How Long by Ron Padgett, Coffee House Press, 2011

Padgett floats among the flotsam and jetsam of the Metaphysical Poets in this comically tragic volume of poems. He evokes Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, and Sir John Suckling, as well as his favorite modernist poets in many of these poems which take on death, fate, the ephemeral, love, and lifelong precociousness. On the topic of the Grim Reaper, Padgett charts the resolutions and perspectives that people develop around The End. In “The Death Deal” the speaker comes to a resolution on his obsession of how his death will occur:

I’m oddly almost cheered

by the thought

that I might find out

in the not too distant future.

Now for lunch.

The last line of this quote, which is also the last line of the poem, shifts the reader in an unexpected and comical direction at the last moment.

Padgett often speaks of coming at things from an “angle,” as he does in “The Coat Hanger” when he writes,

What Did Whitman say? “This is no book;
Who touches this touches a man.” With him that was very
almost true. Me I am at an angle,
but when I stand up straight as the lines in that station,
I see, before the fog rolls in, the tracks that take us all across ourselves,
metaphorical fog thicker that real fog,
just as barking is thicker than a dog,
though the dog is clearing up too, like a sky
whose translucence is arriving as metaphors depart
and I start the day as a man for the first time again.

In sections like these the reader experiences Padgett’s playful gestures which speak to important philosophical questions about how human beings (not just artists and poets) perceive the world. Padgett’s tone is often conversational and understated in a way that makes some of the hard questions his poems ask more palatable, allowing us to go and have a nice “lunch” afterwards.

In the poem “How Long”, which the book is named for, the speaker delves into the nature of identity, and specifically what is the poet’s identity in relation to his or her work. The poem begins with the lines, “How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China[.]” “How Long” is a place that is both spatial as well as temporal, where the speaker can see himself as having a solid identity. The poem describes the desire to shed the self in favor of being, and does so in a blues form, as in “…has that evening train been gone? / How long, how long, baby, how long?” The “train” is whatever means you use to leave that old sense of self to venture out into the unknown. However, Padgett’s poems are not just about ideas, and in this poem, as he does throughout the whole book for the most part, he has a masterful grasp of the line break, as in lines like

Let me know

if you ever change your mind

about leaving, leaving me behind

or at least tell yourself on that train

winding its way through the mountains of How Much Province

This book by Ron Padgett is filled with many gems, and is at times deceptively clear and conversational. In a poem like “The Great Wall” the poem uses rather straightforward language to meditate on history, duration, and time in terms of the political-historical as well as the speaker’s everyday life. Padgett in this book walks deftly along the top of the wall that separates the grave and the comic, life and death, self and selflessness, and the simple from the complex.