How Long - by Ron Padgett (Paperback)

About the Book

Padgett's witty poems ache to save the world--surpassing moral superiority and infusing light, energy, and humor into everyday life.

Book Synopsis

These witty poems ache to save the world--infusing light, energy, and humor into everyday life.

Padgett's title poem asks: "How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China." With the arrival of his first grandchild, Padgett becomes even more inspired to confront the eternal mysteries with a wry, rueful honesty. This elegiac and witty collection illuminates the world at large and at small--from the Great Wall of China to the radiant details of the everyday--and brings wonder and pleasure with it.

Review Quotes

"Padgett's sense of romantic joy is undiminished, as is his thoughtfulness about language and the ways in which time changes meaning, and sense can morph into eloquent absurdity." --Entertainment Weekly

"Padgett's poems are so playful, self-mocking and eager to please that it would be easy to overlook their craft, not to mention the depth and sincerity of the emotions they convey." --The Washington Post

"Reading Padgett one realizes that playfulness and lightness of touch are not at odds with seriousness. . . . As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament." --New York Review of Books

"How Long includes everything--humor and resentment, anger and ardor, pettiness and astonishment." --The Yale Review

"Padgett's genius is to follow his thought no matter where it leads him. He is less concerned with making an old-fashioned shapely poem than he is with the movement of a shapely mind, and in that regard he joins ranks with other poets who have broken new ground." --Bill Zavatsky

"A Padgett book is always a delight. The humor and wry wisdom that shows up in Ron Padgett poems is forever quirky, often also full of feeling, and nearly always clearly to the point." --Galatea Resurrects

"Padgett's poetry drifts from one thought to the next, then circles back on itself, cartwheeling through stanzas and parading through lines, often good-humored even as he discusses the most solemn of adult subjects, death." --Gently Read Literature

About the Author

Ron Padgett grew up in Tulsa and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Padgett's How Long was Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times prize for the best poetry book of 2013. In addition to being a poet, he is also the translator of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. His own work has been translated into eighteen languages.