Padgett is a Tulsa-born migrant to Manhattan. There, along with Kenneth Koch, John Ashberry, Allen Ginsberg, and others, he has been an important figure in the New York School of poetry centered at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, which emphasizes how the daily mess of life and language are inseparable from poetry's fullest expressions. (Full disclosure: your reporter hung out with some of these guys in the late 1960s, as both poet and publisher of some of their work.)

The author of some 20 books of poetry -- the first was Great Balls of Fire 40 years ago -- Padgett has seen his work characterized by a recent reviewer in Publisher's Weekly as possessing the deftness, humor, and beauty of a "bicycle messenger on the streets of New York."

Padgett was reading this week in a series sponsored annually by the Beinecke's Yale Collection of American Poetry. Nancy Kuhl, pictured here with Padgett, is the associate curator of the collection and one of the organizers of the reading series.

"Of the many treasures in this building," she said, "the collection of American poetry books is a particulary 'living one,' with real live authors that we collect like Ron still out there. We like to bring them in for the students and faculty to see and hear and to interact with."

Padgett kept an audience of some 50 people on Beinecke's second floor chuckling with poems full of his signature off-speed whimsy, a daring mixing of life's mundane tasks and rituals along with the beauties and incomprehensibility of existence. In a poem marveling at why woodpeckers don't get headaches, for example, Padgett surmised that a woodpecker's head could probably be likened to a football helmet, with lots of padding. It's likely in fact that the football helmet was modeled on the woodpecker's head. His conclusion: "I'd like to get hold of the entire uniform."

Of a ballerina's performance, he wrote, "You wrap the world around/ your finger, then you wrap yourself/ around the world."

In a found poem, that is, one comprised of quotations Padgett picks up from printed texts or from facades, here are two: "Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he built with his own hands -- an unidentified child." And "History vomited up George W. Bush so he could defecate on the human spirit - wall graffito, New York City."

The next reading in the series will be April 25, when ten undergraduate and graduate poets from the university will be declaiming. The reading is open to the public, at 4 p.m., in a Beinecke setting that, like poetry, is good for the spirit. For more information, future programs, and to hear past and future readings online, including Padgett's, visit this website.

Here's the full text of Padgett's "Words from the Front," which he recited towards the end of his reading. It will be in a collection titled How to Be Perfect, his 21st, forthcoming from Coffee House Press (Minneapolis) this fall:

We don't look as young
as we used to
except in dim light
especially in
the soft warmth of candlelight
when we say
in all sincerity
You're cute
and
You're my cutie.
Imagine
two old people
behaving like this.
It's enough
to make you happy.