How to Be Perfect - Softcover

Padgett, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566892031 ISBN 13: 9781566892032

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2007

Synopsis

“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 these new 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.”

Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, teacher, and, as Peter Gizzi says, “a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist.” His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Visit his website at www.ronpadgett.com.

About this title

About the Author

Ron Padgett's How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best poetry book of 2013. His work has been translated into eighteen languages.

Jason Novak is an cartoonist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker the Paris Review and the Believer among other places. He lives in Oakland.

Review

Padgett’s plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity. He writes, "Everything I think about is a cartoon something / because anything cartoon is immortal / in its own funny little way." Yet these observational, reminiscent, and prescriptive verses are also informed by a sense of loss—not just for his late mother and for departed comrades like Kenneth Koch but for the bohemian ideal that drew him to New York to begin with: "Although one still hears the word conformity," he laments, "it is no longer a pejorative term; now we are on the same page, getting with the program, team players." Even so, Padgett’s cockeyed humor is ultimately optimistic, finding reason for continued hope, even if it means joining "the poetry protection program / so my poems can go out and live under assumed names / in Utah and Muskogee."
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About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1566892031
• ISBN 13: 9781566892032
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128