| Lost and Found Man has lost his gods. If he loses his dignity, it's all over.
I said that.
What did I mean? First, that the belief in divinity has almost disappeared.
By dignity I meant mutual self-respect, the sense that we have some right to be here and that there is value in it. (Values are where the gods went when they died.)
My dog Susie doesn't seem to have any values, but she does have Pat and me, gods she gets to play with and bark at. |
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"Lost and Found" is reprinted by permission from Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013). Copyright © 2013 by Ron Padgett. |
About this Poem: "In the pile of miscellaneous papers always on my desk I found a scrap that contained the words in this poem's epigraph, and I vaguely remembered having scribbled them down. That triggered the poem's beginning: 'I said that.' I liked the unusual idea of quoting oneself in an epigraph. By the way, the corny play on god/dog was unintentional."
Ron Padgett |
Poetry by Padgett Collected Poems |
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| | | Ron Padgett has published over fourteen books of poetry including How Long (Coffee House Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the forthcoming Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013). He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in New York City. Photo by John Sarsgard | Related Poems by Frank O'Hara by Ted Berrigan by Alice Notley |
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