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Photo credits: Pascal Perich as posted on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ron-padgett
Poet, editor, and translator Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Padgett’s father was a bootlegger in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He influenced many of Padgett's works, particularly in the writer's taste for independence and a willingness to deviate from rules, even his own. This would later be described as a stubborn streak of boyishness, allowing a wry innocence in his poetry. Padgett started writing poetry at the age of 13. In an interview, the poet said that he was inspired to write when a girl he had a big crush on did not return his affection. As a high-school student he founded the avant-garde literary journal The White Dove Review with his friends and fellow students Joe Brainard and Dick Gallup. Soliciting and publishing work from poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, the magazine ran for five issues. [...] He is the author of over 20 collections of poetry, including Big Cabin (2019); Collected Poems (2013), How Long (2011), How to Be Perfect (2007); You Never Know (2001); and Great Balls of Fire (1969, reissued 1990).
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Poems
Poems
The Japanese Garden
In 1958 or ’59 when I was sixteenI came up with the ideaof replacing my parents’ backyardwith a Japanese garden –this in a middle-class neighborhoodof Tulsa, Oklahoma.I even showed a design to my mother,who tried to imagine her smooth green lawnreplaced by rocks, gravel,and, somehow, a stream.Even before she said diplomaticallyI’ll show this to your daddyI saw that the whole idea was unrealistic,and I put out my hand for the drawing,relieved to be denied. But what if my parents had gone onnot only to put in the gardenbut also to demolish our houseand replace it with a Japanese one,donned kimonos and learned Japanese,my dad strutting among the pines like a samurai,mother on bended knees, head bowed? The house stayed the same, the grass grewand got mowed, I went away to college,my parents divorced. Now someone else lives there,happy among the cherry blossoms that never fall.
-from How Long (2011)
In 1958 or ’59 when I was sixteenI came up with the ideaof replacing my parents’ backyardwith a Japanese garden –this in a middle-class neighborhoodof Tulsa, Oklahoma.I even showed a design to my mother,who tried to imagine her smooth green lawnreplaced by rocks, gravel,and, somehow, a stream.Even before she said diplomaticallyI’ll show this to your daddyI saw that the whole idea was unrealistic,and I put out my hand for the drawing,relieved to be denied. But what if my parents had gone onnot only to put in the gardenbut also to demolish our houseand replace it with a Japanese one,donned kimonos and learned Japanese,my dad strutting among the pines like a samurai,mother on bended knees, head bowed? The house stayed the same, the grass grewand got mowed, I went away to college,my parents divorced. Now someone else lives there,happy among the cherry blossoms that never fall.
-from How Long (2011)
Grasshopper
It's funny when the mind thinks about the psyche,as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter.
It's a bad idea to fall asleepwhile flying a helicopter:
when you wake up, the helicopter is goneand you are too, left behind in a dream,
and there is no way to catch up,for catching up doesn't figure
in the scheme of things. You arewho you are, right now,
and the mind is so scared it closes its eyesand then forgets it has eyes
and the grasshopper, the one that thinksyou're a helicopter, leaps onto your back!
He is a brave little grasshopperand he never sleeps
for the poem he writes is the actof always being awake, better than anything
you could ever write or do.Then he springs away.
-from How Long (2011)
It's funny when the mind thinks about the psyche,as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter.
It's a bad idea to fall asleepwhile flying a helicopter:
when you wake up, the helicopter is goneand you are too, left behind in a dream,
and there is no way to catch up,for catching up doesn't figure
in the scheme of things. You arewho you are, right now,
and the mind is so scared it closes its eyesand then forgets it has eyes
and the grasshopper, the one that thinksyou're a helicopter, leaps onto your back!
He is a brave little grasshopperand he never sleeps
for the poem he writes is the actof always being awake, better than anything
you could ever write or do.Then he springs away.
-from How Long (2011)
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