White Dove Review

Ron Padgett
Tulsa, Oklahoma

Nos. 1–5 (1959–Summer 1960).

White Dove Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (1959).

Editorially the predecessor to all the second-generation New York School little magazines, the White Dove Review was started by high school student Ron Padgett. The associate editor was Dick Gallup, and the art editors were Joe Brainard and Michael Marsh. The first issue contained poems by Paul Blackburn (described as a “well known poet living in New York”) as well as Clarence Major and Ron Padgett, and an excerpt, here entitled “Thrashing Doves,” from Kerouac’s Book of Blues. The second issue included poems by Ted Berrigan, LeRoi Jones, Ron Loewinsohn, Fielding Dawson, Simon Perchick, and Clarence Major, among others. In a 1991 interview with Edward Foster, Padgett described his inspiration for the Review: “But my introduction to modern poetry came…when I was fifteen and working in a bookstore, the Louis Meyer Bookshop, run by a very nice and highly literate man, who was also a writer. It was there I found out about e. e. cummings and T. S. Eliot.

White Dove Review, vol. 2, no. 5 (Summer 1960). Cover by Joe Brainard.

Then I learned about Evergreen Review and suddenly started reading all these modernist poets such as LeRoi Jones and Frank O’Hara, and I subscribed to the magazines advertised in Evergreen Review like LeRoi Jones’s Yugen and Wallace Berman’s Semina. And when I looked at magazines like Yugen, I saw they were just little things stapled together, and so I went down to a local printer and asked, How do you do this? And he said, Oh, it’s nothing—it’s real easy. So I decided to start my own magazine. I invited Dick Gallup, who was [living] across the street and was writing poetry, to be coeditor and Joe Brainard, who was the best artist in school, to be the art editor.” Padgett called his magazine the White Dove Review after an Evergreen Review cover showing a girl holding a white dove. That issue, Evergreen Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (Autumn 1958), includes “In Memory of My Feelings” by Frank O’Hara and “Cold Mountain Poems” by Gary Snyder. The photograph is by Susan Nevelson.

Through his friendship with Ted Berrigan, whom he first met at Meyer’s bookstore in Tulsa, Ron Padgett developed a network, most of whom soon moved together to New York: “There was a whole crew of young artists and wild people, sensitive, creative people. Ted seemed quite a bit older than me. He’d been in the army, for god’s sake—he’d been to Korea. He’d grown up in Providence. He’d been to Japan. And he knew a lot of things I didn’t know, so he was in many ways a mentor to me and to Dick [Gallup] and to other young people.”