Today, 6/12/16, is the birthday of avant-garde American poet, essayist, and translator Ron Padgett (1942) (books by this author), who once said: “If you match yourself up against Shakespeare, guess what? You lose. It’s not productive. Better to focus on the poem you’re writing, do your work, and leave it at that.”
Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father was a bootlegger who also traded cars; his mother was a housewife who assisted Padgett’s father with bootlegging. Padgett was a precocious reader as a teenager, drifting toward Baudelaire and Rimbaud. He said: “When I got to adolescence, I became more and more gloomy and introspective and serious and angst-ridden.” He and a few friends started an avant-garde literary journal called The White Dove, which lasted for five years. They weren’t shy about writing to their literary heroes and soliciting work. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and LeRoi Jones all published poems in Padgett’s small magazine.
Padgett went to New York to attend Columbia University (1960), where he fell in with a group of poets who favored stream-of-consciousness writing, vivid imagery, and spontaneity. It was the 1960s, and Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Ted Berrigan drew inspiration from the art galleries, museums, dancers, and artists that surrounded them. Padgett inherited Kenneth Koch’s teaching position as a “poet-in-the-schools” (1969) for the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and stayed for nine years. In the beginning, he was paid $50 for three class visits, which he could do in one day, and which paid for an entire month’s rent, utilities, and his phone bill. He loved teaching public school children. He said that whenever poets visited a classroom, “We were like heroes being welcomed home.”
Padgett’s collections of poetry include Bean Spasms: Poems and Prose (1967, with Ted Berrigan); How to Be Perfect (2007); and Alone and Not Alone (2015). His collection How Long (2011) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Padgett says: “Almost everything that’s happened in my poetry is what you might call organic. I don’t do much pre-conceiving. If I start to sound too much like the Ron Padgett that I’ve read before, I stop myself.”
On writing his poems, he says: “If I don’t make line breaks, it’s a prose poem. The line breaks are part of the dance of the poem. If I’m not dancing, I don’t know what steps to take. I don’t know whether to turn or to bow or to move quickly or whatever. I don’t know what to do if I don’t have the line breaks.”
As heard on The Bob Edwards Show, December 17, 2010
My father and I disagreed vehemently about politics and religion in the late 1960s. He was a World War II veteran and a colonel in the Wisconsin National Guard. I was a long-haired student at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, helping to organize antiwar demonstrations. He was a devout Catholic. I was an agnostic. My younger siblings remember all too vividly the violent arguments he and I would have. There was nowhere to hide from them in the small home where we lived. Once, my father ended up chasing me around the kitchen table, intent on hitting me for the first time in his life—and then he broke down crying.
The memory of those tears says more to me about who my father was than the memories of our arguments. He was a man who cared passionately—about the people he knew and loved, but also about people in need he didn’t know at all. He taught me to care with the same intensity. I never doubted that he loved me, even in those moments when I felt least understood by him. And his life spoke eloquently about how much he cared for the less fortunate. He and my mother always did charitable work—preparing and serving meals for homeless people at St. Ben’s parish in Milwaukee’s inner city, for example—but after my father retired, he took his social action to a new level.
He was admitted to a lay ministry program sponsored by the Milwaukee Archdiocese, a program that introduced him to contemporary theology and the history of Catholic social action. This was heady stuff for a man who had never gone to college—one of the greatest regrets of his life, by the way. Suddenly, my conservative father sounded like someone from Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement of the 1930s. He became incensed about how unconcerned the wealthy people in his suburban parish were about the plight of the less fortunate. When he graduated from the program, he became the Social Programs Coordinator for his parish, and until he died at eighty-one, he was a thorn in the side of his fellow parishioners, continually exhorting them to give more to, and do more for, those in need.
It is in large part because of the example set by my father, Arthur Kessenich, that I believe I have a responsibility to give of myself—not just to those I know and love, but to those I would never know if I didn’t seek them out: the poor, the disabled, the imprisoned. It is because of my father’s example that I try to tithe, to give 10 percent of my income to charity; that I spend two hours a week assisting a blind man; that I help lead Alternatives to Violence workshops in prisons.
I don’t do it out of guilt or fear of damnation, but out of love. Because I saw love in action, in my father’s tears and in the way he lived his life. Because of him, I believe in love.
Lawrence Kessenich was formerly an editor at Houghton Mifflin, where he encouraged W. P. Kinsella to write Shoeless Joe, the basis for the movie “Field of Dreams.” Mr. Kessenich now makes his living as a marketing writer while spending his free time writing poetry, essays, short stories, plays, and novels. He lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Lawrence Kessenich Reading Poetry on Poet to Poet Writer to Writer with Doug Holder
Let us spend our time alone
In silence, without talking.
Searching for wisdom’s stone,
Let us spend our time alone
And cultivate what we have sown.
Come, let’s keep on walking.
Let us spend our time alone
In silence, without talking.
And here are the ISBN Numbers: ISBN-10: 0988944766
ISBN-13: 978-0988944763
I Dream; Therefore You Are
by Melissa Studdard
Moon & Pillow
say this is yesterday, and I’ve
pasted you back together
with salt. I mixed you with straw
& carried you into the desert to dry. My adobe
tulip,
my red earth, my paper doll,
I forgot that the rock I propped
you up against
was made of tombstone,
so I searched beneath your eyelids
for an explanation of color. I built
highways & colonies across
the meadows of sleep.
I followed you into the temple of absence
to learn how to die.
Don’t you know
how hard it is to keep you
buried? Please.
Have some compassion.
It’s like a swamp in this desert.
The caskets are at sea level
and always rising. See—
there you go, floating by, mouth full of
music and death.
I guess this means they finally told you:
You are the corpse in this off-key song.
And my words are a pilgrimage
bearing gifts. I brought you flowers.
Is it too late? Are you hungry?
I’m planting a casserole
in the grass.
We Are the Universe
by Melissa Studdard
Watching your mouth as you eat I think
perhaps an apple is the universe and your body
is an orchard full of trees. I’ve seen the way your leaves
cling to the ground in fall, and I noted then
that your voice sounded soft, like feathered, drifting things
coming finally to rest. Note:
I was the core in your pink flesh. You
were hungry birds
and foxes walking through the miles of me.
You climbed, dug your nails in my bark, yanked
something loose. Don’t tell me what it is.
Just keep it close.
Because I planted these rows
and rows of myself for you–
so I could lick the juice from your lips,
so I could remember
how round and hot
the promise of seed. If I could find
that orchard right now, I’d run all through the rows
of you. I’d stand in the center and twirl
until I got dizzy and fell. I’d climb high and shake
until the only thing left in you was longing,
and you’d write a poem for me. You’d say:
Your mouth is the universe. Your desire
is an orchard full of trees.
Photo by Jennifer Ayers of Ayers Design
Melissa Studdard is the author of My Yehidah, The Tiferet Talk Interviews, and the best-selling novel Six Weeks to Yehidah. Her books have received numerous awards, including the Forward National Literature Award, the International Book Award, January Magazine‘s best children’s books of the year, The Reader’s Favorite Award, and the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. Her poetry collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, is available from Saint Julian Press. Her short writings have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, and she currently serves as professor for Lone Star College System, a teaching artist for The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative, an editorial adviser for The Criterion, and host of Tiferet Talk radio. Visit her website. Melissa lives in Texas with her extended family and four sweet, but mischievous, cats.
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