people don’t like poetry

people don’t like poetry
They get turned off by how
A lot of no one, not even the poets,
desperately poets
try to be profound,
expressing “big ideas”

these people simply need
plain language and attempts
at insight. Perhaps, though,
to be introduced to Ron Padgett,
makes you think about how good life
can be. of his counterparts’
simple ideas speak to reality,
fails to reach the height of beautiful, direct honesty
which is reason enough to take comfort in its pages.

Padgett offers only the simplest tips
that really understand. in a deeper way than most
such as eating oranges or brushing your teeth.
Padgett has always articulated something.
other poets have not

While Padgett’s latest collection,
on improving life,
wisdom
is expressed when you find
that it is far more defective than you imagined.

he doesn’t take himself too seriously
in a way that assures the reader that
there is a new kind of cynicism

philosophy could be summed
up into a single piece of guidance
of sitting alone in a restaurant
desperately sad from time to time.

In the title poem, Despite this,
the intensity of pleasure and sorrow
in the middle of a pointless war,
its tragic loneliness and
disappointments. Even Padgett, apparently,
feels out of line with Padgett’s other works

the longest poem in the collection
discusses just that.
poetry as a means of exclaiming
still living, one of the only New
York School poets in the everyday life.
name your own history
for the smallest reasons
of being alive in his latest collection.

if we didn’t exist,
the emptiness of the universe,
we wouldn’t express the exhaustion
a kiss or similes, be able to think about
the moon,
Huge and Incredible Injustice
that progress exists,
as always, but also

when you’re lying in bed trying to get to sleep
the frustrated result of living in a country
that appears in “How to Be Perfect”
can make you laugh out loud

express an unfamiliar pessimism.
Absolutely in the World, still —
existing is the better choice,
all the more powerful and terrifying.
Perhaps they are but lines like “Don’t think ”

Ultimately, though, Padgett still reminds us
Padgett, starts to seem like the better choice
to any Padgett reader
to know that they’re not the only ones

one of very few poets whose work
usually uses his his love of life, lines like
“don’t be so serious.”
- or bring to mind those things you think about,
worrying about these sorts of things.
He communicates the joys of life,
Is it a blind spot particular to me?

No, it’s not, and it’s comforting