April 16, 2012

Poet Ron Padgett to give 15th Ringel Memorial Reading

CTY-sponsored event will take place April 22 at the BMA

The Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading celebrates its 15th season on Sunday, April 22, when eminent poet Ron Padgett will read from his work at 5 p.m. in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Meyerhoff Auditorium. The event is sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.

The self-described son of an Oklahoma bootlegger, Padgett started writing poems in spiral notebooks at age 13. He has written more than 20 volumes of poetry, fiction and essays, edited numerous anthologies and translated works of Apollinaire and others. He is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim awards and is a past chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His work has been described as witty, self-effacing and sometimes bittersweet. Of his book How to Be Perfect, a reviewer wrote, “Padgett seems like a Stoic philosopher eager to peel away the vanities and strip his poems to their bare essentials in order to get to the heart of it all.”

Padgett was a close friend of the late Kenneth Koch, who had been Ringel’s teacher at Columbia and who gave the inaugural Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading.

The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund was established in 1998 by the Ringel family in memory of this former CTY student whose life was tragically cut short in a motorcycle accident just before his 28th birthday. The fund supports an annual lecture/reading dedicated to education, poetry and the imagination. Past visiting poets have included Robert Pinsky, Grace Paley, John Ashbery, Sharon Olds and Billy Collins.

A question-and-answer session with Padgett and a book signing will immediately follow the reading. Books will be available for purchase at the door.

For more information, go to cty.jhu.edu/ringel.