In Search of Truths, Both Small and Large: Ron Padgett At Greenwich Library This Sunday

Tomorrow’s featured spoken artist of the The Poet’s Voice program began writing and publishing with friends Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard--while still in high school. Despite lasting only five issues, The White Dove Review boasted the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other seminal voices of the Beats.

In the years following his relocation in 1960 from Oklahoma to New York, Ron Padgett studied with Kenneth Koch and Lionel Trilling at Columbia College, complemented by a year in Paris under a Fulbright fellowship in French Literature.

Since the 1967 release of Bean Spasms (Granary Books), his first poetry collection co-written with Ted Berrigan (see the interview above about Padgett and his role in helping re-define the New York School of Poetry in the mid-‘60s), Ron Padgett has published numerous collections, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist How Long (Coffee House Press, 2011), How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007), Poems I Guess I Wrote (CUZ Editions, 2001), as well as 1993’s Blood Work (Bamberger Books), a prose collection.

Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems (University of California Press, 1992) and Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Viking, 1971) are representative of his parallel accomplishments in translation, for which Padgett received numerous grants and awards from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts and Columbia University’s Translation Center.

Praised by James Tate for his ability to make his work “sing with absolutely true pitch,” Padgett’s poetry demonstrates a probing commitment to “truths, both small and large,” inspiring “laughter, or at least a thoughtful sigh." In that spirit, here's a jaunty keyboard adaptation of Canadian poet Stuart Ross’ homage, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Ron Padgett”, performed by UK singer Ben Walker:

A resident of New York City, Padgett edited the comprehensive three-volume World Poets (Scribner, 2000) and was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008. He also received the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and has placed pieces in The Best American Poetry (Scribner, various editions), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1994), and The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006); his work has been translated into fourteen languages.  

Enjoying its 36^th year since inception, The Poet's Voice is supported in Greenwich by the Horace E. Manacher Poetry Fund and the Friends of Greenwich Library. The reading is free and all are invited to attend.

Where:

Meeting Room

The Greenwich Library

101 W. Putnam Ave., Greenwich

When:

Sunday, March 24

3 PM

Contact:

Alice Bonvenuto, (203) 622-7919