Tag: joe brainard

Joe Brainard: “Strange Astounding Plots”

Photographers Unknown, Strange Astounding Plots

            “After a white reception in the crystal room of the Hotel
Kenmore, Mrs. George Eustic (Patricia Hays) and her husband
left on a wedding trip to the Pocono Mountains, Pa. They will
live in good old Noodleville.” (Home.)

Where the friendly purple heart is.

            I like to do things. I like to eat, and things like that. I like
the things that go on around me. People are nice. And, really, I
like this place I live in. However, some people don’t.

Sally doesn’t.

            Sick at heart, the trembling girl shuddered at the words
that delivered her to this terrible horrible fate of the East.
“Nasty!” How could she escape from this oriental monster
into whose hands she had fallen–this strange man whose face
none had seen.

Smile!

It is only a little picture,
            In a little silver frame,
And across the back is written
            My darling mother’s name.
                                                                    (Valentine)

Pink and purple and orange ones with Venetian rose buds
Imported from Venetian
In eleven thrilling volumes

                        I heard a shot—I saw him run—then I saw her fall—the
woman I love. My leg was broken—and my gun was gone! I had
only one thought—(tee hee!)—his strange, astounding plots
must be avenged—he must die for a coward at my hands! He had
the courage of a lion and the cunning of a rat. He came running
towards me when—suddenly, I—

Ran.
Forgetting the ripped lace, $35, green violence, & free samples.

“I always run when I hear 3 rings!”

. . ..and remember those swell picnics in Birch Grove?

Joe Brainard, Picnic or Yonder Comes the Blue, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, 2012 The Library of America

Born in Salem, Arkansas in March of 1942, Joe Brainard was an American writer, poet, and artist associated with the New York School, a group of artists and writers who drew inspiration from the contemporary avant-garde art movements. His innovative body of work included paintings, collages, assemblages, album and book cover designs, as well as, theatrical costume and set designs. As a poet, Brainard was a pioneer in the New York literary movement for his use of comics as a poetic medium. 

Brainard spent his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma where, during his high school years, he became friends with future poets Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup and Ted Berrigan. He worked as the art editor for five issues of the high school’s literary journal, “The White Dove Review”, published in the 1959/1960 school year. Brainard had a modest solo exhibition of his artwork, which included some of his first collages, at the small local art center The Gallery. He  briefly attended the Dayton Art Institute in the autumn of 1960 before his move to New York City.

After reuniting in New York City with his high school friends, Joe Brainard shared an East Village apartment on East 6th Street with Ted Berrigan. The city’s many museums, art galleries and movie theaters became a source of inspiration for him. By September of 1961, Brainard had enrolled at the Art Student League and was studying under portrait painter Robert Brackman who was known for his large figurative works. Despite his financial struggles, Brainard continued to produce collages and small assemblages in the city and, later, in Boston during his ten-month stay in 1963. 

In late December of 1963, through the assistance of Ted Berrigan, Brainard began sharing an apartment on East 9th Street with the poet Tony Towle. The assemblages he created in 1964 at this new space went into his first New York solo exhibition at the Alan Gallery in January of 1965. Brainard became a member of both the artistic and literary circles in New York. Among his circle of friends were poets and writers such as Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, and artists such as Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Fairfield Porter.

Joe Brainard began his art career during the early Pop Art movement; however, the wide breadth of his work resists categorization. As a unified whole, the same qualities are apparent in everything he produced: bold simplicity, accuracy of execution, humor, and a low-key sense of the ordinary as sacred. Brainard was able to find the essential details in life experiences and, both vividly and spontaneously, express them in his work. In essence, he was able to locate the extraordinary in the ordinary, as well as make the extraordinary seem ordinary.

During his lifetime, Brainard was the author of five personal publications and collaborated on an additional nineteen publications with other poets and writers. The best known of the personal work are his “I Remember” volumes that were radical departures from the conventions of the traditional memoir. The 1970 “I Remember” depicts his Oklahoma childhood in the 1940s and 1950s as well as his life in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. His life stories, told through a stream of consciousness, list remembered moments prefixed by the phrase “I remember. . .”. Two sequels followed: the 1972 “I Remember More” and the 1973 “More I Remember More”. 

Joe Brainard produced several comic book collaborations with poets and was well regarded for his work as a theatrical set designer and visual artist. Among Brainard’s many New York School friends was poet, author and publisher Kenward Gray Elmslie who became a long-time partner. Elmslie’s Z Press published many works by the New York School, including works which combined Brainard’s art with Elmslie’s own poems. Elmslie also collaborated on operas with Jack Benson and Ned Rorem, and also worked with lyricist John Latouche.

After his success as an artist and poet, Brainard retired from the art world in the early 1980s and devoted his last years to reading. He died in New York City, at the age of fifty-two,  on May 25th of 1994 from AIDS-induced pneumonia. Brainard’s art can be found in many private collections and in the public collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. 

