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How To Be Perfect - Poems by Ron Padgett

How To Be Perfect is a book of memories - the best kind of memories - the kind that wobble around in your head for a decade, rub up against each other, collect even more vivid color, and stumble out again as marvelous line broken parables. The certainty of childhood told through the inhibitions of adulthood is an intriguing combination. If a story can be a still life, Ron Padgett has found a way to paint it. The memory, as photograph, becomes both sign and symbol; How To Be Perfect extends the narrative of both aspects of the object.

Padgett breaks up his menagerie of memory with the occasional insight, the occasional poetics of observation, bringing us back to the contemporary. I think it's relelvent to reference the episode of Doctor Who I just saw where he leaves a DVD message to the past in the form of a one sided conversation, and when someone actually fills in the adjoining emptiness it only reveals that stone statues are alive and exist outside of time, but for them time stops if any living thing in the universe is observing them. How To Be Perfect is a book of wonderment and speculation, an almanac of trivial questions and introspective answers forming an all too human verse.

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