How Long

How Long

<DIV><p>Ron Padgett's title poem asks: "How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China." With the arrival of his first grandchild, Padgett becomes even more inspired to confront the eternal mysteries in poems with a wry, rueful honesty that comes only with experience, in his case sixty-eight years of it.</p><p><I>I never thought,<BR>forty years ago,<BR>taping my poems into a notebook,<BR>that one day the tape<BR>would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off<BR>and that I'd find myself on hands and knees<BR>groaning as I picked the pieces up<BR>off the floor<BR>one by one</I></p><p><B>Ron Padgett</B> is a celebrated translator, memoirist, and "a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist" (Peter Gizzi). His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in <I>The Best American Poetry</I>, <I>The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry</I>, <I>The Oxford Book of American Poetry</I>, and on Garrison Keillor's <I>Writer's Almanac</I>. He was also a guest on Keillor's <I>A Prairie Home Companion </I>in 2009. Padgett is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and his most recent books include <I>How to Be Perfect</I>; <I>You Never Know, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard</I>; and <I>If I Were You</I>. Born in Oklahoma, he lives in New York City and Calais, Vermont.</p></DIV>