Very Collected Poems

by Ron Padgett

Overview

Over sixty years of poems celebrating one of the most dynamic careers in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry.

Gathering a lifetime of poetry, Ron Padgett’s Very Collected Poems is the ultimate record of the Pulitzer Prize finalist’s oeuvre—newly updated since the sold-out first edition of 2013. Padgett’s poems reverberate with his love of poetry, his musings on artists and musicians from Andrew Marvell to Woody Guthrie to his personal friendships with Kenneth Koch and Joe Brainard, alongside his poems involving family and the magic of just being alive. By turns imaginative and witty, and then simple and direct, Padgett’s mercurial work offers readers the pleasure of his surprising curiosity and generous spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566897440
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	11/18/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has also received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Frost medal from the Poetry Society of America. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’s Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson. New York City has been his home base since 1960.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Ron Padgett

“Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.” —Robert Creeley

“For decades now, Ron Padgett has built up a body of work that, like the tenderly deadpan ballads of Jonathan Richman, has at its heart a sort of wry, pickled innocence. . . . The charm of his lines—and their power, because his work has a way of disarming you and pulling you in again and again—often comes from his allergy to anything pretentious or even ‘poetic.’ He makes plain niceness look like the most radical stance of all.” —Jeff Gordiner, The New York Times

“Padgett’s plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity.” —The New Yorker

“Deeply pleasing to read.” —The Paris Review

“Padgett’s poems are so playful, self-mocking and eager to please that it would be easy to overlook their craft, not to mention the depth and sincerity of the emotions they convey. What animates [his work] is the tension between the buoyancy of its language and the gravity of its subject.” —The Washington Post

“Padgett’s sense of romantic joy is undiminished, as is his thoughtfulness about language and the ways in which time changes meaning, and sense can morph into eloquent absurdity.” —Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

“Wonderful, generous, funny poetry.” —John Ashbery

From the Publisher