Ron Padgett is a poet, translator, and memoirist from Tulsa. He left for New York in 1960 to find inspiration from poets like Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara. Last year Ron released Collected Poems, a tome collecting five decades of his work.

In this segment, Ron reads to us from his Collected Poems, then tells us where his first poem came from and what Allen Ginsberg used to do with tomatoes.

Music:
“Accursed Windmills” by Qkcofs
“Windows” by Trigger
“Sono Bom” by Axial
“In the Fallout Shelter on Typewriters Dreaming/Bounding Toward the Snowy
Horizon” by The Fucked Up Beat
“Typewriter Demo 1A” by David Evans
“A Foal Sired by the Wind” by Janne Nummela
“Vreemd Lied” by Jaap Blonk & Splinks
“J.S.Bach’s Concerto No.5 in F-minor for Harpsichord and Strings (BWV 1056) 1957” by Glenn Gould
“Poirot and Tarutz walk in Paris” by Evgeny Grinko

Readings:
Jack Kerouac reads “American Haiku” featuring Al Cohn and Zoot Sims on saxophone
Allen Ginsberg reads “Howl”
E.E. Cummings reads “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself XLVIII” read by Orson Wells

The poems Ron read, “Joe’s Walk” and “As It Turns Out,” can be found in his new book, Collected Poems by Ron Padgett, published by CoffeeHouse Press in 2013. Order your copy of Collected Poems.

The recording of Ron Pagdett reading Goethe comes from PennSound, a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Listen to Ron Padgett read.