In the Attempt, Succeeding

Pink Dust by Ron Padgett

A few weeks ago, I got an email from one of the many poetry newsletters I subscribe to informing me that Ron Padgett would be reading his poetry at St. Mark’s in the Bowery on March 12th. It further stated that Ron Padgett is “one of America’s best-known and most acclaimed poets.” Now, this was very interesting to me because I had never heard of him at all. I figured I had better make him known to me, so I bought two tickets. One for me and one for Kathryn.

In the interceding weeks, I went to The Guggenheim to see a show on Orphism in Paris and up near the top of the spiral on three little chrome receivers, Ron Padgett was reading the translated poetry of Blaise Cendrars. This was serendipity. Here Ron was! Being well-known and acclaimed. I felt good about going to see him read his own poetry. I didn’t study up on him at all.

When Kathryn and I walked into the reading, it was standing room only. We propped ourselves up against the radiator by the door, which got hotter and hotter as Ron read. He started with excerpts from his recent memoir, Dick, about his lifelong friend and fellow poet, Dick Gallup. It was a tender in memoriam, and he got a bit choked up at the end. I was very much endeared to him after that.

There was a break, during which Kathryn and I relocated to the other side of the room, away from the radiator. Then he came up to the podium again, and having shed his jacket, he joked that the visual change was a signal that he would be entering a new mode. He began to read poems from his new collection, Pink Dust, published by NYRB, which I bought a copy of right then and there.

The poems he chose were in turns funny and serious, bored and entertained, irritated and delighted. I came home and wrote in my journal that “Ron Padgett has the undeniable swagger and charm of an old man poet, who understands poetry—and creates it—like only an old man can.” I stand by my assessment, and I feel okay about calling him an old man because I’m highlighting his swagger and charm in the same breath, and also because being an old man is one of the central themes of Pink Dust. Padgett isn’t upset about being one. Bewildered certainly, but upset? No.

Throughout the collection—made up mostly of short and untitled poems—he marvels at the passage of time. He remembers being young and wanting to be old. Now old, he tries to remember what it is to be young: “Young old, old young. / Do you need more proof / of how ridiculous I am? / If so, look inside yourself, / for you are just like me.” The key lies in the fact that he doesn’t want to be young, he wants to remember what it was to be young.

In another poem a “slightly flattened” Mexican cigarette transports him back to 1958, to “a hotel room in Mexico late at night / with twelve teenage girls smoking / Mexican cigarettes and laughing / into the smoke of each other’s breaths.” Padgett is pulled to these memories and interested in exploring the ways that time itself flattens. Poems that begin with “When I was ten years old,” or “When I was a child,” or “As a young man,” or “When I was a sensitive adolescent,” always end firmly planted in the present.

The games he played as a young man, the coffee he drank, the “pink clouds in a blue sky” he saw, were delights in their time, but also served to prepare him for the gentler, quieter pleasures of old age. He proclaims in one poem that “There is nothing / more beautiful / than a beautiful old woman,” in another that sex in old age is “interesting! / Much more than the sex of youth.” Being old is more beautiful, more interesting, better.

One of my favorites considers a new, mortal grace:

What is it that, 
in the face of death, 
lets you find yourself sitting in a chair 
with happiness all around you 
and in you and of you, 
as if you were a dog
and your master is petting your head
and telling you how good 
you are, forever?

I get the sense that it is the proximity to death, the turning to face it, that allows for the pervading feeling of happiness. Knowing that the end will come heightens one’s capacity for delight—particularly delight in the smallest and simplest of things—another theme that Ron treats admirably.

In a titled poem called “Cuff Mode,” he admires the way his dark blue cuffs stick out from under his grey sweater. He says “They look cute! / It pleases me / to have a cute accoutrement,” a set of lines which in turn pleases me to no end. They look cute! The earnest, unassuming language works its magic on me. I am delighted that Padgett is delighted that his cuffs look cute. I too know and feel the pleasure that such small things can bring.

The second half of the book consists of a section called “Lockdown,” referring to the spring of 2020, when Covid shut the world down. It emerges that Ron escaped the city for the country, and in these vignettes, the small delights become even more important, even more delightful in their total, ordinary boringness. I usually can’t stand reading anything written during or about Covid, but Padgett’s poetic account stands apart in being not only tolerable, but also enjoyable.

