A lot of people don't like poetry. They get turned off by how desperately poets try to be profound, expressing big ideas"" that no one, not even the poets, really understand. Perhaps, though, these people simply need to be introduced to Ron Padgett, whose plain language and simple ideas speak to reality in a deeper way than most of his counterparts' attempts at insight.
While Padgett's latest collection, ""How to Be Perfect,"" fails to reach the height of beautiful, direct honesty of his truly perfect ""You Never Know,"" still makes you think about how good life can be - which is reason enough to take comfort in its pages. Padgett has always articulated something other poets have not: the intensity of pleasure and sorrow in the everyday life.
In the title poem, Padgett offers only the simplest tips on improving life, such as eating oranges or brushing your teeth. Most of Padgett's wisdom is expressed in a way that assures the reader that he doesn't take himself too seriously: ""Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far more defective than you imagined."" Indeed, if Padgett's philosophy could be summed up into a single piece of guidance, it would be ""don't be so serious.""
Despite this, there is a new kind of cynicism that appears in ""How to Be Perfect"" out of line with Padgett's other works. Perhaps they are the frustrated result of living in a country in the middle of a pointless war, but lines like ""Don't think that progress exists,"" express an unfamiliar pessimism. He communicates the joys of life, as always, but also its tragic loneliness and disappointments. In ""Sitting Down Somewhere Else,"" he says of sitting alone in a restaurant, ""The emptiness of the room was worse / than the emptiness of the universe."" Even Padgett, apparently, feels desperately sad from time to time.
In fact, the longest poem in the collection is called ""The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World,"" and it discusses just that. For a writer who usually uses his poetry as a means of exclaiming his love of life, lines like ""name your own period in history when a darkness swept over us / and made not existing seem like the better choice"" are all the more powerful and terrifying.
Padgett, one of the only New York School poets still living, starts to express the exhaustion of being alive in his latest collection.
Ultimately, though, Padgett still reminds us that existing is the better choice, but for the smallest reasons. After all, if we didn't exist, we wouldn't be able to think about the moon, a kiss or similes. Padgett is one of very few poets whose work can make you laugh out loud or bring to mind those things you think about when you're lying in bed trying to get to sleep. ""We refer to the decades of a century as the twenties, thirties, forties, etc. - even the teens - but why do I not know the name of the first decade of a century? Is it a blind spot particular to me?"" he asks in ""Pikakirjoitusvihko.""
No, it's not, and it's comforting to any Padgett reader to know that they're not the only ones worrying about these sorts of things.
