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How to Be Perfect
Author Interview
On How to Be Perfect: Ron Padgett in conversation with Amy King
Q: Mies van der Rohe said, “God is in the details.” Many of your poems focus keenly on the little things that often go unnoticed. Within the first few pages of your new book are English muffins, a child’s spinning top, and a chrome Indian head hood ornament. Do you consciously attempt to weigh in on the grander concepts such as existence, love, and mortality through the minutiae of the moment?
A: No, I’m not interested in writing allegorical or symbolic work. I like details for what they are, not what they might stand for. If a grander theme emerges from the details by itself, fine, who am I to argue with a grander theme? Although I do have a penchant for details, I’m much more interested in the poem as a whole: whether or not it feels unified and complete, whether or not the words and the singing and dancing they do combine to create a satisfying flow of energy from start to finish.
Q: How did you decide on the title How to Be Perfect?
A: As you know, there’s a poem of the same name in the book. I’ve always liked titles that begin with “How to.” They promise so much. Years ago I wrote two small books that subvert that promissory tone: How to Be a Woodpecker and How to Be Modern Art. The title poem of this book came from someone who was wistfully drunk and who said to me, “Tell me how to be perfect.” The ludicrousness of such a project intrigued me, just as the ludicrousness of this title pleased me. And it has a certain ring to it.
Q: What was the organizing principle of the book, if any?
A: I’ve never set out to write a book of poems, but when I notice that I’ve accumulated a number of poems that I like I start thinking about putting them together. I arrange them in a sequence that for me has a contour or a movement from poem to poem, even though I know that few people read poetry books from start to finish. My aim is to put the poems in a sequence that has the feel of the sequence of lines in a single poem.
Q: I don’t think anyone thinks of you as a political poet, though your work often touches on the politics of human interaction, sometimes subtly, and on occasion, pointedly so. Your new book, though, has several overtly political poems. Do you think that poetry merely reflects or comments on the condition of the world or that it can awaken something within readers that may transform them?
A: I felt noticeably different after reading “Song of Myself” for the first time: the world seemed much larger, more exciting, and full of energy, and I felt like I was part of this larger world. Would Whitman have been happy to see such a change? Probably. Was his primary impetus for writing to cause such a change? Perhaps not. But about political poems: I’ve never been satisfied with the ones I’ve written, so I had more or less stopped trying. In recent years, though, my political-ecological-social-ethical indignation became so clamorous that there seemed to be no way not to write such poems. But when the writing got underway, I found myself automatically trying to make poems, not simply using poems as vehicles for sentiments or opinions.
Q: You are friends with many visual artists, you have collaborated with Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, and George Schneeman, and you have quite an appetite for art museums. Rare is the Ron Padgett poem from which one does not receive at least one playful or unusual image. To what do you ascribe your predilection for the visual?
A: I like to look at things and try to see what they look like, not what I think they look like. Abstract words make me sleepy, concrete ones make me more alert. (Someone once told me I was a phenomenologist. That sounded good.) Anyway, I love the feeling of looking at something beautiful.
Q: You are identified as a member of the New York School. Do you think of yourself as a member of the New York School?
A: Not really, and I don’t think of myself as a person who wears size 11 shoes, either. I understand that literary historians and critics find it useful to group writers under rubrics—and I have been put in that group, which is flattering, considering the genius of Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara, Schuyler, and others. But thinking about schools or movements has never inspired me to write a single line. So I think about the idea of the New York School only when someone asks me a question about it.
Q: What can we look forward to after this book? Do you have any projects in the works now?
A: Recently I finished revising a large number of unpublished poems, some of them more than thirty years old. It was interesting trying to communicate with the person I was back then. Now I’m scribbling new poems, a couple of which have turned out different from anything I’ve written before—good or bad I don’t know. But I’ve never wanted to say much about new poems. I’m always afraid I’ll talk them out and not write them. I’m also continuing to do collaborative poem-paintings with George Schneeman and to tinker with my translations of Apollinaire.
Q: Your poems are humorous in a way that seems so casual and off-the-cuff that one might wonder if you are a comedian at heart. Do you make a conscious effort to write funny poems?
A: The only times I’ve been aware of trying to write funny poems have been when I was collaborating with a friend and we were making each other delirious. I don’t think I could tell myself, “Ron, write a funny poem” and then do it. By the way, I don’t equate “funny” with “comic.” I’m more interested in comedy than in funniness. A good joke is funny, but it gets used up once you’ve heard it. Good comedy never gets used up, in fact it deepens with each experience of it. Also, comedy embodies optimism, whereas funniness is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. When my poems take a comic turn, it’s because comedy has happened to me in the act of writing. It’s not something I can invoke. These days, though, comedy seems to be hiding from the world, just when we need it! But maybe we should stop here. Mies van der Rohe also coined the saying, “Less is more.”
Amy King lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the author of the poetry collections Antidotes for an Alibi and I’m the Man Who Loves You. She teaches Creative Writing and English at SUNY Nassau Community College and is the managing editor for the literary arts journal MiPOesias. Please visit www.amyking.org for more.
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