Рон Паджетт: Американский поэт и издатель

American poet

Ron Padgett (born June 17, 1942) is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

Padgett’s father was a bootlegger in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He influenced many of Padgett's works, particularly in the writer's taste for independence and a willingness to deviate from rules, even his own. Padgett started writing poetry at the age of 13. In an interview, the poet said that he was inspired to write when a girl he had a big crush on did not return his affection. In high school, Padgett became interested in visual arts while continuing to write poetry. He befriended Joe Brainard, the visual artist who also became a well known writer. They, with fellow Central High student Dick Gallup, co founded the avant garde literary journal The White Dove Review. Padgett and Gallup solicited work for The White Dove from Black Mountain and Beat Movement writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, Paul Blackburn, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Robert Creeley. After five issues, Padgett, on his way to college, retired the White Dove. In 1960, Padgett left Tulsa to study at Columbia College in New York City. At that time he was interested in Pound, Rimbaud, the Black Mountain poets, and the Beats particularly the poetry of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. In an interview, Padgett said that he went to Columbia partly because Ginsberg and Kerouac had gone there. (Paris, 1965–66) he studied 20th century French poetry.

From 1968 to 1969 Padgett was a workshop leader for The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery in New York City. Two pieces of his early work from this period were published in 0 to 9 magazine. With David Shapiro, Padgett co edited An Anthology of New York Poets, published by Random House in 1970. He founded The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1972. Padgett also worked in poet in the school programs nationally from 1969 to 1976. After directing The Poetry Project for two and a half years, he became the publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative (1980 2000), where he also edited The Teachers & Writers Collaborative Newsletter. Padgett was a cofounder, publisher, and editor of Full Court Press from 1973 to 1988, bringing out books by Ginsberg, Brainard, O'Hara, Edwin Denby, Tom Veitch, William S. Burroughs, Larry Fagin, Philippe Soupault, John Godfrey, and others. At the same time, he lectured and taught at educational institutions, including Atlantic Center for the Arts, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University. He also hosted a poetry radio series and the designer of computer writing games. Padgett's papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Padgett is the author of more than twenty poetry collections, including Great Balls of Fire (1969, reissued 1990); You Never Know (2001); How to Be Perfect (2007); How Long (2011); and Collected Poems (2013). Seven of Padgett's poems are featured in Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film Paterson, including three written expressly for the film. Like Padgett, Jarmusch studied poetry under Kenneth Koch at Columbia University. Padgett collaborated with poet Ted Berrigan and artists Jim Dine, George Schneeman, Bertrand Dorny, Trevor Winkfield, and Alex Katz, along with Joe Brainard.

Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan, The Figures (Great Barrington, MA), 1993. Albanian Diary, The Figures (Great Barrington, MA), 1999. Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2003. Joe: A Personal Memoir of Joe Brainard, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2004.

The Poet Assassinated by Guillaume Apollinaire (illustrated by Jim Dine) Holt, Rinehart & Winston (New York, NY), 1968. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, Viking (New York, NY), 1971. Kodak by Blaise Cendrars, Adventures in Poetry (New York, NY), 1976. The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, Mushinsha Ltd. (Tokyo), 1977; revised edition Black Widow Books (Boston, MA), 2008, with Bill Zavatsky. Complete Poems by Blaise Cendrars, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1992. Complete Fiction by Serge Fauchereau, Black Square Editions, (New York, NY), 2002, with John Ashbery. Prose Poems by Pierre Reverdy, Black Square Editions (New York, NY), 2007. Flash Cards by Yu Jian, (Zephyr) 2010, with Wang Ping. Zone: Selected Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, NYRB Poets (New York, NY), 2015.