The editors of a high school literary magazine in Tulsa, Okla., successfully solicited poems from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley. Upon graduation, this magazine’s young editors immediately took off for New York, where they rapidly assimilated into the most exciting artistic circles.

Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard, along with fellow Tulsan Ted Berrigan, constituted a second wave of New York school writing, which carried the tradition of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara into the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s. But where Ashbery and O’Hara, along with Kenneth Koch, had Harvard in common, Padgett and Brainard had Central High School.

In “Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard” (Coffee House Press, 357 pages, $17), Mr. Padgett draws on material as deep as annotations in a high school yearbook. He even quotes a poem that he wrote about Brainard from afar, before they met: “and I think he is the greatest person / in the whole school / you can tell by looking at his eyes / so meek and tender.”

Ron Padgett’s high-school friendship with Joe Brainard created a tightly enclosed sphere of serious artistic endeavor that lasted a lifetime. Without each other, the pair might never have arrived in New York quite the way they did. As it happened, they got off the bus and asked a cab driver to take them to the village. “Where in the village,” the driver asked. “Oh, the middle,” they said. The two boys were disappointed with the intersection of Sixth avenue and 8th street: “What is so picturesque about this? We had imagined thatched roofs!”

The two friends grew up fast. Brainard was primarily a visual artist (though he did write the much-imitated book “I Remember”), and he suffered the agonies typically associated with midcentury American painters. While Mr. Padgett was uptown at Columbia, Brainard was downtown, hungry, experimenting with speed.

In high school, Brainard seems to have been more interested in social success than the Padgett who had admired his meek and tender eyes. In New York, Brainard went to work on his persona. One night he arrived at Mr. Padgett’s apartment “atypically drunk.” He went straight to the bathtub, where he doused himself in green food coloring. “It was one of a number of things he would do to put himself in an extreme state, to jolt himself out of his niceness.”

Brainard was still unclear about his sexuality. (He turned out to be gay; Mr. Padgett straight.) With youthful seriousness he cast his identity crises as an artistic crisis. As he put it in a letter to Mr. Padgett: “Though I know beauty, I can’t express it until I’ve undressed. Have so much undressing to do.” He meant undressing both literally and metaphorically. Brainard’s seriousness flowered in the accepting art world of the 1960s, “until making art virtually every day had become an integral part of his life.”

For Mr. Padgett, Brainard’s life had a dramatic arc. Embattled from the start, Brainard was denied the stability that marriage and fatherhood brought Mr. Padgett. Brainard’s success as an artist – although generally labeled as “minor,” his success within that rubric was indisputable – meant a more monied, glamorous lifestyle. But Brainard, having always yearned to be popular, to move beyond his niceness into a more powerful expressiveness, was unsure of his place in the art world.

He regularly had “start-over binges,” in which he emptied his studio of everything. Of celebrity parties, he wrote in a letter, “I always have a feeling something really great is going to happen at a party. Though it rarely does I like them anyway.” In 1976, he told People magazine that the art world had become “too big, too serious, too self-important, and too expensive.” In the last 15 years of his life, Brainard stopped making art and did nothing to maintain his reputation; in 1994 he died of AIDS.

Mr. Padgett repeatedly returns to a comparison with Frank O’Hara. Brainard once wrote: “I find myself with a certain talent that Frank O’Hara has, and that is to say something quite simple so absolutely that one, without even thinking, assumes that you are of course right.” Like O’Hara, Brainard left behind a body of work that, for its simplicity, will always be vulnerable to the critique that it is lightweight.

Mr. Padgett’s memoir is both heavy and light. He is uncomfortable with calling Brainard a saint, as others have. And “Joe” is about not only the man but the friendship the two men made up as they went along. Mr. Padgett has been working on this memoir for a very long time – as he wrote in Brainard’s high school yearbook, “You’ve learned a lot from me, things I’ve poured into your brain over cups of coffee. I hope, Joe, that you’ve also heard the things I’ve felt, hope you realize how important you are to me.”