LETTERS OF JOE BRAINARD : BOOK REVIEW

'' Love, Joe : The Selected Letters of Joe Bernard.'' Edited by Daniel Kane, Columbia University Press.

' The artist who remembered everything.' : The boom review is a Trojan horse. Ostensibly it concerns a collection of letters titled ''Love, Joe'' written by the downtown artist and writer Joe Brainard [ 1941- 94 ] to friends including the poets John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and James Schuyler.

Before we get to those letters, a historical wrong must be righted. Next year is the 55th anniversary of the publication of Brainard's experimental memoir, '' I Remember.''

I hadn't read it until I picked it up in preparation to write this piece. Now I consider it one of the best books I know.

Each sentence in Brainard's short, stream-of consciousness memoir begins with the same words : '' I remember.''

The book which chronicles his childhood in Oklahoma in the 1940s and 1950s and his later decades in New York City, dispenses small cubes of pleasure on every page. Its cumulative effect is sly but enormous.

Some of the entries are childlike and earnest :

I remember after opening packages what an empty day Christmas Day is. I remember not allowing myself to start on the candy until the feature started.

I remember cold cream on my mother's face.

I remember that there is always one soldier on every bus.

Others investigate culture and take a broader view of society:

I remember a lot of fuss about '' The Catcher in the Rye.''

I remember when going to an analyst meant [ to me ] that you were real sick.

I remember not understanding how the photographer could have just stood there and taken that picture.

I remember when ''atheist'' was a scary word.

The World Students Society thanks Dwight Garner.