Joe Brainard: I Remember

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John Ashbery said he was nice—“nice as a person and nice as an artist.” I think it’s fair to say that we don’t have a rich critical vocabulary for nice artists. (And how many are there?) Yet, everyone agrees that Joe Brainard was one. There seems to have been a magnetism in his niceness, so many people came to love him. I remember the first time I met Frank O'Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early Spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly. I remember that the four sentences written on the pediments of the Palais de Chaillot were composed specially by Paul Valéry. the writing usually shows rather than tells: the contents of Brainard’s version – references to movie stars and songs, the clothes, food, hardship and simple pleasures – conjure up a whole time and place, for example.

For my intermediate students, I eschew the more listlike anaphora poems and provide a poem to imitate that uses anaphora more sparingly, such as “ Hospital parking lot, April” by Laura Kasischke:De behandelde herinneringen zijn herkenbaar, dikwijls ook als ze heel erg intiem zijn en het boek is volkomen pretentieloos. Heerlijk, speels en vlot leesvoer, dit cultboekje uit 1975 in Nederlandse vertaling van Johannes Jonkers opgevist door uitgeverij Oevers. I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives. I like to use anaphora-heavy poems not only to show students the musicality of repetition, but to suggest a generative engine for their own work. The cascading verbosity we see in poets such as Whitman and Ginsberg shows us the expansive qualities anaphora can give a poem, which is a boon for students who fear they have nothing to say. The anaphora demands more, more, more, and is a never-ending question for the student to answer. If we look at a section of “ Howl,” for instance, that question is where: And maybe do ‘I remember’ for characters in your fictions? This can involve a slight shift in the writing, and perhaps a bit more thought than some of the more natural, I-centred versions, but it can also be a good way to graft some of your fictional content on to your natural, easy, remembering voice

Updates, 2020 and 2021: Here are others I’ve subsequently written (also see some more by others in the comments): I Remember the Library, I Remember York, I Remember Bobbie Louise Hawkins. I’ve also added further links, including those for books by Perec and Abirached, and altered the opening quotation to give a fuller illustration of the workings of Joe’s text. If you know of other examples, please add in a comment below. I remember (recently) getting blown while trying to carry on a normal conversation on the telephone, which, I must admit, was a big turn-on somehow. All credit to Joe Brainard and his I Remember, now in its own very handsome UK edition from Notting Hill Editions. Lewallen, Constance M. (2001). "Acts of Generosity". In Constance M. Lewallen, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (pp. 5–44). New York City: Granary Books, Inc. It is when a remark such as “I remember the murder of Sharon Tate” appears that the reader feels something to latch onto. Words and suggestions appear that a reader may understand in part but may not put into the correct context. Within the specificity of memory, there are also moments where Perec allows for the limitations of memory and the idiosyncrasies of personal reflection to take forefront of the text, recalling the ways memory can be shaped and reshaped, to admit to the absence at hand. “I remember the radio programs ( Comme il vous plaira) presented by Jean-Pierre Morphée and ?” (76). The work concludes with an invitation to the reader to create their own list of “I Remembers” inspired by Perec’s example.

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In the early 1970s, New York poet and artist Joe Brainard wrote a letter to a friend. "I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me." At once intensely personal and strikingly universal, Brainard's I Remember has remained a cult classic ever since (though this magnificent yolk-yellow edition is the first UK publication). It's an assemblage of memories, a collage pieced together from snippets and stray thoughts, each of which begins with the incantation "I remember". "I remember butter and sugar sandwiches," he writes. "I remember tight white T-shirts and the gather of wrinkles from under the arms… I remember regretting things I didn't do… I remember when 'beehives' really got out of hand." Brainard made art for the same reasons the New York School poets wrote: for the pleasure of it. As he said of collaboration, "it’s fun," and in the late 1960s, Brainard took an interest in the other side of his collaborations, the "fun" of wearing his cohorts' writer pants. The book I Remember is the riotous, poignant, earnest and seemingly random result. Painterly in its vivid details and collagist in its hands-off juxtaposition, it is an accumulative, oblique biography, a portrait of the artist as a young man. It is much, much greater than the mere sum of its parts. Ashbery referred to it, only half-jokingly, as "humane smut." It has that sweet, playful self-possession that pervades Brainard’s work. I was saying to Bob the other night how easy it would be to live in Bolinas if you were madly in love (a few minutes of silence while we could tell that we were both thinking the same thing) as one of us said “But, of course that could be said about just about any place.” Nice when that happens.

Register of the Joe Brainard Archive [1] In the Mandeville Special Collections Library archives (accessed 1/20/2011). I remember tight white pants. Certain ways of standing. Blond heads of hair. And spotted bleached blue jeans. Though I Remember contains much, its achievement, or one of them, lies in its attitude toward all it can’t contain. In his elegy for Brainard, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia, in 1994, the poet Frank Bidart writes of his friend’s “ purity and / sweetness self-gathered”: Brainard worked at a fever pitch on dozens of pieces simultaneously. As if to highlight the kitsch, the camp, and the love of artifice that so delighted him personally, Brainard chose not to disguise the constituent parts in his assemblage and collage, instead naming works such as "Prell" after the products he had co-opted. Brainard adopted a "no comment" approach to art, allowing whatever meaning accrued in his glued-together worlds to go unexplained. Many collages went untitled, as if the "message" were of no concern and many wound up with provisional titles such as "Good’n Fruity Madonna," reflecting instead the process and materials rather than any will of the artist, reflecting style over content and a refusal on the artist’s part to take the art, or himself, too seriously. Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; traveled to Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV

Ci vuole un attimo a riannodare il filo, a immergersi nella magia, a lasciarsi prendere e trasportare nell’altrove più bello. Brainard είναι ένας άγνωστος σε μένα καλλιτέχνης μιας κοντινής/μακρινής εποχής, κι όμως οι μικρές του μνήμες κατάφεραν να μου δώσουν μια ουσιαστική και καθαρή εικόνα τόσο της εποχής του όσο και τους ίδιου του του εαυτού, ενός queer αγοριού που παλεύει ανάμεσα στα θέλω και τις κοινωνικές επιταγές. As humorous as Homer’s speech is, it’s also useful in the classroom because of the contrast it provides with these previous examples. The delight we derive from Homer’s vision of “explor[ing] the world” stems from the fact that it is so very pedestrian and myopic: watching TV somewhere new, visiting new malls (which, by definition, are like the old malls), trading one sandwich for another. His narrow worldview highlights the expansiveness and inclusiveness of these other speeches. Senza enfasi, senza retorica, con dolce leggerezza (Brainard aveva un animo così gentile che quando abbandonò la scuola d’arte della nativa Tulsa, Oklahoma, per trasferirsi nella Manhattan degli anni Sessanta, per non ferire i sentimenti dello staff, disse che doveva lasciare la scuola perché suo padre aveva il cancro, evitando di dire che invece stava per salire sul prossimo Greyhound diretto nella Grande Mela).