It isn’t always easy to balance childlike playfulness and lived-in wisdom, but Ron Padgett walks tightrope expertly in his book How to Be Perfect. As the collection unfolds, the poems only become more whimsical and more relevant, most notably in his longer pieces that exhibit a playful disobedience that refuses to stay inside the lines. When given the space to meander, he follows the poem to see where it leads, as if solving for the answer to a problem by performing long division. Reading his work is like watching him show his math to life’s most unquantifiable questions. 

How to Be Perfect is at times surreal and absurd. Padgett has a knack for turning a mundane topic on its head, polishing it on his shirt, and turning it over in his hands like a gemstone, so that we can see it so clearly in a new light. His poems are marked by experimentation, out of the box thinking, and are also irresistibly funny. Reading Padgett’s work is a bit like being a fish your whole life and finally encountering someone who tells you what water is. “I’ve never thought about it that way,” you might say to yourself at least once while reading this book. Here’s an excerpt to show what I mean:

the earth is always lying down on itself
and whirling
It is totally relaxed and happy to let everything happen to it
as if it were the wisest person who ever lived
the one who never got up from bed
because the bed flew around everywhere anyone would want to go
and had arms and hands and legs and feet
that were those of the wise horizontal bed-person

Lines indicating very fast movement are horizontal
because the horizon is so fast it is just an idea:
Now you see it now you are it
and then ninety-nine percent of every beautiful things you
ever knew
escaped and went back into the world…

…You are next in line, which is exciting,
which is why life is exciting: every moment is another line
you’re next in.