Padgett, Ron

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry

The classic, inspiring account of a poet's experience teaching school children to write poetry

When Kenneth Koch entered the Manhattan classrooms of P.S. 61, the children, excited by the opportunity to work with an instructor able to inspire their talent and energy, would clap and shout with pleasure. In this vivid account, Koch describes his inventive methods for teaching these children how to create poems and gives numerous examples of their work. Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is a valuable text for all those who care about freeing the creative imagination and educating the young.

Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

Great Balls of Fire

It's impossible to characterize Ron Padgett's poems except to say that there's never a dull moment. His versatility in this collection is stunning, what Kirkus Reviews calls "a sustained virtuoso performance, a staggering display of poetic forms and voices, a literary arsenal. " His sense of humor and experimental daring make this an excellent choice for both collectors and readers who want a taste of something different, yet intelligent and often just plain fun. I can vouch that intense discussions have centered on some of these poems, such as the sonnet with a single repeating line, or the staged prose poem that depicts "true " love as the ironic paradox it is.

How to Be Perfect

"Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder."-Robert Creeley

Ron Padgett has reenergized modern poetry with exuberant and tender love poems, with exceptionally lucid and touching elegies, and with imaginative and action-packed homages to American culture and visual art. He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have always imparted a contagious sense of joy.

In these new poems, Padgett hasn't forsaken his beloved Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the alarm. Here, he asks, "What makes us so mean?" And he really wants to know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving. "Humanity," Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still "has to take it one step at a time."

Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, teacher, and, as Peter Gizzi says, "a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist." His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Visit his website at www.ronpadgett.com.

Handbook of Poetic Forms

A reference guide to various forms of poetry with entries arranged in alphabetical order. Each entry defines the form and gives its history, examples, and suggestions for usage. For this second revised edition of the Handbook, 19 teaching poets have written 76 entries on traditional and modern poetic forms. The Handbook succintly defines the forms, summarizes ther histories, quotes good examples (both ancient and modern), and offers professional tricks of the trade on how to use each form.

You Never Know

You never know what to expect from Ron Padgett, a poet full of delightful surprises and discoveries. This witty new collection glides from comic to elegiac to lyrical, in celebrations of fairy tales, friendship, cubism, birds, lullabies, spirituality, Dutch painting, and the magic of everyday life, all rendered in artful conversational American.

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Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa in 1942. With Ted Berrigan and others, Padgett reinvented the New York School of poetry in the mid-1960s. Also a distinguished translator of modern French poetry, he has published 15 books of his own, including Great Balls of Fire, and has been honored by a Guggenheim and an American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award. Padgett lives in New York City.

Also Available
Great Balls of Fire
TP $8.95 0-918273-80-3 CUSA

The Teachers & Writers Guide to Walt Whitman (Teachers & Writers Guides)

Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Head: The Angel Hair Anthology

This anthology presents material selected from the collection of Angel Hair magazine and books edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh between 1966 and 1978. Included are substantial sections of writing--in some cases entire books--from an impressive range of poets including Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Hannah Weiner, Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer, Kenward Elmslie, Tom Clark, Joanne Kyger, Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, Lorenzo Thomas, John Wieners, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, as well as Waldman and Warsh, among many others. From the nascent St. Mark's Poetry Project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Bolinas and Boulder, Angel Hair published an idiosyncratic cross-section of innovative writing in distinctive format, becoming one of the longest-lived and most influential publishers on the small press scene. The anthology of literary writings is supplemented with brief memoirs by more than twenty writers, and the book also includes an annotated checklist by Aaron Fischer and Steven Clay that comprises a citation and photograph of each of the approximately eighty books, magazines, broadsides and catalogues issued by the Press.

Blood Work: Selected Prose

Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan