Search results for ""Author Ron Padgett""

Written over three seasons in a Vermont cabin, these poems act as a reflecting pool, casting back mortality, consciousness, and time in new, crystal-clear light.

Read more less

Ron Padgett's title poem asks: "How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China." With the arrival of his first grandchild, Padgett becomes even more inspired to confront the eternal mysteries in poems with a wry, rueful honesty that comes only with experience, in his case sixty-eight years of it. I never thought, forty years ago, taping my poems into a notebook, that one day the tape would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off and that I'd find myself on hands and knees groaning as I picked the pieces up off the floor one by one Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, and "a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist" (Peter Gizzi). His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He was also a guest on Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion in 2009. Padgett is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and his most recent books include How to Be Perfect; You Never Know, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard; and If I Were You. Born in Oklahoma, he lives in New York City and Calais, Vermont.

Read more less

Kenneth Koch, in the words of editor Ron Padgett, wrote poetry that became a part of “the mystery and pleasure of being alive.” A center of the New York School, he gained notoriety by mocking the stodginess and academicism of much mid-century verse.This enthralling selection encompasses the full range of Koch’s poetry, and includes such already classic works as “Fresh Air” (his devastatingly satirical assault on mid-1950s poetic conformism), “The Pleasure of Peace” (with its defiant assertion that “One single piece of pink mint chewing gum contains more pleasures / Than the whole rude gallery of war!”), “The Art of Poetry,” his astonishing and light-footed survey of the aims and methods of poetry, and poems from the late collection New Addresses, including “To World War Two,” “To Psychoanalysis,” and “To the French Language.”A poet at once directly accessible and deeply mysterious, Kenneth Koch was the master of an art of surprise in which the world is constantly reimagined.About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

The American artist's much-imitated memoir, described by Paul Auster as "one of the few totally original books I have ever read.” Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail." Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.

Read more less

Discover the works of Joe Brainard, whose quirky style earned him a reputation as a “recognizable American phenomenon” and “oddball classicist”—with a foreword by 4321 author Paul Auster (John Ashbery) An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical work I Remember has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many other pieces that for the first time present the full range of Brainard's writing in all its deadpan wit, madcap inventiveness, self-revealing frankness, and generosity of spirit. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. “Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed-off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance,” writes Paul Auster in the introduction to this collection. “These little works . . . are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits.” Assembled by the author’s longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett and including fourteen previously unpublished works, here is a fresh and affordable way to rediscover a unique American artist.

Read more less

"Theater such as Kenneth Koch cannot be simply paraphrased, and presents to the audience the classic Mennipean challenge: to ponder, to mull it over, to think."--Mac Wellman The Banquet brings together 144 plays, ten screenplays, and five operas spanning more than five decades of experimental work from a writer John Ashbery has called "simply the best we have." Witty, provocative, and playful, Kenneth Koch's work draws on poetry, musicals, improvisational comedy, satire, and other forms for their inspiration and touches on subjects ranging from the silly to the sublime. Kenneth Koch (1925--2002), known for his association with the New York School of poetry, wrote many collections of poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction. His books include Seasons on Earth, On the Edge, Thank You and Other Poems, The Art of Love, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, Hotel Lambosa, and The Collected Fiction, and several books on teaching children how to write poetry. Koch was awarded numerous honors, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University.

Read more less

Flash Cards is a primer of modern Chinese life, constructing a complex philosophical vision from swatches of daily events and observations. As Yu Jian has written about his own work: “It is possible to see eternity—to see everything—in a teacup or a sweet wrapper. Everything in the world is poetry.” An eighteen-year-old college girl walks to class on a spring morning rosy cheeks long legs inside a wool skirt only a small wild part revealed beautiful girl chest held high a cup of tea between her hands a book beneath her elbow crossing the flower garden looking straight ahead she is rushing to catch a philosophy class Yu Jian, born in 1954 in Kunming, China, is a poet, author, and documentary film director. He began writing poetry in the early 1970s, influenced both by classical Chinese poetry and modern Western writers such as Walt Whitman. Yu Jian is a major figure among the "Third Generation Poets” who came after the “Misty Poetry” movement of the early 1980s. Wang Ping’s books include two collections of poetry, The Magic Whip and Of Flesh & Spirit, and the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Her novel The Last Communist Virgin was winner of the 2008 Minnesota Book Award in the category of Novel & Short Story and the 2007 Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in the category of Poetry/Prose. Ron Padgett’s translations include Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems, Guillaume Apollinaire's Poet Assassinated, and, with Bill Zavatsky, Valery Larbaud's Poems of A. O. Barnabooth. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Padgett was named officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Read more less

Fifteen years of Joe Brainard’s illustrated appropriation of classic comic strip character, Nancy From 1963 to 1978, Joe Brainard created more than 100 artworks that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into a variety of astonishing situations. The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of more than 50 works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.

Read more less

Blaise Cendrars was a pioneer of modernist literature. The full range of his poetry--from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor--offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now. Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe. With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Leger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry--from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor--offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

Read more less

Ted and Sandy Berrigan’s honeymoon ended when her father, a well-connected doctor, forced Sandy into a mental hospital, had Ted run out of town by the sheriff, and hired private detectives to investigate his friends. These intimate, irresistible letters, written over the course of their three-month separation, read like a passionate, epistolary novel—full of longing, intrigue, and gossip. They also offer serious advice for developing readers and writers, bring the thriving cultural scene in mid-twentieth-century New York to life, and serve as a day-by-day chronicle of Ted Berrigan’s developing voice. In addition to the letters, this collection contains never-before-published reproductions from A Book of Poetry for Sandy,featuring Berrigan’s cutouts, drawings, photographs of fellow poets and artists, and excerpts from poems that eventually became The Sonnets.

Read more less