|
POEM OF THE WEEK #19
Ron Padgett
|
Ron Padgett
probably gets tired of hearing this but the phrase "poet's poet" was invented just for him. His
poems
are open and good-humoured -- anyone can understand them -- but so sly and subtle in invention
that only practitioners realise just how rare his talent is. He takes everyday language places it
never knew it could go. Padgett's "wonderful, generous, funny poetry"
(John Ashbery),
"a provocatively persistent wonder"
(Robert Creeley),
can be sampled in
New and Selected Poems
(David R. Godine, 1995)
and You Never Know
(Coffee House Press, 2002)
among many others. A renowned
teacher,
he is also the author of memoirs including
Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers
(University of Oklahoma Press, 2003)
and translator of
Blaise Cendrars: Complete Poems
(University of California Press, 1993).
|
|
Body Lit
My lower back is a little bit stiff,
it's like what literary critics like
to call a "cautionary tale" (potential
ouch). Inside my nose is a short story,
too short, perhaps, and too much story,
next to the eclogue of my eyes
that sing back and forth to one another
like shepherds on a knoll made stubby
by sheep as thin as epigraphs.
But these figures of speech fade quickly
outside of literature, out in the actual air
and sunlight on my one and only face.
POEM ARCHIVE
|
© 2004 KultureFlash
Limited |
