The Brooklyn Rail

             All I want
to know right now
is why Dick stopped
writing poems. Did he
really? Mom warned me
not everyone would
make it.

—Anselm Berrigan, Don’t Forget to Love Me (Wave Books, 2024)

If criticism is praise, measure, and the drawing out of what the work and the life of an artist might mean for others, then Ron Padgett’s new book about Dick Gallup, who Anne Waldman called the “secret hero of the second generation New York School,” is among the most perceptive and rewarding in the game. It might seem strange to talk about a memoir as criticism, but Padgett’s work gracefully blends these genres, and at certain points even mixes in posthumous selections from Gallup’s unpublished poems, letters, and journals. All this together makes for a remarkably powerful and affable portrait of an artist, an accomplishment which is nothing new for Padgett. Dick makes the third of this celebrated poet and translator’s raw, loving books about his poet friends from Tulsa, Oklahoma; Ted (Berrigan) was first, and Joe (Brainard) second. Dick might be the rawest volume of the trilogy; while maintaining the true romance of Padgett’s storytelling, it reveals how trying and painful it can be to “make it” as a poet or a friend. Many poets and artists like to talk about the importance of artistic community, but this book really faces the mutual self-questionings, the careworn frustrations, and also the vital glee of lifelong closeness.

The pleasures of reading Dick begin with the physical book, the latest terrific design from Cuneiform Press. With its classic black-and-white cover of Gallup (taken by Padgett) looking vision-laden and melancholic, and its tight, slim form that slides nicely into the back pocket, this book is a fellow traveler, made for carrying around and holding up between yourself and the world. But the greater pleasure comes in the grace of human presence and subtle provocation in Padgett’s prose, which makes not just an important contribution to New York School literary history, but to the craft of writing about artists and their work. The book mostly consists of short, episodic chapters, which proceed roughly chronologically but with quite a bit of flashing back and forth, as there is in both memory and storytelling. Many are dedicated to analyzing and sharing Gallup’s work, with titles like “Poetic Structure, Surface, and Depth,” while others, like “Disenchantment and Disconnection,” offer meditations on the poet’s ultimate abandonment of the poetry world. Padgett’s first-person voice is that of a disarming, seasoned storyteller, and it especially shines in his tales of misadventures with Gallup, often given enticing titles such as “The Pentagon Caper” and “The Pubic Hair Donation.” For all the humor and air of innocence that dance through this story of boyhood friends becoming old heads together, other feelings, at once dark and unfathomable, are hinted at, without Padgett stepping in and spelling them out. Padgett seems to recognize that some feelings exist in the domain of the unspeakable; to write about them would cheapen them, and turn them into a commodity.

Those last two sentences are in fact brazenly plagiarized from what the poet and critic John Yau has beautifully written about Padgett’s poetry—they fit here because they get at the power of Padgett’s narrative prose about his friends, too, much more eloquently than I could. I asked Padgett about the insights that friends can bring to each other’s work, and what he thinks of the prohibitions many publications place on writing about friends. He said, “I don’t care what professional journals want, and I have a knee-jerk aversion to literary taboos. I got more from Joe LeSueur’s memoir of his friend Frank O’Hara than any other book about him.” Having met Gallup and Brainard by age six and Berrigan by seventeen, Padgett sits in an enchanted place to create great works of friendship, found-families, and art-making—works whose stories are so resonant and strong they almost feel like myth.

Gallup never really did stop writing, and later in life would even refer to himself as an “unreconstituted poet.” But such a “retreat into his private world,” Padgett believes, left him “dogged by anxiety, depression, crushing self-doubt, and physical exhaustion.” It was “because we were together,” Padgett wrote in Ted about the group’s years in New York, that “we had a momentum and impudent confidence we could never have mustered alone.” That collective pluck feels true both to the goofball Dadaism of the group’s early collaborations, and to Padgett’s stories of adolescence with Gallup—mocking their over-athletic neighbors, making fun of their parents’ nightly TV shows. In Padgett’s telling, their youth was lighthearted and rowdy because they had each other to confront what Padgett and Gallup portray as a hard Oklahoman moral rigidity and lonesome boredom. As a teen, Gallup wrote into the highly conservative Tulsa Tribune to call its politics “childish and short-sighted,” and to claim that “an American is no better than a Russian”; a few days later, Padgett followed with a letter saying, “Bravo Richard Gallup!” “We were like tag-team wrestlers,” Padgett writes. Soon after Gallup left home for college at Tulane (quickly abandoned to join the group in New York) he wrote to Padgett, “My reliance on you, and vice versa, makes it hard to live apart.” (All quotes from Gallup’s letters and journals come from Dick). I think it is telling as to the nature of these memoirs that Padgett never wrote a book about the group; it’s his intimacy with each of them, one to the other, that impels the writing.

In New York, Gallup became an accomplished, influential poet—publishing in the big and little magazines, doing readings with the likes of John Ashbery at MoMA, graduating from Columbia, and teaching workshops. Padgett says, “Of all the intelligent and pensive people I’ve ever known, I can’t imagine any of them going … so deeply and persistently into thought itself.” Gallup’s lines range from simple, mysteriously funny ones like “Spooky freeways link us,” to philosophical play like Ashbery’s, but more vernacular: “After peeling away the layers / There’s nothing left / But to put them back on.” Writing with the kind of insight that only a friend would have, Padgett says what makes Gallup’s poetry so special “is a striking blend of cerebral control and the adventuresome ‘out there.’ Sometimes he went so far ‘out there’ that he wasn’t sure what he was doing.”

