Joe Brainard: I Remember

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Ci vuole un attimo a riannodare il filo, a immergersi nella magia, a lasciarsi prendere e trasportare nell’altrove più bello.

Humans are pattern-seeking animals, pre-tuned to the music of language. We are pleased when we hear patterns in language, perking our ears in recognition, and can be both vexed and delighted when those patterns are broken. Many poetic devices, such as assonance, consonance, alliteration, and sibilance, take advantage of our ability to perceive repetition, making them valuable tools when teaching poetry techniques to both beginning and more advanced students. In the classroom, anaphora can be particularly useful in drawing student attention not only to sound but also to concrete detail, metaphor, and rhetorical movement. Importantly, in New York, Brainard would also meet the poets who would come to define the era, his future collaborators: Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Bill Berkson, Kenneth Koch, Anne Waldman, and James Schuyler. His collaborations with writers took many forms, from book covers and illustrations to paintings and collages with text provided by poets. Some of the finest and funniest are his collages and comic strips to which he invited a bevy of poets to contribute quips.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: Joe Brainard remembered a lot of things and will be remembered as a lot of things: foremost as a master of collage and assemblage, and so, by necessity as well as temperament, an obsessive collector of materials and appropriator of images; also as a painter; a poet; and a friend. John Ashbery, in his introduction to Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, says: "Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist."

In 1970, Perec met Harry Mathews; Mathews introduced Perec to ideas then circulating in the New York art scene, including Brainard’s “serial autobiography,” which was then on the cusp of publication. The French writer likely never saw Brainard’s book, but tale of its concept—each sentence beginning with the phrase “I remember”—was enough to inspire him. Next month, the fruits of Perec ’s efforts, also titled I Remember , will be published in English for the first time, by David R. Godine.Comics (Marz Verlag, 1983), collaborations with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, James Schuyler, and Tony Towle I remember exactly how I visualised the Pilgrims and the Indians having the first Thanksgiving dinner together. (Very jolly!) E che ritmo, che fluire… sì, c’è musica, c’è danza... sono ripetizioni, sono liste (ah!), sono variazioni… e perché no, le ripetizioni pittoriche di Warhol (Brainard è stato anche artista visuale), e, certo, anche la madeleine proustiana.

the writing is uncensored, authentic. For example, I note in the example above the reference to the Pilgrims and Indians celebrating a jolly Thanksgiving. Now: I don’t think it’s stretching things very far to say that that recollection is of a romanticised association! And we could of course parse that, and discuss what it means, e.g., in terms of decolonising the historical record. But the actual writing here is simply being honest – it’s about recalling a perception, a time and place – and it is being true to that. (Even if it’s not true to the historical record, and we hope there will have been scope for future reconstruction!) Elsewhere in the poem we get gender- and race-based descriptions that are products of that time, and there is an awful lot of sexually graphic and extremely fruity content. It means I’m always careful about selecting extracts for classes! But again: this has a truth. I remember that Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War and that he became an actor after having played himself in a (mediocre) film recounting his heroic exploits. After reading this, I have students write an “I remember” poem about a specific place and time, requiring them to focus their poem’s subject. I suggest they choose a place they know well, such as their hometown, the house they grew up in, their high school. Brainard’s poem, with its concrete descriptions, encourages sensual and specific details. The anaphora asks us to return again and again to the well of memory and, like the “I spy” games of their childhood, to articulate what they see there. Perhaps, you think, his work as a collagist began here. Perhaps growing up, for him, meant learning to put things where they don’t belong. But you can’t know. And the next paragraph brings a new topic. The result is a book of immense generosity, in which anything could be included:I remember one house that always gave you a dime and several houses that gave you five-cent candy bars. 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 remember when, in high school if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were queer. Miller, Andrew H. (October 3, 2019). "B-Sides: Joe Brainard's "I Remember". Public Books . Retrieved October 15, 2020.

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. I Remember is “about everybody else as much as it is about me,” he wrote his friend Anne Waldman. “And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can.” Part of the pleasure in reading the book, of course, comes in finding your own memories shared by someone else (nice when that happens). Another part of the pleasure comes from listening for the harmonics of the thing, the way that the memories work together and apart, never giving you everything but always giving you something.

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the form is regarded as both poem and/or prose and/or either/neither, and I love writing that plays with or maybe ignores categories, and simply enjoys being good writing. O'Brien, Geoffrey. "Joe Brainard's Communal Intimacy | Geoffrey O'Brien". {{ cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= ( help) Cuando tenía menos de 25 años, repasaba mentalmente lo que creía era mi recuerdo más antiguo. Era el regreso de mis padres y mi hermana mayor a la casa donde vivíamos en Torreón. Papá había viajado a Los Ángeles, y mamá lo alcanzó con mi hermana allá, de vacaciones. I remember when girls wore lots of can can slips. It got so bad (so noisy) that the principal had to put a limit on how many could be worn. I believe the limit was three.