Joe Brainard: I Remember Review & Synopsis

Synopsis Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail." Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett. Review Joe Brainard was born in Arkansas and moved to New York when he was only 18, where he became a vital presence in the city's art and poetry scenes of the 1960s and 1970s. He died in 1994.A completely original book. -- Edmund White Each detail seduces and reveals while remaining entirely true to the unsentimental demands of the form itself. -- San Francisco Bay Guardian, January 31, 2001 -Noel Black ...a masterpiece...Joe Brainard's modest little gem will endure. ...both uproariously funny and deeply moving. -- Paul Auster, 1995 ...he had happenend onto something wonderful...Joe's originality came from the fresh way he looked at things. -- Ron Padgett ...universal appeal. He catalogues...fashion and fads, public events and private fantasies, with such honesty and accuracy and in such abundance... -- The Voice Literary Supplement, --Michael Lally The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical work I Remember ("a completely original book" -Edmund White) has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many other pieces that for the first time present the full range of Brainard's writing in all its deadpan wit, madcap inventiveness, self-revealing frankness, and generosity of spirit. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. "Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed- off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance," writes Paul Auster in the introduction to this collection. "These little works . . . are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits." Assembled by the author's longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett and including fourteen previously unpublished works, here is a fresh and affordable way to rediscover a unique American artist. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. “Brainard disarms us with ..." Joe Brainard's Art Examines the multiple angles of the avant-garde poetry and art of Joe Brainard Joe Brainard's work occupies the literal margins of New York school poetry, while also figuratively influencing its aesthetic margins, shaping the school from both within and without. Brainard was not only an important illustrator and friend to many New York school poets, he was also a respected collage artist, miniature artist, cartoonist, avid letter writer and serious poet. As the canon of avant-garde American poetry warmly embraces his poetry alongside his art, the field of literary criticism is freshly responding with enthusiasm to Brainard's literary contribution with sophisticated scholarship and first-hand accounts which attend to both his textual and visual nuances. This collection offers the first place for the importance of Brainard's poetry, collaborations and art to be recognised for their contribution and influence, all in one place.Key FeaturesFeatures series of established and new voices in contemporary American poetrySelected essays all focus on writing but transgress disciplinary lines to also incorporate consideration of Brainard's visual practice at the same timeSuggests Brainard's work informingly lined, bound , and shaped the poetics of American avant-gardeShifts critical attention to Brainard's writing (while also attending to his well known comics and collages)Offers further analysis of Brainard's art and work as uniquely queer in aesthetic practice Joe Brainard, I Remember , in The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: Library of America, [1974] 2012), pp. 5–134. 2. Brainard, I Remember, p. 111. My ideas about queer sexuality and normality are indebted to ..." Remembering Paris in Text and Film This new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris, through written texts and movies, from the outside, and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it. This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience, but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines. The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn, which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Paris at Midnight, which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. While it is driven by original research, notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity, it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership, including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time, it will also provide clarity and, importantly, make logical links between, for example, the past and present, myth and reality, poetry and history, and various schools and movements, including psychology, poetics, poststructuralism and critical theory, classical reception, feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science, who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses. Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire, the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision, tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity, but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated, received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond. Primary readership will be academics, educators, scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use. Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses, which combine historical, cultural, literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book, therefore, will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language, literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies, gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography. An interesting anecdote about Je me souviens is included by Brian Glavey in an article entitled 'Friending Joe Brainard '. The debt owed by Perec to Brainard's I Remember , which Andrews (2020) notes is of 'capital importance', ..." Frank O'Hara Now The work of Frank O'Hara (1926–66) is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. Frank O'Hara Now, the first collection of essays to be dedicated to O'Hara in nearly two decades, asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. For many, O'Hara's distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of abstract expressionism, and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these approachable qualities coexist with a demanding engagement with currents in European and American modernism. The book includes coverage of O'Hara moods that have rarely been discussed in the criticism to date, including boredom, hatred, and nihilism. Throughout, there is a powerful sense that fresh readings of O'Hara are crucial to understanding his continuing influence, making it essential reading for scholars and students of American poetry. Memory Pieces: Collage, Memorial and the Poetics of intimacy in Joe Brainard , Jasper Johns and Frank O'Hara Nick Selby i remember the first time i met Frank O'Hara. He was walking down second Avenue. it was a cool early spring evening ..." The Advocate The Advocate is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) monthly newsmagazine. Established in 1967, it is the oldest continuing LGBT publication in the United States. The star of Alexander and A Home at the End of the World talks about playing bisexual two films in a row By Mike Szymanski Colin Farrell thinks that there's something to be said for the ways of men around 330 B.C. As he studied for his ..." Neon Words Neon Words is a book that will illuminate the writer in you. By using the tools and activities here, you’ll connect the word-organizing part of your brain with your free-ranging imagination—and you’ll love what you’ve captured on the page! It’s an exciting, confidence-boosting, and deeply satisfying experience. Whether you want to be a writer, or just want to explore what it’s like to create with language, you’ll discover that playing with words can help you be more present in your life and, best of all, it’s lots of fun. Who knew writing could be so enlightening? I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off. From Collected Writings of Joe Brainard , edited by Ron Padgett, with an introduction by Paul Auster (Library of America, 2012)." The Nancy Book From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard (author of I REMEMBER) created more than 100 works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified by the incongruity of her presence. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality. Together these works accumulate into a sophisticated, complex work of great wit, equal parts surprise and subtlety.The Nancy Book is the first published collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings (with nearly eighty full page reproductions), including collaborations with luminary New York School poets such as Frank O?Hara and Ted Berrigan, an essay by Ann Lauterbach that illuminates, with critical and poetic acumen, the complexity of Brainard's transformation of Nancy.OEvery page of this book will make you smile or laugh'not with recognition but with startled joy. Joe Brainard took an unchanging icon of the American norm and inserted her into countless fashionable or scandalous contexts, subtly metamorphosing something that seemed eternal into absurdly contemporary forms. He is as funny as only a philosopher can be.O Edmund White.OJoe Brainard's pursuit of the once ubiquitous fuzzy-haired pest Nancy chronicled one of the great love-hate relationships in American popular culture. It's wonderful to have it all between the covers of a book.O John Ashbery Together these works accumulate into a sophisticated, complex work of great wit, equal parts surprise and subtlety.The Nancy Book is the first published collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings (with nearly ..." Poems in the Manner Of "Best American Poetry series editor and respected poet David Lehman channels, translates, and imagines a collection of "poems in the manner of" and in homage to Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Yeats, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Rilke, William Carlos Williams, and others. Poems in the Manner Of is an illuminating journey through centuries of writers that continue to inspire new work today"-- The simplicity of Joe Brainard's “I remember ” formula has inspired countless imitations, many of them ingenious. None can match Brainard in charm and unaffectedly naive self-presentation, but that doesn't stop us." Fado and the Place of Longing Fado, often described as 'urban folk music', emerged from the streets of Lisbon in the mid-nineteenth century and went on to become Portugal's 'national' music during the twentieth. It is known for its strong emphasis on loss, memory and nostalgia within its song texts, which often refer to absent people and places. One of the main lyrical themes of fado is the city itself. Fado music has played a significant role in the interlacing of mythology, history, memory and regionalism in Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Elliott considers the ways in which fado songs bear witness to the city of Lisbon, in relation to the construction and maintenance of the local. Elliott explores the ways in which fado acts as a cultural product reaffirming local identity via recourse to social memory and an imagined community, while also providing a distinctive cultural export for the dissemination of a 'remembered Portugal' on the global stage. ... what I am going to call the 'I remember ' school of writers inspired by Joe Brainard's book of the same title. I Remember was first published in 1975 and consisted of a series of entries, all beginning with the words 'i remember ', ..." The Poetry of Disturbance In this book, David Bergman argues that post-war poetry underwent a significant shift from a visual to oral emphasis. (59) And here is a portion from Joe Brainard's work: I remember the Millers who lived next door. Mrs. Miller was Indian and Mr. Miller