| “99 percent of every beautiful thing you ever knew escaped and went back out into the world where you vaguely remembered it.” — Ron Padgett | Your order helps support public radio. In this week's EXTRA, we feature a collection of poetry from Ron Padgett, as well as poetry from David Wagoner, David Lehman, Julia Alvarez, and Mary Oliver. We also recognize the birthdays of Joyce Carol Oates, W. B. Yeats, Igor Stravinsky, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and meet our nation's new poet laureate. |
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| | Poetry from The Writer's Almanac |
Collected Poems
By Ron Padgett Today is the birthday of avant-garde American poet, essayist, and translator Ron Padgett (1942), who once said: “If you match yourself up against Shakespeare, guess what? You lose. It’s not productive. Better to focus on the poem you’re writing, do your work, and leave it at that.” Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father was a bootlegger who also traded cars; his mother was a housewife who assisted Padgett’s father with bootlegging. Padgett was a precocious reader as a teenager, drifting toward Baudelaire and Rimbaud. He said: “When I got to adolescence, I became more and more gloomy and introspective and serious and angst-ridden.” He and a few friends started an avant-garde literary journal called The White Dove, which lasted for five years. They weren’t shy about writing to their literary heroes and soliciting work. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and LeRoi Jones all published poems in Padgett’s small magazine.
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| | Padgett went to New York to attend Columbia University (1960), where he fell in with a group of poets who favored stream-of-consciousness writing, vivid imagery, and spontaneity. It was the 1960s, and Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Ted Berrigan drew inspiration from the art galleries, museums, dancers, and artists that surrounded them. Padgett inherited Kenneth Koch’s teaching position as a “poet-in-the-schools” (1969) for the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and stayed for nine years. In the beginning, he was paid $50 for three class visits, which he could do in one day, and which paid for an entire month’s rent, utilities, and his phone bill. He loved teaching public school children. He said that whenever poets visited a classroom, “We were like heroes being welcomed home.” Padgett says: “Almost everything that’s happened in my poetry is what you might call organic. I don’t do much pre-conceiving. If I start to sound too much like the Ron Padgett that I’ve read before, I stop myself.” On writing his poems, he says: “If I don’t make line breaks, it’s a prose poem. The line breaks are part of the dance of the poem. If I’m not dancing, I don’t know what steps to take. I don’t know whether to turn or to bow or to move quickly or whatever. I don’t know what to do if I don’t have the line breaks.” Poems from this collection: |
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| | From Pretty Good Goods |
Stravinsky: The Soldier's Tale It’s the birthday of the avant-garde composer Igor Stravinsky, born in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia (1882). His first major success as a composer was a ballet based on a Russian folk tale, called The Firebird (1909). It was wildly popular, and he traveled all over Europe to conduct it. He then got an idea for a ballet about a pagan ritual in which a virgin would be sacrificed to the gods of spring by dancing herself to death. Stravinsky composed the piece on a piano in a rented cottage, and a boy working outside his window kept shouting up at him that the chords were all wrong. When Stravinsky played part of the piece for director of the theater where it would be performed, the director asked, “How much longer will it go on like that?” Stravinsky replied, “To the end, my dear.” He titled the piece "The Rite of Spring." At its premiere in 1913 in Paris, the audience broke out into a riot when the music and dancing turned harsh and dissonant. The police came to calm the chaos, and Stravinsky left his seat in disgust, but the performance continued for 33 minutes and he became one of the most famous composers in the world. |
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith This week, The Library of Congress named Tracy K. Smith as the nation's new poet laureate. She's the author of three collections of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The poet laureate is appointed by the librarian of Congress and fills the role for a year. Smith takes the mantle from Juan Felipe Herrera, who has served two terms. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a statement that Smith's work "brings history and memory to life" and "calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion and pop culture."
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