Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

The C.R.W. Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today my guest is

Ron Padgett. He's the author most recently of a biography memoir of Joe Brainer. The book is called Joe, a memoir of Joe Brainerd, and it's

published by Coffee House Press. What I felt thrillingly interesting about the memoir was that it

really gives you a sense of the casual day-to-day ups and downs

of someone trying to make it as a poet and an artist

and the way that person functions within a community of poets and artists.

But it seemed, in a certain way so close to the ground,

so nose to the day to the day, that I wondered about the process of writing it, you know,

because there's a feeling you're going through one year, one month, one art show at a time.

And this is not an artist that people know certainly as well as you knew him.

And so there's a level of ongoing intimacy.

How did you decide on your tone?

Michael, I don't think I really decided on the tone at all.

I think the tone came to me in the course of writing this book.

When Joe died in 1994, I began to scribble just little memories I had of him. And my original intention was just to preserve these little capsule moments. But then the book kind of got out of hand, and I kept writing more and more and discovering more and more about this person. I thought I knew so well. And I did know him well. We met at the age of six, and we were lifelong friends. But I guess Joe was such a, to me, a very close friend,

almost a brother, that I couldn't take a sort of a distance from him. I couldn't write as if I were the official biographer of Joe Raynard. I had to write something that was from a friend, and

that's exactly why I did that. Also, I wanted people to know what Joe was really like,

...