Ron Padgett's Cool Sensibility

Ron Padgett, the suavely funny second-generation New York School poet, occupies a space among my guilty pleasures—not because the quality of his poems isn’t high-culture enough for me, but because his work seems to come so easily to him (a delusion, I’m sure) and yet still provides oodles of pleasure. I’m envious of his ease. His deeply pleasing, light-as-air poetic sensibility leaks out over, around, and through his seemingly simple, eminently accessible lines. And yes, his poems are easy as hell to read.

Take this little beauty, “The Love Cook”. How relaxed and easy it all seems in its disrobing of the reader, yet how quietly astonishing, too, in the unexpected turn of a line: “Sit down and take off your shoes/and socks and in fact the rest/of your clothes. …”

Then there’s the deadpan hillarity of “How to Be Perfect,” which begins, manual-style, with these three lines: “Get some sleep./ Don't give advice./ Take care of your teeth and gums.” This list poem to end all list poems sails through scads of banal advice, driven along by the tone, the zen humor, of the poet’s voice. “It must give pleasure,” Wallace Stevens demands of poetry, and Padgett, a true disciple, generally follows the master’s dictate.