Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Ron Padgett’s "Lines Written at Columbia" is an expansive, surreal, and free-associative meditation that moves fluidly between history, personal memory, classical allusions, and absurdist imagery. Like many of Padgett’s poems, it plays with language in a way that resists traditional meaning-making, instead constructing a world where thoughts collide, transform, and dissolve into new patterns of perception. The poem's seemingly disjointed structure mimics the experience of thought itself—wandering, unpredictable, and layered with multiple temporalities.

The opening declaration sets the tone: "The sky was like a blue blackboard from which 'Omnia Gallia divisa est in partes tres' had been erased and Vercingetorix was an ape in tinted armor (illustrations by F. Thompson, 1952 ed.)." The Latin phrase, which translates to "All Gaul is divided into three parts," is the famous opening of Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico, a textbook phrase familiar to generations of Latin students. That it has been erased suggests both a forgetting of history and the way classical knowledge fades from contemporary consciousness. The mention of Vercingetorix, the Gallic chieftain who resisted Roman conquest, is immediately undercut by the surreal image of him as "an ape in tinted armor," suggesting that historical narratives, once grand and serious, are reinterpreted through modern imagination, often trivialized or distorted.

The poem continues to juxtapose different layers of reality: "For all my turning did but wait upon her pleasing face that finds us in the open air ('He clear did see that she was passing fair') for what is meet but meeting in the open air 30 cents with chocolate, 25 without." Here, a poetic reflection on beauty and fate suddenly crashes into a commercial transaction, reinforcing the absurd way in which romanticized ideals coexist with mundane consumerism.

Padgett then shifts into a historical landscape, but one tinged with modern detachment: "We descend from the highlands into the fertile plain where peasants are tilling the soil to earn their meagre fare the way you lose yourself when drinking pop and feathers brush my temples lightly just before the scent of goons." The pastoral setting, evoking centuries of agrarian labor, is abruptly replaced by a contemporary and almost ridiculous association—the everyday act of "drinking pop." The phrase "the scent of goons" is particularly jarring, making goons (thugs or enforcers) something tangible and almost poetic, giving menace an unexpected sensory quality.

The imagery becomes increasingly surreal: "So run, lovely galosh, and play with the pretty goon: across the room he stands half-crouched, holding a rifle by stock and by barrel, his long straight hair framing high cheekbones, the tight, thin mouth, as if he knew that the goddess really is the girl with red, red ribbons in her hair and a dead lily on her brow." The combination of violence and beauty, with the "pretty goon" juxtaposed against "the girl with red, red ribbons", suggests an underlying tension between myth and brutality, between idealized femininity and an ominous, silent figure.

Midway through, the poem shifts into personal recollection: "I knew, for I was Anybody, big and growling, my father sitting barechested on an old Harley Davidson, his arm right-angled in the air with muscle bulging, and behind him Mother smiling openly in a breezy bathing suit." This moment grounds the poem in an almost cinematic image of American masculinity and nostalgia, a snapshot of the past rendered with exaggerated physicality. The father’s "right-angled" posture suggests both pride and rigidity, while the mother’s "breezy bathing suit" carries a kind of faded, idyllic charm.

Yet this personal moment is soon swept away by another disorienting transition: "So you too smile with a smile as endless as a confetti of winds and unwinding out to the Caribbean whose flickering throat of bees hums out, 'I love the way the dishes gleam when you wash them. I think they love you, too' while you sit in a café holding a book and a café con crema the color of your eyes." The whimsical notion that dishes "love you, too" adds a tender absurdity, while the café scene, rich with sensory detail, evokes both distance and intimacy, merging past and present.

The poem takes another philosophical turn with the invocation of a composer: "Alas, George Frederick Handel, I feel lousy and I think of you! I cannot imagine sailing down 525 rivers at once! But I imagine you, most sensual of recluses, faint in a haze of daguerreotypes, afraid to address letters in your own hand . . ." The lament for Handel, known for his grand baroque compositions, feels almost comic in its randomness. The idea of "sailing down 525 rivers at once" turns historical admiration into an exaggerated, impossible feat, reinforcing the theme of time collapsing into absurdity.

Then, in typical Padgett fashion, the poem disrupts itself once again: "How lovely it is to sit among some old pink fleas and think of leaving anywhere! For I have been picked up and tossed on the variable nonsense of my childhood—'and I just come along to be one of those people'—the way Hobart Earp, cousin of Wyatt, did, famous sheriff of olden times who lives this day. Or did." The historical figure, seemingly plucked from a Wild West mythos, is both alive and not alive, reinforcing the poem’s treatment of history as something malleable, constantly rewritten in the present.

The final movement of the poem builds toward a climax of bewilderment and surreal humor: "Today you are waking up the street while you are walking down the street because your grandparents saw the officers put him on the train at Fort Sill and he had insignias of hoof. Me, I had undergone a gloomy metamorphosis, treking across dead buzzards, unfathomable tundras, flying buttresses, and the insufferable embarrassment of rainbows!" The repetition of "waking up the street while you are walking down the street" creates a looping, dreamlike effect, while the imagery of "dead buzzards" and "the insufferable embarrassment of rainbows" captures the poem’s collision of the grotesque and the beautiful.

The final lines pull together the poem’s themes of uncertainty, displacement, and imaginative excess: "Clearly it was time for some 'backwards' . . . though ugh, it was a regular backwards, an anthology of forest that opens up in the New York Times, but you, mentally wonderful you, I used to think you were Emily Dickinson in the line, 'I am Emily Dickinson'! The doctor gazed out the window at Sunday. It was very kite. 'One of your deficiencies stems from your lack of stems from.' I nodded out as he ascended into Sunday with an armful of deficiencies, for I was even happier than the corduroy slacks on the Japanese girl who came as in a dream with clouds of blue and orchid petals floating in her hair as her dog leaped into the book and disappeared, giving meaning and beauty to each and every thing and the listeners fell quietly into the rain." The phrase "giving meaning and beauty to each and every thing" suggests that, despite the wild and chaotic journey, there is still a strange, fleeting transcendence.

"Lines Written at Columbia" is an exhilarating, free-associative exploration of memory, language, history, and the absurd. It embraces disjunction, allowing classical references, personal nostalgia, and surreal imagery to coexist in a space where meaning is constantly shifting. Padgett’s humor and unpredictability make the poem feel alive, as if it is being created in real time, where history and the present moment collide in a storm of dazzling nonsense and unexpected insight.

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