Wayne Padgett was a colorful, charming, and generous man. He was also one of Oklahoma's most elusive bootleggers and career criminals. From the 1960s into the 1980s, he operated out of Tulsa as a high-ranking member of the outfit known as the Dixie Mafia. In "Oklahoma Tough," poet Ron Padgett tells the inside story of his notorious father and of how he earned his reputation as a Robin Hood "King of the Bootleggers."

"Oklahoma Tough" is also a history of the distinctive mid-twentieth-century Oklahoma milieu that made Wayne Padgett's life story possible. Ron Padgett brings this vanished world to life with candid and sometimes comic descriptions of criminal life. Particularly insightful and entertaining are interviews in which former bootleggers, family members, friends, and enemies speak openly about their lives.

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.

For the Handbook, 19 teaching poets have written 76 entries on traditional and modern poetic forms. The Handbook succinctly defines the forms, summarizes their histories, quotes good examples (ancient and modern, by adult and young writers), and offers professional tricks of the trade on how to use each form.

New to this edition of the Handbook are: two new entries for poetic forms, a new preface, an updated bibliography, and a resource list of current audiocassettes, videocassettes, CD-ROMs, and Web sites. Padgett has revised the text throughout.

In this new poetry collection, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett illuminates the wonders inside things that don't even exist-and then they do. In Dot, Ron Padgett returns with more of the playfully profound work that has endeared him to generations of readers. Guided by curiosity and built on wit, generosity of spirit, and lucid observation, Dot shows how any experience, no matter how mundane, can lead to a poem that flares like gentle fireworks in the night sky of the reader's mind.

"Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder."-Robert Creeley Ron Padgett has reenergized modern poetry with exuberant and tender love poems, with exceptionally lucid and touching elegies, and with imaginative and action-packed homages to American culture and visual art. He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have always imparted a contagious sense of joy. In these new poems, Padgett hasn't forsaken his beloved Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the alarm. Here, he asks, "What makes us so mean?" And he really wants to know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving. "Humanity," Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still "has to take it one step at a time." Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, teacher, and, as Peter Gizzi says, "a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist." His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Visit his website at www.ronpadgett.com.

Art. LGBT Studies. From 1963 through 1978, Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified by the incongruity of her presence. THE NANCY BOOK is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of over fifty works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before. In THE NANCY BOOK, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.

Written over three seasons in a Vermont cabin, these poems act as a reflecting pool, casting back mortality, consciousness, and time in new, crystal-clear light.

"Theater such as Kenneth Koch cannot be simply paraphrased, and presents to the audience the classic Mennipean challenge: to ponder, to mull it over, to "think.""--Mac Wellman

"The Banquet" brings together 144 plays, ten screenplays, and five operas spanning more than five decades of experimental work from a writer John Ashbery has called "simply the best we have." Witty, provocative, and playful, Kenneth Koch's work draws on poetry, musicals, improvisational comedy, satire, and other forms for their inspiration and touches on subjects ranging from the silly to the sublime.

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), known for his association with the New York School of poetry, wrote many collections of poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction. His books include "Seasons on Earth," "On the Edge," "Thank You and Other Poems," "The Art of Love," "One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays," "Hotel Lambosa," and "The Collected Fiction," and several books on teaching children how to write poetry. Koch was awarded numerous honors, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University.

Soupault is the co-founder of the surrealist movement, so this book should appeal to fans of surrealism as well as dada. The book also concerns well-known writers like James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Apollinaire. This is the only English translation of this vital and rare first-person account of the French writers (and including James Joyce) who shook the literary establishment in Paris and breathed fresh air into a young century. Published on the centenary of the Dada movement. Paul Auster will blurb the book and it will feature a foreword by noted translator and Breton biographer Mark Polizzoti and an afterword by Ron Padgett.

"When someone we love dies, most of us do something to keep them from completely vanishing. We summon up memories of them, we talk about them, we visit their graves, we treasure photographs of them, we dream about them, and we cry, and for those brief moments they are in some way with us. But when my friend Joe Brainard died, I knew I was going to have to do something beyond all these."

So begins Ron Padgett's warm, conversational memoir--the unlikely and true story of two childhood friends, one straight and one gay, who grew up in 1950s Oklahoma, surprised their families by moving to New York City in search of art and poetry, and became a part of the dynamic community of artists and writers whose work continues to shape American culture.

Much of this intimate memoir is told in Joe's own direct and unforgettable voice. Dozens of letters, journal entries, poems, photographs, and artworks create a stirring portrait of the times--one that illuminates not only Joe Brainard's life and art, but the influence that his kindness and insight had on the lives of his contemporaries, including Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Frank O' Hara, Joe LeSueur, Anne Waldman, John Ashbery, Kenward Elmslie, and countless other friends, lovers, and admirers.

As Ron Padgett generously shares his memories, he allows us all to get to know Joe Brainard, a truly great person who just happened to be a brilliant artist and poet. Above all, "Joe" is a gentle reminder that love, life, and art matter every second.

Poet Ron Padgett, the son of an Oklahoma bootlegger, grew up in Tulsa where he met Joe Brainard at the age of 6. His recent books include the memoir, "Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers" and the collection of poems "You Never Know."

Classics in the Classroom presents practical ways to use great literature to inspire imaginative writing by young people and others. The great literature discussed in this volume includes myths, epics, lyric poems, plays, stories, and novels, from ancient Sumeria, Greece, Rome, and Persia, and from Europe, Japan, Africa, and the United States. Authors presented include Homer, Sappho, Aristophanes, Ovid, Catullus, Rumi, Shakespeare, Basho, Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Kleist, Twain, and Hesse. Also discussed are works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and Beowulf. The 19 informal essays in this book offer useful ideas and approaches taken directly from the contributors' own teaching experience.

This book contains 33 creative writers presenting ideas and techniques for exploring poetry writing, fiction writing, translation, practical aesthetics, creative reading and the imagination. Selected from the very best articles in Teachers & Writers Magazine over 17 years, this two volumes (sold separately) offers a comprehensive multitude of ideas and techniques for writing in the classroom

In the two volumes of Educating The Imagination, fifty-five creative writers present a multitude of ideas and techniques for writing in the classroom: poetry writing; fiction writing; playwriting; writing about folklore, history, and science; translation and writing across cultures; bookmaking; writing parodies; the importance of stories; practical aesthetics; creative reading; funny experiences with words; the history of punctuation; memories of high school English teachers and other legendary figures; and that great, alluring, dangerous, delightful mystery known as the imagination. The seventy-two informal essays come from the past seventeen years of "Teachers & Writers" magazine, with practical ideas and exercises that are still fresh, useful, and inspiring. Educating The Imagination invites us to take a new look at the imagination and the ways it can enrich our classrooms and our lives. These ideas and exercises are as appropriate for the small group workshop and the individual aspiring writer at home, as they are for the formal curriculum of classroom instruction. -- Midwest Book Review

This popular book, in which writers share the assignments that never fail to inspire their students, covers a broad spectrum of genres pertinent to the core curricula of school boards across the country. Lessons on diversity, Greek epic and non-classical literature will all do well by Christian McEwen's essay on preparing students for creating oral histories. But there are plenty of creative exercises on fiction, poetry, playwriting and memoir, here, to inspire teachers and engage students. Samples of student writing are included. "Highly recommended." -Kliatt.

Blaise Cendrars was a pioneer of modernist literature. The full range of his poetry--from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor--offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now. Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe. With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Leger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry--from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor--offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.