The celebrated poet Ron Padgett — a mainstay of the "soi-disant Tulsa School of poetry" and a main source of inspiration for aspiring poets since he burst on the New York scene in the 1960s — will appear with moderator David Lehman at the
New School on Wednesday, November 7, for what is sure to be an
entertaining evening of poetry and talk. The forum will take place at 6:30 in room 510 of 66 West 12 Street. Padgett will read half the time, the field questions from the moderator and audience.
The Oklahoma-born Padgett is a poet, a renowned translator from the French (with versions of Apollinaire, Cendrars, Larbaud et al), a tireless literary collaborator (with such as Ted Berrigan, Jim Dine, Tom Veitch, Trevor Winkfield), an assiduous editor, and the author of affecting memoirs of Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, and his own bootleg dad. With Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bernadette Mayer, Michael Brownstein, Maureen Owen, and others, Padgett may be said to have renewed or even reinvented the New
York School of Poetry in the mid-1960s with St. Mark's Church in the Bowery as its center. (See the epilogue of The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets.) He has published more than fourteen books,
including Great Balls of Fire, Toujours L'Amour, Tulsa Kid, How to Be Perfect, and You Never Know.
Padgett studied with Kenneth Koch at Columbia College. He taught poetry writing to schoolchildren and became publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. He was also the edtor-in-chief of Full Court Press, which published Edwin Denby's Collected Poems and Joe Brainard's I Remember. He won a Guggenheim Fellowshiop in 1986. His
poetry has been translated into fourteen languages and has appeared in several volumes of The
Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, Postmodern American Poetry: A
Norton Anthology, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award.
A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he edited The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, which the Library of America published last spring. He lives in New York City and Vermont.
Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator at the New School of Writing.