By Brain and Gut: An interview with Ron Padgett
By Stasha Cole, from our Summer 2025 issue
The following interview appears in our Summer 2025 issue, which will reach mailboxes in June. Subscribe now to receive yours!
In 1959, three years after a group of students at the University of Tulsa founded Nimrod, two local high school students, Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, released a little magazine of their own. While Nimrod was publishing the verse of Louis Ginsberg, Padgett and Gallup’s White Dove Review featured poems by Louis’s son, Allen, as well as work by other leading lights of the Beat generation. Padgett’s first collection of poems, Summer Balloons, appeared the following year. He has gone on to publish three dozen more collections, important translations of modern French poets, as well as memoirs of his father (a major Oklahoma bootlegger) and of his friends in what John Ashbery famously branded the “Tulsa School” of poetry: Gallup, Joe Brainard, and Ted Berrigan. Padgett’s latest collection, Pink Dust (NYRB Poets), explores, with characteristic wry humor, the joys and tribulations of aging, remembering, and writing poems. In a virtual literary homecoming, Padgett wrote from Calais, Vermont, to answer a few of our questions about Pink Dust, his early days in Tulsa, and his approach to the art.
Stasha Cole
STASHA COLE: This is the first interview Nimrod has published in some time, and we thought it important to restart this occasional series by speaking with a Tulsa great who was already making his mark when our journal launched in the late 1950s. Could you share some memories of the Tulsan literary and arts scene from those days?
RON PADGETT: Thank you for the word great, but we’ll have to have a private talk about that later. And, by the way, I grew up only a few blocks from where Nimrod was founded.
But to answer your question: When, at the age of sixteen, I became aware of the practicing poets and artists in Tulsa, that scene was quite small. The poets I met were students at TU (Ted Berrigan, Martin Cochran, David Bearden) and the visual artists I met were either TU students (John Arthur, Gordon Boyd, Tom Manhart, Bill Rabon) or older, unaffiliated artists who formed something of an informal group (Bob Bartholic, John Kennedy, Betty Kennedy, Nylajo Harvey). Many of these people got together at the open-house salon maintained by John and Betty Kennedy in their home, where everyone talked and smoked and listened to folk music. It was what might be called a bohemian or underground scene, into which I and my high school buddies Dick Gallup (poet) and Joe Brainard (artist) were welcomed warmly.
I’d also like to mention the city’s only good bookstore, The Lewis Meyer Book Store, whose generous and encouraging proprietor advised Dick and me to read authors we’d never heard of, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Albert Camus. Lewis, with his Sunday morning book review show on local television, was a one-man cheerleader for literature.
COLE: In an article by Mark Brown in the Tulsa World, you expand on how central Lewis Meyer’s bookstore was to your personal literary development: it was where you were exposed to some of your literary heroes and later had the chance to stock them on the bookstore’s shelves. Between your experiences at the bookstore and the Kennedy salon, it seems as though you found just the creative community you needed. Your latest collection, Pink Dust, is dedicated to your childhood friend Dick Gallup and the book includes a long and moving poem recalling Robert Creeley. You’ve also written touching memoirs of Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard. How did your artistic bonds shape your identity as a poet?
PADGETT: In recent years I’ve come to realize how important my poet friends were to me, not just as a poet but as a person. I was very lucky to have them as my friends. Without them, god knows what would have become of me. May I sneak in a bit of self-promotion? I’ve just published a book called Dick: A Memoir of Dick Gallup. He and I grew up on the same block on East Fourth Street and remained close friends for seventy-one years. He was the real deal.
COLE: Do you recall the first time you were compelled to write?
PADGETT: I think it was when I was fourteen, when I was sitting at my desk in my bedroom and looking out at a tree thrashing in a volent windstorm, and I sensed a connection between that scene and the turbulence I felt in my heart because a classmate I had a crush on didn’t return my affection. (Oh, Lynn McClaskey!)
COLE: Has the motivation changed over time? You once said that for you writing poems is like brushing your teeth. That doesn’t mean that it’s work without inspiration, does it?
PADGETT: Since that first poem, I’ve written a lot of others under various circumstances, but I’m not smart enough to know, except in a few cases, what my motivation has been. As far as my glib remark about brushing one’s teeth, I will say that it’s perfectly fine to write poems without what we call inspiration. That is, it’s possible to start writing a poem with very little or no inspiration, and then, in the process of writing, find a surprising energy coming into the process.
COLE: My partner has your Handbook of Poetic Forms on his desk as he writes a dissertation chapter on Lead Belly. What do you feel is the relationship between poetry and music? How has your own poetry changed from the song it once sang?
