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 inThe Best American Poetry,The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry,The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor'sWriter's Almanac. He was also a guest on Keillor'sA Prairie Home Companionin 2009. Padgett is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and his most recent books includeHow to Be Perfect;You Never Know, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard; andIf I Were You. Born in Oklahoma, he lives in New York City and Calais, Vermont.