Scope and Contents
The collection consists of material created and accumulated by Ron Padgett in the course of his work as a poet, translator, and editor. Material includes extensive correspondence with other poets and writers; manuscripts for Padgett's books of poetry and prose, as well as some juvenilia and early writings; manuscripts for Padgett’s English translations of works by French-language poets including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Valery Larbaud, Paul Morand, and Pierre Reverdy; manuscripts of collected letters and writings by others arranged and edited by Padgett, including works by Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, and Frank O’Hara; and manuscripts for writings by others, including filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Also included are "bokes," the term coined by Padgett to describe the "little unique editions" Ted Berrigan and he made for each other beginning in the 1960s, which encompass dozens of unique handmade works by Tom Clark, Anne Waldman, Patricia Padgett, Bill Berkson, George Schneeman, Michael Brownstein, Larry Fagin, Tom Veitch, Aram Saroyan, Steve Carey, and Lewis Warsh, among others. Also found are notebooks, including numerous travel diaries, project notebooks, and personal journals; appointment books for the years 1971 to 2008; as well as teaching files; student papers; research material; printed material; and personal papers. Also included is a collection of the writings and correspondence of Padgett’s friend, gay artist and author Joe Brainard, as well as files for White Dove Review, edited by Padgett, along with Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard, while they were high school students in Tulsa, and Full Court Press, edited and published by Padgett, Joan Simon, and Anne Waldman from 1974 to 1989.
Correspondents include John Ashbery, Paul Auster, Glen Baxter, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Michael Brownstein, Rudy Burckhardt, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Jim Dine, Kenward Elmslie, Clayton Eshleman, Larry Fagin, Kathleen Fraser, Dick Gallup, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Alex Katz, Kenneth Koch, Ann Lauterbach, Harry Mathews, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Tom Raworth, Charles Reznikov, Ed Sanders, Aram Saroyan, George Schneeman, James Schuyler, Tony Towle, Tom Veitch, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, and Trevor Winkfield, among others. Among the highlights are a complete file of correspondence between Padgett and Joe Brainard from 1962 to 1993, including Padgett's letters to Brainard which were returned to Padgett upon Brainard's death in 1994; a complete file of correspondence between Padgett and Berrigan from 1959 to 1983; and extensive correspondence from James Schuyler, as well as correspondence from Schuyler to Joe Brainard, dating from 1966 to 1990.
The White Dove Review files consist of all known correspondence and manuscripts, including those of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, e. e. cummings, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, David Meltzer, and Ron Lowinsohn, among others, and provide documentation of the magazine that helped launch Padgett's career and that influenced many of the Second Generation New York School little magazines and presses.
The Full Court Press files consist of all known correspondence, manuscripts, proofs, production material, promotion files, and business records. Writers published by Full Court include Joe Brainard, William Burroughs, Edwin Denby, Larry Fagin, Allen Ginsberg, John Godfrey, Frank O'Hara, Phillipe Soupault (William Carlos Williams, translator), and Tom Veitch.
Dates
- 1922-2019
Creator
Conditions Governing Access
The materials are open for research.
Boxes 89, 134-135: (computer media): Restricted fragile material. Access copies of electronic files may be requested. Consult Access Services for further information.
Boxes 136-142 (audiovisual media): Restricted fragile material. Reference copies may be requested. Consult Access Services for further information.
Box 143 (student records): Restricted until 2089. For further information, consult appropriate curator.
Conditions Governing Use
The Ron Padgett Papers is the physical property of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the authors or their legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the appropriate curator.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Purchased from Granary Books, Inc. on the Edwin J. Beinecke Book Fund, 2009, 2019.
Arrangement
The collection is organized into two groupings: February 2009 acquisition, 1929-2008, and October 2019 acquisition, 1922-2019.
Extent
129.02 Linear Feet (144 boxes)
Language of Materials
English
French
Chinese
Spanish; Castilian
Portuguese
Catalog Record
A record for this collection is available in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog
Persistent URL
Abstract
The collection consists of material created and accumulated by Ron Padgett in the course of his work as a poet, translator, and editor. Material includes extensive correspondence with other poets and writers; manuscripts for Padgett's books of poetry and prose, as well as some juvenilia and early writings; manuscripts for Padgett’s English translations of works by French-language poets including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Valery Larbaud, Paul Morand, and Pierre Reverdy; manuscripts of collected letters and writings by others arranged and edited by Padgett, including works by Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, and Frank O’Hara; and manuscripts for writings by others, including filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Also included are "bokes," the term coined by Padgett to describe the "little unique editions" Ted Berrigan and he made for each other beginning in the 1960s, which encompass dozens of unique handmade works by Tom Clark, Anne Waldman, Patricia Padgett, Bill Berkson, George Schneeman, Michael Brownstein, Larry Fagin, Tom Veitch, Aram Saroyan, Steve Carey, and Lewis Warsh, among others. Also found are notebooks, including numerous travel diaries, project notebooks, and personal journals; appointment books for the years 1971 to 2008; as well as teaching files; student papers; research material; printed material; and personal papers. Also included is a collection of the writings and correspondence of Padgett’s friend, gay artist and author Joe Brainard, as well as files for White Dove Review, edited by Padgett, along with Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard, while they were high school students in Tulsa, and Full Court Press, edited and published by Padgett, Joan Simon, and Anne Waldman from 1974 to 1989.
Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1942. He began writing at the age of 13 and started a little magazine in high school called the White Dove Review with friends Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard. In its five issues, the magazine published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Ted Berrigan, and others.
In 1960, he moved to New York, where he attended Columbia College and studied with Kenneth Koch and Lionel Trilling. Padgett later spent a year in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship where he studied French literature.
His first collection of poems, Bean Spasms, written with Ted Berrigan, was published in 1967. Since then, he has published several books of poetry, including How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007), You Never Know (2002), Poems I Guess I Wrote (2001), New & Selected Poems (1995), The Big Something (1990), Triangles in the Afternoon (1979), and Great Balls of Fire (1969).
He has also published a volume of selected prose titled Blood Work (1993), as well as translations of Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems (1992), Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1971), and Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated (1968).
Padgett was the editor-in-chief of World Poets, a three-volume reference book (Scribner, 2000). He served as director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project from 1978 to 1980 and then was the publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative for twenty years. He was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008. He lives in New York City.
Biographical note is drawn from Poets.org. More information about Padgett can be found on his website.
Processing Information
The collection was received by the library in 157 boxes, which were organized and described by the dealer in ten sections, according to where the material originated and/or was stored. Six sections of the dealer list described material stored in Ron Padgett's apartment (in the living room, the closet, or above the bed); three sections described material stored in Manhattan Ministorage; and one section described material originating from Vermont, where Padgett spent summers. Similar types of material (for instance, correspondence and writings) could be found in all ten sections.
The collection was processed to a preliminary level in 2009 shortly after it was acquired. Preliminary processing included reboxing and refoldering all material, and organizing material at the box-level into series based on activity or format. Material within boxes and folders have not been sorted. Original section and box numbers have been recorded on each folder as part of rehousing so that it's possible to reconstruct the original physical groupings, or sections, of material.
Information included in the Description of the Papers note and Collection Contents section is drawn almost entirely from the dealer description and list. This information has not been verified by the library, and is included in the finding aid in order to provide more detail about the context and content of the collection. Titles in brackets were supplied by the archivist. In order to compensate for the lack of sorting within boxes and folders, the list of correspondents for each box or file has, when available, been incorporated into the contents list. Names are repeated throughout the finding aid and researchers will have to look in numerous boxes to locate all the correspondence of a particular individual; however, by doing a key word search, it will be possible for researchers to identify where such correspondence is located.
This finding aid may be updated periodically to account for new acquisitions to the collection and/or revisions in arrangement and description.
Former call number: Uncat MSS 1194.
- American literature -- 20th century
- American poetry -- 20th Century
- Apollinaire, Guillaume, 1880-1918
- Artifacts (object genre)
- Artists -- United States -- 20th Century
- Ashbery, John, 1927-2017
- Audiocassettes
- Audiovisual materials
- Auster, Paul, 1947-
- Authors, American -- 20th Century
- Authors, American -- 21st century
- Baxter, Glen, 1944-
- Berkson, Bill, 1939-2016
- Berrigan, Ted, 1934-1983
- Born digital
- Brainard, Joe, 1942-1994
- Brownstein, Michael, 1943-
- Burckhardt, Rudy
- Cendrars, Blaise, 1887-1961
- Clark, Tom, 1941-
- College teachers -- United States
- Coolidge, Clark, 1939-
- Diaries
- Dine, Jim, 1935-
- Drawings (visual works)
- Elmslie, Kenward, 1929-
- Eshleman, Clayton
- Fagin, Larry, 1937-2017
- Financial records
- Fraser, Kathleen, 1935-
- French literature -- 20th Century
- French poetry -- 20th Century
- Gallup, Dick, 1941-
- Gay authors
- Hejinian, Lyn
- Howe, Susan, 1937-
- Jarmusch, Jim, 1953-
- Katz, Alex, 1927-
- Koch, Kenneth, 1925-2002
- LGBTQ resource
- Larbaud, Valéry, 1881-1957
- Lauterbach, Ann, 1942-
- Mathews, Harry, 1930-2017
- Mayer, Bernadette
- Morand, Paul, 1888-1976
- New York school of art
- Notebooks
- Notley, Alice, 1945-
- O'Hara, Frank, 1926-1966
- Owen, Maureen, 1943-
- Padgett, Patricia
- Padgett, Ron, 1942-
- Photographs
- Poets -- United States
- Poets, American -- 20th century
- Publishers and publishing
- Raworth, Tom, 1938-
- Reverdy, Pierre, 1889-1960
- Sanders, Ed, 1939-
- Saroyan, Aram, 1943-
- Schneeman, George
- Schuyler, James
- Scrapbooks
- Towle, Tony, 1939-
- Translators and translating
- Veitch, Tom, 1951-
- Video recordings
- Waldman, Anne, 1945-
- Warsh, Lewis, 1944-
- Winkfield, Trevor, 1944-
- Title
- Guide to the Ron Padgett Papers
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- by Leigh Golden, Jennifer Meehan, and Emma Gronbeck
- Date
- July 2009. Revised: September 2019.
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description note
- Finding aid written in English.
Part of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Repository
Location
121 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Opening Hours
Access Information
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