was a radio ham. They had five children and a very little house. There was always junk all over their ..." Circling the Canon, Volume II One of our most important contemporary critics, Marjorie Perloff has been a widely published and influential reviewer, especially of poetry and poetics, for over fifty years. Circling the Canon, Volume II focuses on the second half of her prolific career, showcasing reviews from 1995 through her 2017 reconsiderations of Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric and William Empson’s classic Seven Types of Ambiguity. In this volume Perloff provides insight into the twenty-first-century literary landscape, from revaluations of its leading poets and translations of European poetry from Goethe to the Brazilian Noigandres group and interart studies and performance art. Key issues of the past few decades, such as the controversy over the role and function of poetry anthologies, receive extended treatment, and Perloff frequently voices a minority view, as in the case of the acclaimed British poet Philip Larkin. Remembering . with. Joe. Brainard. W. hen Joe Brainard —painter, book designer, illustrator, comic-strip writer, essayist, and poet—met his untimely death from AIDS in 1994 at the age of fifty-two, he had become a cult figure on the ..." Strategies for Fostering Inclusive Classrooms in Higher Education This volume will provide educators with an understanding of challenges associated with equity and inclusion at higher education institutions globally and with evidence-based strategies for addressing the challenges associated with implementing equity and inclusion. (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/ joe - brainard-i-remember ) Brainard's observation belies the elegant simplicity of I Remember as a model for creative writing in the classroom: “the material does it all.” Rather than force students to ..." Pop Poetics Adopting artist-poet Joe Brainard as its principal focus, this project presents "Pop poetics" not as a minor, coterie movement meriting a sympathetic footnote in accounts of the postwar era's literary history, but as a missing link that confounds and potentially unites any number of supposedly rigid critical distinctions (authenticity versus formalism, the "personal" versus the mechanical). Pop poetics matter, argues Andrew Fitch, not just to the occasional aficionado of Brainard's I Remember, but to anybody concerned with reconstructing the dynamic aesthetic exchange between postwar art and poetry. Pop poetics matter, argues Andrew Fitch, not just to the occasional aficionado of Brainard's I Remember, but to anybody concerned with reconstructing the dynamic aesthetic exchange between postwar art and poetry." Joe Brainard Retrospective Nor is Joe's book of " I remembers " for family viewing . Some indeed seem to require a new rating for " humane smut , " though they are so cleverly interleaved among others like " I remember wondering if I looked queer " and " I ..." Wounded Writers Ask: Am I Doing it Write? This book addresses (and aims to dismantle) writer woundedness, a state of being that prevents students from trusting themselves as capable of writing something they can feel good about. Wounded Writers Ask: Am I Doing it Write? invites students to begin a new writing history through a collection of 48 free-writes that explore list writing, aesthetic writing, word craft, and writing that delves into personal life stories. These free-writes are invitations to develop a lead or improve a story title, to discover a character’s name or replace one word for another that is more vivid, to locate a story idea or revise a story’s focus. More than this, Wounded Writers Ask: Am I Doing it Write? emphasizes creative consciousness over correctness, where writing is a vehicle for exploring identity and (re)claiming voice across multiple grade levels. This book is for the wounded student writer as much as it is for the wounded classroom teacher as writer, who may feel burdened by his/her own writing history such that he/she struggles with where or how to start. For each free-write, Leigh offers Before Writing, During Writing, and After Writing suggestions with samples of student writing to guide teachers into writing engagements with their students that break down walls and open up new vistas. I REMEMBER Joe Brainard's (2001) I Remember is a collection of reflections and remembrances that each begin with the refrain, “I remember .” They range from the funny to the serious and offer a collage of images of American life." The Divine Comedy The Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy. Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body - its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals. In February 2007 I gave my French French colleague at New College, Frédérique Aït-Touati, a copy of 'I Remember My Mother Dying', ... I explained that Perec's brilliant book was twice indebted – to Harry Mathews, and to Joe Brainard ." Poetry and Autobiography This collection makes a critical and creative intervention into ongoing debates about the relationship between poetry and autobiography. Drawing on recent theories of life writing, the essays in the first part of this volume provide new analyses of works by a range of poets, dating from the early modern period to the present day. Exploring the autobiographical resonances of poems by Martha Moulsworth, Mina Loy, Anne Sexton, Joe Brainard, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, and Gwyneth Lewis, the authors here examine the extent to which discourses of truth and authenticity have been implicated in traditional interpretations of lyric poetry. In doing so, they endeavour to illuminate the complex intersections – and divergences – of poetry and autobiography, asking what these forms might learn from each other about issues of shared concern, from questions of identity and textuality to those of reference and audience. The creative reflections which form