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Joe Brainard: The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (hardcover)

Introduction by Paul Auster | Includes the complete text of I Remember | journals, stories, poems, travel diaries, comic strips, and mini-essays More

Edited by Ron Padgett

“It is wonderful, and singularly fitting, that Joe Brainard’s collected writings are being published by The Library of America. Brainard’s subject was memory, that is, the things that memory remembers. In his case these were as quirky as anybody’s, which is why so many readers have responded to them. Brainard was that recognizable American phenomenon, the oddball classicist.”—John Ashbery

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Influences ‘She wrote about subjects you weren’t supposed to write poems about’: Sarah Bridgins on the works that inspired her gut-punch debut collection
May 26, 2023

Influences Sarah Manguso: Thoreau, Annie Dillard, William Maxwell, and “lessons of constraint” on 300 Arguments
March 8, 2017

Influences Playwright-turned-novelist Kirk Lynn on Joe Brainard, James Thurber, and other influences on Rules for Werewolves
November 13, 2015

“Writing, for me, is a way of ‘talking’ the way I wish I could talk.”

In New York’s vibrant art and poetry scenes of the 1960s and 70s, Joe Brainard occupied a special place. An artist of diverse and extraordinary gifts, he worked prolifically in a dazzling range of media, creating cover designs and interior art for some of the most significant books of the period and experimenting with the mixing of poetry and comic strips. The publication in 1970 of his one-of-a-kind autobiographical work I Remember showed that Brainard was also a writer of originality, grace, depth, and distinctive humor. I Remember has become a contemporary classic, of which the poet James Schuyler said: “It’s a great work that will last and last—in other words, it is literature.”

Here in one volume is the full range of Joe Brainard’s writing in all its deadpan wit, effortless inventiveness, personal candor, and generosity of spirit: the complete text of I Remember, along with an unprecedented gathering of intimate journals, stories, poems, travel diaries, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them until now available only in expensive, rare editions. Using apparently simple means to achieve complex and surprising effects, these works turn the most everyday experiences into occasions for startled contemplation. “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 his 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 presenting for the first time fourteen previously unpublished works, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard provides long overdue recognition of a singular literary talent and a terrific person whom readers will come to love.

Ron Padgett, editor, is the author of many books of poetry, including How to Be Perfect, You Never Know, The Big Something, How Long, and Great Balls of Fire, as well as Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard.

This special publication features full-cloth binding, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.

This title is also available in a paperback edition.

Visit I Remember Joe Brainard, a Web page dedicated to Joe Brainard memorabilia and video remembrances by Edmund White, Brad Gooch, Keith McDermott, Ron Padgett, Ann Lauterbach, Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, and others.

Project support for this volume was provided by: Anne Dunn; Furthermore: A Program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund: A Friend
Table of Contents

Editor’s Preface by Ron Padgett
Introduction by Paul Auster

I Remember

Self-Portrait
Self-Portrait on Christmas Night
Back in Tulsa Again
Saturday July 21st 1962
Diary Aug. 4th–15th
The China Sea
Picnic or Yonder Comes the Blue
A True Story
I Like [“A happy glory to sky!”]
I Like [“I Joe”]
The People
Andy Warhol: Andy Do It
The Man
Marge
Johnny
Nancy [“It was coffee time”]
Nancy [“Nancy was always handing me”]
May Dye
Colgate Dental Cream
Brunswick Stew
Sick Art
Sunday, July the 30th, 1964
Saturday, December the 11th, 1965
Van Gogh
People of the World: Relax!
Ron Padgett
January 26th, 1967
Pat
August 29th, 1967
Jamaica 1968
What Is Money?
Little-Known Facts about People
Diary 1969
Diary 1969 (Continued)
Sex
A Special Diary
Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself
Death
Autobiography
Some Train Notes
Diary 1970–71
December 22, 1970
1970
Queer Bars
Art
Short Story
Life [“When I stop and think”]
Rim of the Desert
How to Be Alone Again
Bolinas Journal
Wednesday, July 7th, 1971
Selections from “Vermont Journal: 1971”
Fear
White Spots
My Favorite Quotations
Selections from “Self-Portrait: 1971”
from N.Y.C. Journals: 1971–1972
Friday, June 16th, 1972
Tuesday, July 11th, 1972
What I Did This Summer
Washington D.C. Journal 1972
The Gay Way
Matches
Self-Portrait (As a Writer) If I Was Old and Fat and Wore Hats
Dirty Prose
Fantastic Dream I Had Last Night!
If
The Friendly Way
The Friendly Way (Continued)
If I Was God
Ponder This
Grandmother
Night
Neck
30 One-Liners
The Cigarette Book
Poem [“Sometimes”]
No Story
Journals
Before I Die
Right Now
Life [“The life of a human being is”]
Stoned Again
A Depressing Thought
Thirty
Ten Imaginary Still Lifes
from 29 Mini-Essays
The Outer Banks
Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises)
Twenty-three Mini-Essays
Religion
Out in the Hamptons
Nothing to Write Home About
A State of the Flowers Report
Jimmy Schuyler: A Portrait
January 13th

Interviews
The Joe Brainard Interview by Tim Dlugos
An Interview with Joe Brainard by Anne Waldman

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-149-7 576 pages

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