Some of Gallup’s poetry can’t help reading like “a prescient commentary on his withdrawal,” Padgett writes. The question of leaving behind poetry and friends seems to have been on his mind even in Gallup’s first full-length book, Where I Hang My Hat (1970), where he wrote: “Go forth into novel languages, or into the lowly valleys to escape your relentless fellows.” And in 1981, the latter is just what Gallup did. “With very little money, no job prospects,” and a “disenchantment with his fellow poets,” Gallup set out for San Francisco and started a second career as a cabdriver.

As early as 1970, he had journaled a scathing, still-relevant judgement of the poetry community: “As soon as ‘personalities’ are established as the no. 1 consideration people are going to hate one another and the scene will blow itself apart.” By the later seventies, Gallup was angry and weary, Padgett says, “with what he had been seeing in too many poets: egoism and careerism.” Amid art and poetry scenes that can feel too close to social risers, fashion, celebrity, and “personality,” it is irresistible to romanticize Gallup’s drop out as a principled repudiation of a community that had lost its way. And this is an important aspect of Padgett’s multi-dimensional portrait of Gallup: “He was genuine,” Padgett writes, and “always free of the guile and calculation that make people (myself included) not quite authentic.” But Padgett also makes clear that Gallup’s drop out was not a performance, nor was it part of some hard scrabble route to poetic integrity. “His ‘dropping out’ was quiet and gradual,” Padgett wrote to me, and not anything meant to garner reaction.

When I asked Padgett if his feelings toward Gallup had shifted as he worked on the book, he candidly said, “A number of unexamined, ambiguous feelings presented themselves, and I had to deal with them.” You can feel him doing just that as the book goes on.

Was I bothered by his pretty much dropping out of the literary life? You bet I was.… Over the years the very fact that he was writing poetry had helped sustain me as a poet. He and I and some of our close poet friends had felt confirmed by each other, and had been inspired by each other.

Padgett at times seems betrayed by how Gallup departed from his fellows for the lowly valleys, and reproachful, too. In 1978 he wrote to Gallup, “those of us who love you … wish you would float less,” meaning lay off the hard booze and all the joints and nail down some steady commitments. “My understanding of his emotional life was pathetic,” Padgett reflects just after quoting his letter. But at other times his harsher thoughts toward Gallup give way to that admiration for his genuineness and his refusal to self-promote or ride coattails. Other events that Padgett factors into Gallup’s departure are a troubling, if liberating, divorce and “severe budget cuts” to the programs Gallup taught in. But Padgett never settles into any explanations. His moral and narrative self-questioning seem ever-ongoing, and each chapter feels like a stray epiphany that he pursues and then moves on from to make way for to the next one.

Something of the whim of Brainard’s I Remember is at play in Padgett’s storytelling, and it gives the work a distinct “clarity of the here and now,” to quote Padgett’s own superb analysis of Brainard. Publishers Weekly criticized Padgett’s Joe for not providing “deep insight into the mind of Brainard,” but what this completely misses is that one of Padgett’s great provocations is his distrust of “deep insight” and his aversion to the neutral, authoritative perspective many critics and biographers assume. “Deep insight” would inevitably cramp his intimate involvement with the writing, not to mention his good humor and charm. One very short chapter interrupts Dick’s story to note that “George Schneeman and Dick, two of my best friends for so many years, my buddies for life, both died on January 27. It’s a coincidence, but… but what?” Padgett wrote that Brainard had a unique ability to reveal “the dynamics of the flow of memories across the screen of his mind in the very moment of recollection and composition,” and the same is true of Padgett’s narrative prose. Brainard brings the moment of making the art into the work at hand in ways that are natural, surprising and often very funny, and Padgett believes this constitutes “a phenomenology of the self as a step toward a more fundamental sense of reality.” And in Dick, the way Padgett stays with both the moment of writing and his intimacy with Gallup takes a step toward a more present, human, and friendly style of criticism.

In Padgett’s world, literature exists far away from the academic, the elevated, or the “important,” and it seems to become in fact an actual thing people do and live out together, and something that is always best when shared among friends. If there is a moral to Dick and Padgett’s other fables of friendship and art, it must be: take the risk of really seeing (and maybe even writing about) what your friends are doing, and do so with inquisitive affection, with honesty, with doubtings of both self and art, with nerve, and with love. Why is it important to tell the stories of the people we love? Because it gives vital sustenance to our collective fights against things like insecurity, depression, self-sabotage, and destruction. I asked Padgett how writing about Gallup after he had passed changed his relationship to him, and he said, “I’m afraid that although writing about Dick drew me closer to him, finishing the book seems to have put up a barrier between us. It’s as if I had codified him, which was not my intention. I’m hoping this feeling will fade.” When asked if he had any advice about friendship and staying connected, all he said was: “Remember that friendship is one of the best things in life. If you’re lucky, in thirty or forty years you’ll know exactly what I mean.”