Note: An article “Joe Brainard in 1961-1963”, written by his friend and fellow poet Ron Padgett, contains photographs of Brainard’s early works, many never seen by the public. This article can be found at: https://www.ronpadgett.com/Joe%201961-63.pdf

Top Insert Image: Pat Padgett, “Joe Brainard, Calais, Vermont”, 1992, Color Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Joe Brainard, “Hot Fudge Sunday”, 1965, C Comics No. 2, Boke Press, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Joe Brainard, “48 Squares”, Date Unknown, Gouache, Graphite, Ballpoint Pen, Felt Tip Marker and Paper Collage on Paper, 34.3 x 27 cm, Private Collection 

Bottom Insert Image: Joe Brainard, Untitled (Still Life), 1968, Watercolor on Paper, Private Collection

Frank Bidart: “Night Was the Guide Sweeter Than the Sun Raw at Dawn”

Photographers Unknown, Night Was the Guide

In a dark night, when the light
burning was the burning of love (fortuitous
night, fated, free,—)
as I stole from my dark house, dark
house that was silent, grave, sleeping—

by the staircase that was secret, hidden
safe: disguised by darkness (fortuitous
night, fated, free—)
by darkness and by cunning, dark
house that was silent, grave, sleeping—;

in that sweet night, secret, seen by
no one and seeing
nothing, my only light or
guide
the burning in my burning heart,

night was the guide
sweeter than the sun raw at
dawn, for there the burning bridegroom is
bride
and he who chose at last is chosen.

.

As he lay sleeping on my sleepless
breast, kept from the beginning for him
alone, lying on the gift I gave
as the restless
fragrant cedars moved the restless winds,—

winds from the circling parapet circling
us as I lay there touching and lifting his hair,–
with his sovereign hand, he
wounded my neck=
and my senses, when they touched that, touched nothing. . .

In a dark night (there where I
lost myself, —) as I leaned to rest
in his smooth white breast, everything
ceased
and left me, forgotten in the grave of forgotten lilies.

Frank Bidart, Dark Night

Born in Bakersfield, California, in May of 1939, Frank Bidart is an American academic and a poet, and the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He started his studies in 1957 at the University of California at Riverside where, after reading works by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, he decided on a career in poetry. He continued his studies at Harvard, where he became both a student and friend to Robert Lowell, the sixth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and Elizabeth Bishop, the 1956 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry and, after Lowell’s departure, the subsequent Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Bidart’s work is written in the style of Confessional poetry which emerged in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this personal form of poetry, the speaker focuses on extreme moments of individual experience, thoughts, and personal traumas, which may include such experiences as mental illness, sexuality, and self-harm. These issues are often set against the broader themes of society. In the 1950s, confessional poets often wrote about the unhappiness in their lives in opposition to the idealization of domestic life which was propagated at the time.

Frank Bidart’s early work often disregarded the formal conventions of poetry. His narrative works are not seamless dramatic monologues but rather snippets of speech, anecdotes, reminiscences, analogies, and notes and letters which are spliced together in a cinematic progression. In his poetry, Bidart uses unusual typography and takes liberties with capitalization and punctuation; this process allows the reader to visualize, spatially, the urgencies, emphases, pauses and fatigue in the poem’s voice.

Frank Bidart gained critical attention with his first two books, the 1973 “Golden State” and the 1977 “The Book of the Body”. However, it was his 1983 “The Sacrifice” that made his reputation as an original, uncompromising poet. These three early works, focused on the origins and consequences of guilt, were later published together in the 1990 collection “In the Western Night: Collected Poems1965-90”.  Among Bidart’s most notable works are monologues spoken by central characters.Two examples of these are “Herbert White” from the “Golden State”collection, a monologue spoken through the voice of a psychopathic child murderer, and “Ellen West” included in “The Book of the Body”, spoken by a woman with an eating disorder.

Bidart’s 1997 collection “Desire” began with thirteen short poems, one of which was a memorial to artist  and writer Joe Brainard, who was associated with the New York School movement of poets, painters, dancers and musicians active during the 1950s and 1960s. A prodigious artist known for his collages and his memoir “I Remember”, Brainard died from AIDS in May of 1994. The second half of the book, “The Second Hour of the Night” was a long poem that questioned the traditional assumptions about love told through a recounting of Ovid’s tale of Myrrha’s incestuous love for her father.This collection, which also included writings by Dante and Marcus Aurelius, received the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and was a finalist for three awards: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

Frank Bidart’s sixth book “Star Dust”, also divided in two parts, was nominated for a National Book Award and employed the familiar Bidart typography, including block capitals, italics and blank spaces, and used the techniques of quotations, paraphrases and monologues. His 2008 “Watching the Spring Festival” was his first book of lyric poems. Bidart’s  2013 collection “Metaphysical Dog” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016” won both the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 

Frank Bidart has taught at Brandeis University and, since 1972, at Wellesley College, both located in the state of Massachusetts. Bidart’s poem “Herbert White” became the basis for actor and poet James Franco’s  2010 short film of the same name. Bidart became a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2001 and, in 2017, won the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award.