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(Coffee House Press: Minneapolis)

It’s uncommon for two young friends from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to exhibit a common affinity for self-salvation and a deep love for art and literature. That this affinity inevitably embarked them on a mutual odyssey of personal growth and life adventure makes for a compelling friendship indeed. The bond between Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett remained steady throughout their lives, until Brainard contracted HIV and consequently died of pneumonia in 1993.

Writing in a warm, sparkling, conversational style infused with highly personal pathos, at times nearly tragic, at other times heightened with exaltation and a joyous sense of discovery, Ron Padgett—a distinguished member of the New York school of poets and writers and author of numerous books, such as You Never Know and Oklahoma Tough (poems), and My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (a memoir)—renders a vivid reminiscence of their early and simple upbringing at the age of six, when they first met. In high school the two friends started a magazine of contemporary poetry and art called The White Dove Review, which published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creely, LeRoi Jones, Ted Berrigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and others (Padgett and Dick Gallup were editors and Brainard and Michael Marsh were art editors). The sensitive account acknowledges Brainard’s struggle with his own sexual identity and the narrow conventions of his background, which continually resurfaced throughout his life. The two friends reunited in New York City with Ted Berrigan and Pat Mitchell (later married to Padgett), suffering through many endearing episodes of a mutually impoverished condition, as the late Willem de Kooning once referred to those under such circumstance as “Bowery bums.” Eventually, they met with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, and other New York luminaries, including James Schuyler, Ann Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bill Berkson, and Kenward Elmslie—Brainard’s longtime lover and devoted friend—all of whom were part of the Padgetts’ and Brainard’s palatable mixture of social, artistic, and literary circle. The perpetual battle against self-doubt, which would drive most people to reclusion and embitterment, in Brainard’s case proved to have the opposite effect, as beautifully told in the last paragraph of the book:

I don’t know if saintly is the best word to describe a person who is kind, generous, loving, and compassionate, whose spirit has moved continually toward honesty, openness, and clarity, and whose fascination with reality has ultimately led him to an acceptance of who he is and the ways things are—even in his own terminal illness—but I do know that Joe, with his aversion for inflated pronouncements and his awareness of his own foibles, would hardly have thought that saintly applied to him. I just don’t know what other word to use.

The affection Brainard had for Padgett was mutual:

All I could think about was you [Ron]. I had to face looking out the window at the Flat Iron Building, which said in big letters ‘Flat Iron Building.’ All I could think of was crossing out the ‘I’ in ‘Iron’ and leaving it as ‘Flat Ron Building.’ At first it was funny, then it was sort of infuriating because I could think of nothing else.

Apart from this vast scope of Brainard’s frequent collaboration with Padgett and many other poets such as Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, Kenward Elmslie, Ann Waldman, Bill Berkson, and John Ashbery, his published memoir, I Remember, was a book of lasting significance. In addition, the two great retrospectives at Tibor de Nagy in 1997 and later at P.S. 1 in 2001 were illuminating experiences, especially for younger artists, myself included, who were not previously exposed to the magnificent range of his work. In some ways, Brainard is indeed a visionary, whose work reveals both the indigenous originality in his graphic vision of America, via Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” comic strip, and the deep pocket of New York’s bohemian esprit, which can be seen as a synthesis of all the artists he knew, from Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Alex Katz to Fairfield Porter. In fact, Joe Brainard’s art has the same power as that of Forrest Bess. While the latter stands on one side of the road in the dark, dreaming of asteroids, primal symbols in his head, the former walks on the other side, in the light, celebrating the tangible objects of his affection available in his immediate environment. Both operate outside of the art world’s mainstream aesthetic. Both share the deepening questions of their sexualities—one longs to be a hermaphrodite; the other was a self-professed homosexual with great appetite for life.

In the end, Ron Padgett has written more than just a moving memoir of his friend Joe Brainard, with an abundance of colorful stories of their milieu. In his effort, the testament of true friendship also touches upon the strength and wisdom of how one should live one’s life as a creative individual, hence elevating the book in the minds of its readers to an invaluable tonic for inspired men of good will.