it is marked by the ease of Padgett's writing, his unrivaled directness. --John Yau, Hyperallergic
When the spinster Miss Helen Campbell sets off in a motorcar called The Comet with four high school girls, their cross-country car ride promises to fulfill their singular dreams of grand vistas. Unprepared for the ensuing plane crash, a stolen car, a trip to The Singing Ranch, encounters with cryptic individuals, a painting by Henri Rousseau, a train robber on the lam, an Italian village located in California, a talking door and the assistance of cowboys, Blaise Cendrars, Indians and mountain outlaws who turn into statues, the redoubtable Motor Maids are compelled to dream even larger.
Ron Padgett (born 1942) grew up in Tulsa and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Padgett's How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry. His Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times prize for the best poetry book of 2013. In addition to being a poet, he is the translator of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars. His poems appeared in Jim Jarmusch's film Paterson.
You never know what to expect from Ron Padgett, a poet full of delightful surprises and discoveries. This witty new collection glides from comic to elegiac to lyrical, in celebrations of fairy tales, friendship, cubism, birds, lullabies, spirituality, Dutch painting, and the magic of everyday life, all rendered in artful conversational American.
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Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa in 1942. With Ted Berrigan and others, Padgett reinvented the New York School of poetry in the mid-1960s. Also a distinguished translator of modern French poetry, he has published 15 books of his own, including Great Balls of Fire, and has been honored by a Guggenheim and an American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award. Padgett lives in New York City.
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Great Balls of Fire
TP $8.95 0-918273-80-3 CUSA
When someone we love dies, most of us do something to keep them from completely vanishing. We summon up memories of them, we talk about them, we visit their graves, we treasure photographs of them, we dream about them, and we cry, and for those brief moments they are in some way with us. But when my friend Joe Brainard died, I knew I was going to have to do something beyond all these.
So begins Ron Padgett's warm, conversational memoir--the unlikely and true story of two childhood friends, one straight and one gay, who grew up in 1950s Oklahoma, surprised their families by moving to New York City in search of art and poetry, and became a part of the dynamic community of artists and writers whose work continues to shape American culture.
Much of this intimate memoir is told in Joe's own direct and unforgettable voice. Dozens of letters, journal entries, poems, photographs, and artworks create a stirring portrait of the times--one that illuminates not only Joe Brainard's life and art, but the influence that his kindness and insight had on the lives of his contemporaries, including Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Frank O' Hara, Joe LeSueur, Anne Waldman, John Ashbery, Kenward Elmslie, and countless other friends, lovers, and admirers.
As Ron Padgett generously shares his memories, he allows us all to get to know Joe Brainard, a truly great person who just happened to be a brilliant artist and poet. Above all, Joe is a gentle reminder that love, life, and art matter every second.
Poet Ron Padgett, the son of an Oklahoma bootlegger, grew up in Tulsa where he met Joe Brainard at the age of 6. His recent books include the memoir, Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers and the collection of poems You Never Know.