Dammit. Go to POETRY DAILIER. Quit wasting your time on this blog!!!


Poetry Dailier’s offering for March 10th is a poem by Ron Padgett, a poem I’ve loved since I first read it, years ago, in bed at the Hotel Allison in downtown San Francisco with a woman I wasn’t sure I loved. I was sure, though, that I loved this little poem, loved how it said what I had thought a thousand times before but had been unable to express. I loved being young, in lust, and relatively new to the “poet’s life” in an exciting city with a beautiful girl (now naked beside me) after a night of art-gallery partying and burritos in the Mission (burritos that, while, good, didn’t compare to those of my beloved San Diego). I loved that Ron Padgett had decided, in the manner of Frank O’Hara to write a poem about his friends, now gone, and New York City. Never having been to New York (something I’ll be doing for the first time in less than a month), I romanticized it terribly, what I imagined it must be, and having had many friends passed on already, I related to what Padgett was trying to say, how he was both aggressively deromanticizing my vision and making it all the stronger. Contradictions indeed. I wrote an “epic” San Francisco poem that pivoted on a line (now probably mis-remembered) “my lover is claiming my back for her millennium project.” Now, years later, the girl in bed with me is now living in New York, happily married. She recently took a workshop with Ron Padgett. Back in the MFA program in which she and I first met, there was a poet, older than the rest of us by 10-15 years, who once asked out my then-girlfriend. He looked like Ron Padgett’s younger brother. Like Ron, he was from Oklahoma. Like me, he dropped out of the program and began poeting on his own. A few years ago he moved back to Oklahoma, but I’ve heard recent rumors that he’s been spotted on the streets of Eugene again. Maybe he’s looking for a barking dog.