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.

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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.

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“Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.”—Robert CreeleyRon 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.”

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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