You Never Know [Paperback]

Ron Padgett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2002

You never know what to expect from Ron Padgett, a poet full of delightful surprises and discoveries. This witty new collection glides from comic to elegiac to lyrical, in celebrations of fairy tales, friendship, cubism, birds, lullabies, spirituality, Dutch painting, and the magic of everyday life, all rendered in artful conversational American.

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Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa in 1942. With Ted Berrigan and others, Padgett reinvented the New York School of poetry in the mid-1960s. Also a distinguished translator of modern French poetry, he has published 15 books of his own, including Great Balls of Fire, and has been honored by a Guggenheim and an American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award. Padgett lives in New York City.

Also Available
Great Balls of Fire
TP $8.95 0-918273-80-3 CUSA

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Coming through with clarity and charm in his seventh full collection, Padgett is the undisputed Zen master of the chicane, maintaining a perfectly readable and casual tone while turning meanings on a dime, or several dimes, on his way to a reliably radiant and melancholy conclusion. The giddy excitement of these changes is difficult to excerpt: "Sudden Flashes" begins in media res, "hit the sky hot as javelins vibrating in a baobab that became a mast with chevrons aflutter, and the ghost ship floats into an icy abyss." Recent work has tended toward a prosy style that fronts luminous anecdotes with outrageous titles ("Licking Igor's Head"; "Extreme Vindaloo"; "The Missing Lips") that remain startling even after the eccentric observations have come to seem natural. These poems make a go at the epistemological concerns of the title, but like his collaborator Ted Berrigan or his predecessors James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, Padgett shines brightest when he interrupts his crazy word combinations to be serious about love and death. And in his breathless praise of a ballerina ("Little Ode to Suzanne Farrell"), he transcends his preoccupation with geometry to soar: "No ode is big or fast enough to have the very all of you inside it so I will have to be like you and climb inside myself and fly into the outline that the pattern of my moving self has left behind." While he acknowledges in the title poem that it's impossible to ever really be certain about "oh anything," this is Padgett's most moving book to date.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1942. With Ted Berrigan and others, Padgett reinvented the New York School of Poetry in the mid-1960s. He has published over fourteen books, including Great Balls of Fire and is regarded as the definitive translator of Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire. Padgett lives with his wife in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566891280
• ISBN-13: 978-1566891288
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,215,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How can ever Padgett book be his best?!, October 29, 2002

By 

Stuart (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Never Know (Paperback)

Since the 1960s, Ron Padgett has been writing some of the best, and funniest, and most challenging poetry in the English language. My favourite of his books have been The Tulsa Kid and Toujours L'Amour, but I've loved everything he's written (even the small-press oddity Poems I Guess I Wrote). His direct language, his enthusiasm for goofiness, his smart playfulness -- all this stuff moves me and inspires me.

But with You Never Know, Padgett moves beyond the 10th rung of a 10-rung ladder. He's still nuts, and often hilarious, but this whole mortality thing has got him doing stuff so perfect, so condensed, so magical... geez.

You know, people generally hate poetry. But shove a book like this in their shaking paws and they might have second thoughts.

It's a lovely looking book, too, but it would've looked better mimeographed and stapled down the side with a line drawing by Joe Brainard on the cover.

Yeah! Resoundingly.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hallmarked with a very special wit, June 5, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Never Know (Paperback)

The poetry of Ron Padgett is hallmarked with a very special wit and an artfully conversational American approach. You Never Know offers a complete spectrum of his style, which has a penchant for surprise and discovery, all in service to acknowledging the simple magic of everyday life. Poet As Immortal Bird: A second ago my heart thump went/and I thought, "This would be a bad time/to have a heart attack and die, in the/middle of a poem," then took comfort/in the idea that no one I have ever heard/of has ever died in the middle of writing/a poem, just as birds never die in mid-flight./I think.

4.0 out of 5 stars delicate and witty poetry by Ron Padgett, December 23, 2009

By 

Luigi Priori - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: You Never Know (Paperback)

The book contains delicate and witty poems. It was also a pleasant surprise to receive my order earlier than expected.