How Long

Ron Padgett's title poem asks: "How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China." With the arrival of his first grandchild, Padgett becomes even more inspired to confront the eternal mysteries in poems with a wry, rueful honesty that comes only with experience, in his case sixty-eight years of it. *I never thought, forty years ago, taping my poems into a notebook, that one day the tape would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off and that I'd find myself on hands and knees groaning as I picked the pieces up off the floor one by one* **Ron Padgett** is a celebrated translator, memoirist, and "a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist" (Peter Gizzi). His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in *The Best American Poetry*, *The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry*, *The Oxford Book of American Poetry*, and on Garrison Keillor's *Writer's Almanac*. He was also a guest on Keillor's *A Prairie Home Companion* in 2009. Padgett is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and his most recent books include *How to Be Perfect*; *You Never Know, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard*; and *If I Were You*. Born in Oklahoma, he lives in New York City and Calais, Vermont.