Pink Dust
Ron Padgett
New York Review Books Poets, Mar 2025
he thing about Ron Padgett’s poetry I find most engaging is its diction’s lucidity—you could as easily call it simplicity—as concoctions of surreal delight, which he crafts with a feather-light touch. An example:
A haiku went up into a tree
and sat there on a limb
it had just made up.
As to the collection's title:
There used to be an eraser
in the shape of a wheel, pink,
attached to a little brush, black,
for erasing pencil words
and then brushing away the residue,
a little pink dust, . . .
I remember these erasers. Do they still exist? (They do. Amazon offers them as collectibles, $19.50.) Padgett’s pink dust calls to mind a monumentally huge eraser with brush by approximate contemporaries, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, dating from 1999, Typewriter Eraser, Scale X. Padgett’s an old guy who, to this older guy’s great satisfaction, labels one of the book’s three sections Geezer. The other two are Residue and Lockdown. Another pleasure from Geezer:
I put some stamps
on the envelope, maybe enough,
I don’t know.
The Post office
should accept it
as is, because
I made an effort.
The post office should look
at the envelope and say
“Well, he made an effort.”
Indeed. Padgett’s published work goes back to the Sixties. Pink Dust is the most recent of an enormous queue, though I doubt it’s the last. I wish us both long life and health.
Mike Silverton is most recently the author of Anvil on a Shoestring (2022), Trios (2023), and Yoga for Pickpockets (2024).
His poetry appeared in the late '60s and early '70s in Harper’s, The Nation, Wormwood Review, Poetry Now, some/thing, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, Elephant and other publications he may have (and most likely) mislaid. William Cole included Mike’s poems in four anthologies: Eight Lines and Under, Macmillan, 1967; Pith and Vinegar, Simon and Schuster, 1969; Poetry Brief, Macmillan, 1971; and Poems One Line & Longer, Grossman, 1973.
As a culture go-getter, Mike produced poetry readings for The New School for Social Research, New York’s municipal radio station, WNYC, and Pacifica Radio’s WBAI, KPFA, and KPFK. One glaring regret: Mike had arranged to record Frank O’Hara on the week in which he was killed, the weekend intervening, by a dune buggy.
Mike’s music writing, centering on modernist classical, appeared in Fanfare, a bimonthly review, and several Internet publications, including his own LaFolia.com. Mike's reviews of high-end audio hardware appeared in the main in The Absolute Sound, a print publication, and StereoTimes.com. For the unlikely audiophile reading this, Mike's speakers are Wilson Audio Sasha W/P.
When Mike and Lee relocated from Brooklyn to Midcoast Maine in early 2002 he indulged an interest in Dadaesque assemblage, resulting in several works in a group show at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, and a one-man show at Belfast’s Aarhus Gallery. Mike and Lee’s 1842 house and barn are peppered throughout with work he’d have preferred to sell. (Jefferson Davis spent a night, obviously at an earlier time. Really.)