Poets and Poems: Ron Padgett and “Collected Poems”

When Ron Padgett was a teenager, according to his biography at the Poetry Foundation, he and some friends founded a poetry review – and he convinced Allen Ginsberg (among others) to submit poems to it. The review lasted for five issues. But still, not bad for a young man from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Padgett has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, translations of French poets (like Apollonaire), essays, and memoirs, and edited or co-edited poetry anthologies. He is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist or a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

In other words, he is a presence in American poetry. And now he’s assembled selected work from a lifetime of publishing into Collected Poems. It’s a hefty volume (782 pages of poetry, and then notes and an appendix). It’s also a rewarding volume, a fascinating collection of the poems of youth, maturity, middle age and beyond.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Larisa Koshkina via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.