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poem [i’m in the house] by Ron Padgett

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This for That

by Ron Padgett

What will I have for breakfast? I wish I had some plums like the ones in Williams’s poem. He apologized to his wife for eating them but what he did not do was apologize to those who would read his poem and also not be able to eat them. That is why I like his poem when I am not hungry. Right now I do not like him or his poem. This is just to say that.

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Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes: Ron Padgett is a master of scale, adept at tiny poems, long poems, and prose poems, too. Here are two from his recent Collected Poems, published by Coffee House Press and winner of both the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The first is titled “Song”:

Learning to write, be a good person and get to heaven are all the same thing,

but trying to do them all at once is enough to drive you crazy

The second is “Poem”:

No sir! Trade places with an animal? Have a muskrat read my books while I scuttle through the woods in terror?

Padgett has many admirers among poets, among them John Ashbery, Thomas Lux, Alice Notley, Charles Simic (“As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament.”), and Tom Clark (“These poems mingle the nervy sophistication and cosmopolitan experimentalism of a thriving international avant-garde art tradition with a kind of hillbilly twang that’s unmistakably American.”).

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Ron Padgett and Clark Coolidge, Supernatural Overtones, (facsimile, excerpts), The Figures, Great Barrington, MA, 1990, Edition of 500 (reading copy pdf here) [Eclipse Archive. © Ron Padgett, Clark Coolidge]