You Never Know - Softcover

Padgett, Ron

4.1

100 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891280 ISBN 13: 9781566891288

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2002

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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.

Also Available
Great Balls of Fire
TP $8.95 0-918273-80-3 CUSA

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About the Author:

Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1942. With Ted Berrigan and others, Padgett reinvented the New York School of Poetry in the mid-1960s. He has published over fourteen books, including Great Balls of Fire and is regarded as the definitive translator of Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire. Padgett lives with his wife in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

Coming through with clarity and charm in his seventh full collection, Padgett is the undisputed Zen master of the chicane, maintaining a perfectly readable and casual tone while turning meanings on a dime, or several dimes, on his way to a reliably radiant and melancholy conclusion. The giddy excitement of these changes is difficult to excerpt: "Sudden Flashes" begins in media res, "hit the sky hot as javelins vibrating in a baobab that became a mast with chevrons aflutter, and the ghost ship floats into an icy abyss." Recent work has tended toward a prosy style that fronts luminous anecdotes with outrageous titles ("Licking Igor's Head"; "Extreme Vindaloo"; "The Missing Lips") that remain startling even after the eccentric observations have come to seem natural. These poems make a go at the epistemological concerns of the title, but like his collaborator Ted Berrigan or his predecessors James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, Padgett shines brightest when he interrupts his crazy word combinations to be serious about love and death. And in his breathless praise of a ballerina ("Little Ode to Suzanne Farrell"), he transcends his preoccupation with geometry to soar: "No ode is big or fast enough to have the very all of you inside it so I will have to be like you and climb inside myself and fly into the outline that the pattern of my moving self has left behind." While he acknowledges in the title poem that it's impossible to ever really be certain about "oh anything," this is Padgett's most moving book to date.
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