We use italics
to put electricity into words.
Then we plug lamps
into the words.
That’s how we light our homes.
Really.
~
Ron Padgett grew up in Tulsa in 1942 and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The French government made him an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters. Padgett’s How Long was Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. For many years he taught poetry writing to children. He is also a translator of twentieth-century French poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. His own work has been translated into eighteen languages. Padgett’s most recent poetry collection, Alone and Not Alone (with a cover by Jim Dine), makes a brief appearance in Paterson. Both Padgett and Jim Jarmusch studied under poet Kenneth Koch at Columbia University. For more information, go to www.ronpadgett.com.