Thematically, the material ties in with the first half of the collection, but fittingly, it also feels like a contained narrative. Time is stretched and flattened again. Padgett sits in one room in “rustic isolation,” presumably somewhere upstate or something like that, and he just doesn’t leave that room. He stares out the window or at the curtains if they happen to be closed. He considers “a black thing—a crumb of chocolate cake?” on his desk and measures the dictionary. The reader feels, palpably, that in between the poems, after each one, he just stays right there in that room, waiting for the next one to come. He is stuck, but in being stuck he is forced into paying attention to things. To pay attention is eventually to delight, and one cannot be stuck when one is delighted.

Being attuned to this channel of delight—increasing our capacity for it, also increases our capacity to be delighted by each other, and to love each other, in spite of. Yes, Ron rejects the trite old sentiment that loving someone “because of” is more powerful than loving someone “in spite of.” Nope! Ron loves you in spite of, and that’s good enough for him. Good enough for you too. Better.

The first poem in the Lockdown section begins with the lines “If I were living alone / there wouldn’t be enough people in the house,” but ends by saying “A word without people / would be okay though” Padgett thinks a world without people would be wonderful because “Everything would be a fact.” With his signature wry and deadpan sense of humor, Padgett perfectly captures how confusing we can be to each other. Our distance from and near apathy for strangers in the broader world sits comfortably, somehow, with our desire and need for people in the house—no doubt heightened by being trapped in the house.

Those people in the world—they complicate things, but Padgett does not want them do disappear really. Later in the collection, still in Lockdown, a more loving image arrives:

There is nothing like
a house seen from outside,
lights on,
in the dark winter night,
to make you feel
close to all the humans
inside that house
and out.
Pretty great
to love humanity,
if only for a moment.

Yes! Pretty great. Better than almost anything, even if it’s just for a moment. One interpretation has the ending lines of this poem coming out deflated. I guess this fleeting moment of love is all we get, it says. Another reading is more tender, more exultant. Instead: it only takes a moment to love all of humanity. If we can each experience the sensation for just one moment, that is enough. I think Ron read this poem at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, though I can’t remember for sure—having been to the reading, every poem I read after played in my head in in his lovely voice.

I would be remiss not to mention one final theme that Padgett deals with—mostly because it’s a personal favorite of mine. He writes about his own creative process, and in two particular poems, about his frustrations with the shortcomings of the act of writing. The way that our words cannot convey with the degree of purity that we want them to. Our language can come close, but cannot exist outside of our own interpretation. The moment it is out, it is sullied. He writes:

If only my hand and the pen it holds 
could go off on their own 
and write what it’s like
to be a hand and a pen
attached to the arm of a man 
and then to be free of him, 
more beautiful and alive
than he could be in his wildest dreams.

It may seem an odd wish for a poet—to want to detach himself from his own creative process. But he yearns for something purer than what he can create and imagines that a disembodied hand and pen would be more “beautiful and alive” than he could dream of being. In many senses he’s right. A disembodied hand and pen does not question or suffer—it just exists and, presumably, creates. Perhaps it can access the truth of things, unadulterated. The same sentiment appears again just a few pages later:

There has to be something 
I can tell you that
will make you happy 
with the idea of being alive, 
O citizens. I feel it
somewhere in my body, 
where I don’t know. 
If only my body could disappear, 
that one thing 
would drop onto the ground, 
where you could pick it up
and stare at its words
written in a language
no one understands
but which brings joy, 
a quiet, crazy joy without end. 

Padgett wishes he could disembody himself and leave behind “that one thing” that will make humanity “happy / with the idea of being alive.” His mission comes clear. It is to make the world make sense. To make it delightful to himself and to us, to verbalize and make concrete the sneaking suspicion he harbors—that life is wonderful.

The “one thing” that will exist when his body disappears is of course his poetry. His prediction that no one will understand the language it’s written in ties into his urge to separate the poetry exist apart from the man. To make the personal into the universal. His hope that his words—his “one thing”—will create “a quiet, crazy joy without end,” speaks to the truth of the matter: we can understand each other. The words of Ron Padgett do make sense to me. I can feel the purity of the thing he tries to describe. He may feel as though the words fall short, but he’s wrong. In the attempt, he has already succeeded. And here I am, in quiet, crazy joy.

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