the second part of the collection develop and respond to these questions in various suggestive and original ways; here poetry and prose are used in order to test the relationship between poetry and life writing and to explore issues of memory, time, place, subjectivity and voice. This book was published as a special issue of Life Writing. Jo Gill, Melanie Waters. Park seems as fond of Brainard as his fellow Pressed Wafer contributors. ... David Trinidad's ' Joe Brainard Pink' (a selection of twelve entries extracted from I Remember's 100-plus pages) explores how a ..." The Dark Side of Camp Aesthetics "Camp" is often associated with glamour, surfaces and an ostentatious display of chic, but as these authors argue, there is an underside to it that has often gone unnoticed: camp’s simultaneous investment in dirt, vulgarity, the discarded and rejected, the abject. This book explores how camp challenges and at the same time celebrates what is arguably the single most important and foundational cultural division, that between the dirty and the clean. In refocusing camp as a phenomenon of the dark underside as much as of the glamorous surface, the collection hopes to offer an important contribution to our understanding of the cultural politics and aesthetics of camp. There is no catalogue raisonné for Joe Brainard in part because he produced a virtually unaccountable number of works that defies ... Brainard's major literary work, I Remember , also has something cast-off or cast-away about it." Spatial Poetics What is the relationship between the spaces we inhabit and the spaces we create? Does living in a messy downtown New York City apartment automatically translate to writing a messy New York School poem? This volume addresses the 'environment' of the urban apartment, illuminating the relationship between the structures of New York City apartments and that of New York School poems. It utilizes the lens of urban and spatial theory to widen the possibilities afforded by New Critical and reader-response readings of this postmodern American poetry. In drawing this connection between consciousness and form, it draws on various senses of the environment as informing influence, inviting avant-garde American poetry to be reconsidered as uniquely organic in its responsiveness to its surroundings. Focusing exclusively and comprehensively on Second Generation New York School poetry, this is the first book-length study to attend to the poetry of this postmodern American movement, encouraging American poetry scholars to resituate New York School poetry within larger critical narratives of postmodern innovation. BRAINARD'S COLLECTIONS The expansive recently published The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard makes a case for ... of that conversation, and this is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the results of his publication of I Remember ." Arts and Letters In these 39 lively essays and profiles, bestselling novelist and biographer Edmund White draws on his wide reading and his sly humour to illuminate some of the most influential writers, artists and cultural icons of the past century, among them Marcel Proust, Catherine Deneuve, George Eliot, Andy Warhol, André Gide, David Geffen, and Robert Mapplethorpe. 'Anyone who loves arts and letters even half as much as Edmund White will enjoy this fine collection by this admirable American writer.' - The Washington Post Book World Most important, he wrote a completely original book called I Remember , which was reprinted by Penguin in 1996 but which was first launched ... Honesty (for me) is very hard because I suppose I don't really believe there Joe Brainard • 235." The Champ Poetry. Illustrated by Joe Brainard. THE CHAMP (originally published in 1968) is back for a new generation of readers who will swim with delight in the Elmslie ocean. THE CHAMP explores the mysteries of dailiness in all its beauty ('He wept wetting the apple') and terror ('A black curtain removed the hair of the champ/pretending to be the wind'). And the mysteries are never revealed but amplified by Joe Brainard's lucid flowers, chimps, pendants, cigarettes, boys, toys, and tangled weeds--the perfect one-handed accompaniment to Kenward Elmslie's opaquely glowing language. But beware! THE CHAMP--a collaborative classic of alternative letters--still doesn't behave. It's alive and exuberant. Savor it!"--Maxine Chernoff. Also by Joe Brainard Nothing to Write Home About ( Little Caesar , 1981 ) 24 Pictures & Some Words ( BLT , 1980 ) 29 Mini - Essays ( Z Press , 1978 ) 12 Postcards ( Z Press , 1975 ) I Remember ( Full Court Press , 1975 ) New Work ..." Joe "This is Ron Padgett's memoir - the unlikely and true story of two childhood friends, one straight and one gay, who grew up in 1950s Oklahoma, surprised their families by moving to New York City in search of art and poetry, and became part of a dynamic community of artists and writers whose work continues to shape American culture." "Much of this intimate memoir is told in Joe Brainard's own direct and unforgettable voice. Dozens of letters, journal entries, poems, photographs, and artworks create a stirring portrait of the times - one that illuminates not only Brainard's life and art, but also the lives and work of his many friends, including Frank O'Hara, Alex Katz, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Fairfield Porter, Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt, and Kenward Elmslie." --Book Jacket. "This is Ron Padgett's memoir - the unlikely and true story of two childhood friends, one straight and one gay, who grew up in 1950s Oklahoma, surprised their families by moving to New York City in search of art and poetry, and became part ..." Modern Painters MES I Remember Joe Brainard Subject of a New York retrospective this Spring , Joe Brainard's art inevitably evokes , for William Corbett , the nature of the man . TE lenderness , modesty , clarity , where he resided until his death ..."