PADGETT: By the way, I learned about Lead Belly at John and Betty Kennedy’s, and was thunderstruck by his greatness. As for your question about the relation between poetry and music: That’s too big a question for me to answer here. I’ll just say that some of my poems have—or I hope they have—a musicality, preferably one that doesn’t call attention to itself.
COLE: Certainly. Did the folk music you listened to at the Kennedy salon inspire your poetry? Are there any regular catalysts for your poems, musical or otherwise?
PADGETT: Yes, some of my poems even quote Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, but I like all kinds of music. Well, most kinds: Beijing opera is still hard for my ears to adjust to. Before the folk music and blues I heard at the Kennedys’, I was surrounded by cowboy and Western swing, as well as big bands from the 1940s, all of which my mother listened to on the radio and her record player. About the age of fifteen, Dick Gallup and I discovered classical music on our own. If only we had known that a few blocks away Béla Rózsa was the head of the TU music department. To answer your question, though: over the years, the catalysts for my poems have changed. In recent years, I’ve been motivated by wondering what I’d write if I just sat down and started writing.
COLE: Pink Dust is gentle and evocative, full of humor, and, in many ways, down to earth. I have read a handful of your poetry collections over the last week and am struck by your commitment to narrative. Are there any stories you want to share about any particular poems in your new collection?
PADGETT: A poet sitting at a desk or table and scribbling on a piece of paper—where’s the drama?—but that’s what I did, during the pandemic. Day after day, I sat alone at a desk in what had once been a small carriage shed in rural Vermont, surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest and total silence, with no preconceptions of what to write, and I just let myself go, scribbling any old thing in a notebook, with no thought of what anyone would think of the results. I had nothing to lose.
COLE: Though you wrote your poems alone, your wife’s presence permeates Pink Dust, for example:
When, from bed,
I thought to ask my wife
to turn off the light,
she walked across the room
without my saying a word,
and turned off the light.
What a joy,
this strange new power I have
over her.
Was she a part of the Tulsa art scene as well? And how does your life enter into your poetry? Your work is so often disarmingly intimate; is there a line between Ron Padgett the poet and Ron Padgett the person?
PADGETT: My wife, Patricia, was on Nimrod’s editorial board, but she’s never thought of herself as a practicing writer or artist, though she did write an adventure novel for adolescent girls and for a while she painted. But she was very much a part of the lives of Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup, Ted Berrigan, and others, including, it turned out, me. It seems natural that she make occasional appearances in my poems, as I’ve been with her almost every day for the past sixty-three years.
Yes, there is a line between Ron poet and Ron person, though sometimes that line is very thin or hazy. It’s a mistake for readers to assume that the “I” in a poem is the same person as the author.
COLE: In your poem “Tone Arm” in Great Balls of Fire (1969) you write, “You people of the future/ How I hate you / You are alive and I’m not/ I don’t care whether you read my poetry or not.” Does that statement hold true for you today? Do you recommend that younger poets adopt that attitude, at least to some extent?
PADGETT: I wrote the lines you quote when I was living in Paris in 1965, age twenty-three, protected by the arrogance of youth. I now see that it was perhaps a prototype of what I said above about having nothing to lose. I think that if you write with the public looking over your shoulder, you’re in trouble. However, I wouldn’t presume to tell younger poets to thumb their noses at the literary world.
COLE: What course do you think American poetics has charted? Where have we sailed during your lifetime? What new shores are we exploring now?
PADGETT: First of all, I’m not sure there is an “American poetics.” There have been and continue to be so many different kinds of poetry in America that the very definition of poetry has been greatly expanded. I think that’s a healthy state of affairs. But for me it comes down not to trends or different types of poems or literary schools but to this or that specific poem, and the question, “Is it any good?”
COLE: How can you tell if a poem is good? What do you do with the half-baked poems that may require erasers and their “little pink dust”?
PADGETT: Your first question is so big it would require a book-length answer, but in regard to my own poems, often I’m not sure if the poems I write are good or bad or in-between, so I put them away and let enough time pass for me to have more or less forgotten them. Then I can read them as if they were written by someone else, revising them by brain and gut, trying to be as tough and honest as I can. Even then, my judgements waver, but I’ve come to accept uncertainty as part of the game, keeping in mind that there are a lot of things in the world far more important than whether a poem of mine is good or bad.
StashaCole is a Ph.D. student in literature at the University of Tulsa. Her poetry and photography can be found at Zaum, L’Esprit, Anodyne, Poetry South, and Susurrus, among others. She is the editorial assistant for Nimrod International Journal and loves every minute.
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