POETS @ PACE Presents RON PADGETT
Monday, April 21, 2014, 6-8 p.m., Bianco Room
One of America’s best and most popular poets, Ron Padgett, will give the spring 2014 Poets @ Pace reading. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 6-8 p.m. in the Bianco Room, Level B, One Pace Plaza (entrance at 3 Spruce St.) It will include a Q & A, a book signing, and refreshments. Poets @ Pace, which brings important poets to the Pace NYC campus each semester, is organized by Pace Poet-in-Residence Charles North and sponsored by the Office of the Provost.
Ron Padgett grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While in high school, he edited a literary magazine that published work by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Le Roi Jones and Robert Creeley. Padgett’s numerous honors include Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, an American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, The Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2012 he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and he is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. A noted translator from the French (Apollinaire, Cendrars, Reverdy, Larbaud), he has received several translation awards including an NEA Fellowship, and in 2001 the French Ministry for Culture made him an Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Padgett’s Collected Poems (2013) is his thirteenth book of poetry.
“Reading Padgett one realizes that playfulness and lightness of touch are not at odds with seriousness. . . .As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament.”—Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
“Padgett’s plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity.”—The New Yorker
“Wonderful, generous, funny poetry.”—John Ashbery
“Padgett’s poetry is masterful for its panoramic humanity and mind-stopping verbal wit, its breathtaking power and beauty.”—Anne Waldman