Hardcover. 8vo. 131 pp. Blue boards, yellow lettering to spine, fine. One of 500 numbered copies (#437). A very fine copy.

This volume includes two significant collaborations with Joe Brainard. “Suddenly Joe Brainard was everywhere,” Ron Padgett begins his 2004 book-length portrait, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard. In 1958, Tulsa, Oklahoma, young Padgett, poet and high school junior, looking for an art editor for his literary journal, the White Dove Review, hired Joe Brainard. Within five issues, the White Dove Review would publish some of the most important writers of the day: Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and the then little known poet and Tulsan graduate student, Ted Berrigan. And roughly a year and half later, the “Tulsa Kid” with Berrigan and Brainard would coast into the heart of the New York literary and art scene on the wings of their dove, becoming known, among various monikers, as the Tulsa School of writers, a second generation of the New York School. Padgett led poetry workshops, directed the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Place for a few years, and edited the influential 1970 Anthology of New York Poets.

From the collection of Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. Perhaps Bidart's most celebrated poem, "The Second Hour of the Night," is partly based on his relationship with Brainard. "The relationship was," as Bidart has said, both "more than friendship and less than a romance." His "In Memory of Joe Brainard" is a profound elegy for his friend who died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.