John Yau Reviews Ron Padgett's Big Cabin

En route to Boston, John Yau reads Ron Padgett's latest collection, Big Cabin (Coffeehouse Press, 2019). "By the time the train got to Boston, I had finished the book and was dipping back into it," Yau remarks. From there: 

Padgett writes in a relaxed, vernacular style. His poems often remind me of cartoon thought balloons floating above a solitary figure who has just had a revelation. In “Sweeping Away,” he writes, “What I want to do / is to forget everything / I ever knew about poetry / and sweep the pine needles / off the cabin roof,” concluding:

The pen is mightier than the sword
but today the broom
is mightier than the pen.

A few moments before I began writing this review, I imagined a scene in which W. H. Auden and Padgett are seated side by side at a bar, or across from each other at a diner. They have come to the end of their conversation and are about to part. Remembering his poem, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Auden looks at Padgett and says in his gravelly voice: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” With a smile breaking across his face, like sunlight on a pond, Padgett replies: “Why should it?”

I began reading Padgett in the 1970s, when I was in my mid-20s and had just arrived in New York. I bought copies of Bean Spasms: Poems and Prose, (with Ted Berrigan, New York, NY: Kulchur Press, 1967); Great Balls of Fire (New York, NY: Holt, 1969); The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Ron, (with Jim Dine, London, England: Cape Goliard Press, 1970); and Crazy Compositions (Southampton, New York: Big Sky, 1974). From then on, I have bought any book of his that I could find – poetry, prose, and translations. In 2007, I published Padgett’s translation of Prose Poems by Pierre Reverdy through my press, Black Square Editions. So if you are looking for a critical review, I am not sure you have come to the right place.

Read on at Hyperallergic.