Ron Padgett’s Inner-Outer Spaces

This chapter examines a range of poems by Ron Padgett which muse on lived-in spaces. Accordingly, this chapter illuminates the “nuts and bolts” of Padgett’s poems through close readings, coupling formal criticism with “gossip” of interview material to pursue more decisive statements regarding the distinct ways in which this form is unique in the way that it registers sought or actual lived in space. This becomes particularly possible within this close examination of Padgett’s poetry. As Padgett utilizes a particularly supple sense of poetic form, exhibiting a control on the page that reflects a control of thought, over and above the rigid limitations of urban space and structures of inherited form, he constructs metaphors that pursue the explosion of structural constraints. This chapter resists shying away from the ramifications of such explosions, ending this study of spatial poetics in the contemporary moment.