Happy Birthday, Ron Padgett!

June 18, 2022

Three nights ago I was reading Ron Padgett’s HOW LONG (Coffee House Press, 2011) and finding the poems to be as delightful and full of droll annotations as I remember from my first reading. The second poem in that collection, “The Death Deal,” meditates on the various ways that one might die, and considers how the narrator of the poem might very well find his curiosity requited in the near future. Padgett, with his usual dead-pan joie d’vivre, ends the poem with the line, “Now for lunch,” as if to say that the pleasure awaiting him in preparing and eating the mid-day meal deserves every bit as much of circumspect anticipation.

Well, now it’s 2022, and Ron is still with us: 80 years old!

Happy birthday, Ron! And sorry that I’m a day late.

— Sincerely,
Bill Mohr

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“How to be Perfect”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57243/how-to-be-perfect

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