Joe Brainard: I Remember

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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: Surrealism and its precursor, Dadaism, originated as a philosophical and cultural movement in Europe, primarily in France, in the aftermath of World War I. The Dadaists and Surrealists rejected the authority of the supposedly “rational” thoughts and values that had led the world into war. Instead of relying on rational thought to make connections, Dadaist and Surrealist art and writing relied on the more “random” movements, images, and juxtapositions of the subconscious mind or the dreaming mind. Surrealist and Dadaist artists and thinkers believed that our subconscious and seemingly irrational thoughts are more authentic than our “conscious” thoughts, which are censored and influenced by the morals and conventions of society. The Surrealists and Dadaists had a number of techniques and games to free the conscious mind; “automatic writing” was one of those techniques. To practice automatic writing, a person must simply begin writing and continue writing without censoring any of the thoughts or images that come to mind. The writer must not stop writing what comes to mind, even though the content may seem strange or disconnected. For the Surrealists and Dadaists, this “stream of consciousness” was left unrevised, but for contemporary writers influenced by these movements, this uncensored flow of language may then be revised or mined for ideas or images. In korte, heldere stukjes - dikwijls niet meer dan 1 of 2 zinnen - somt Joe Brainard op wat hij zich herinnert. "Ik herinner me" wordt heel het boek door gevolgd door dikwijls herkenbare, soms erg intieme of net heel universele dingen die onze terugblik kleuren. Selected Collections include Berkeley Art Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, Baron Guy de Rothschild, Fogg Museum, Harvard; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, Time-Life, Inc,. Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. The Mandeville Special Collections Library at UCSD also has a large archive of works by and about Brainard collected by Robert Butts from 1960 to 1992. [10] The poet Sean Bishop suggested Joanna Klink’s “ Some Feel Rain” for these purposes, and I’ve also found it a useful poem when considering how form and content can reinforce one another. The initial anaphora calls the world into being and establishes the rules of that world, where some feel some things and, by implication, others do not: Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle

I remember, when a fart invades a room, trying to look like I didn’t do it, even if, indeed, I didn’t. … Me acuerdo de querer dormir en el patio de atrás y de que se riesen de mí diciendo que no iba a aguantar la noche entera y de, al final, dormir fuera y no aguantar la noche entera.” 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:

After high school, the artist re-united with the White Dove boys in New York City shortly after leaving the Dayton Art Institute. [3] [4] If some students purport to be too cool or jaded to “give praise,” they might consider turning their imitation into an anti-praise poem, either by modifying the anaphora (“Damn the …,” perhaps?) or by adopting a sarcastic tone. Either way, the power of the listing anaphora still works. 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:

I don’t ever have an idea. The material does it all. You have a figure and a flower and you add a cityscape and it makes the story. You have control if you want to take it but that’s something I never wanted to do much. Un libro original en su planteamiento y adictivo en su lectura, una autobiografía de la niñez, adolescencia y juventud del autor construida a base de recuerdos. Simplemente una sucesión de “Me acuerdo de… “, completado con unas pocas líneas en las que se alude a hechos, sensaciones, pensamientos, deseos, fetiches o personas -amigos, familiares, simples conocidos o personajes famosos-, conformando un collage sin guion ni secuencia temporal alguna pero que acaban por dibujar la figura del artista y del mundo de aquellos años, aunque sea de forma tangencial, y siempre de forma amena y sin grandes estridencias. “Me acuerdo de la dulzura de Marilyn Monroe en Vidas rebeldes.” Me acuerdo" es un libro espléndido, bello, en ocasiones reminiscente a la obra de Mapplethorpe, aquella donde exponía imágenes de flores junto a infantes desnudos.

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Je me souviens. Γραμμένο με την τεχνική των fragments και αυτό, αποτελεί μία πρωτότυπη για την εποχή αυτοβιογραφία του συγγραφέα όπου παρουσιάζονται μονοπροτασιακά μνήμες από την παιδική του ηλικία και γενικότερα από την δεκαετία του '50 στις ΗΠΑ. Όλες ξεκινούν με την φράση I REMEMBER. Me parece que hay que ser muy valiente o nada pudoroso o indiferente a la mirada ajena para escribir muchos de estos recuerdos. Su obsesión por las pollas en general y su tamaño en particular es un buen ejemplo de ello. Churchill’s anaphora allows him to conscript his listeners, through the use of both “we” and “shall”—the latter of which, while used interchangeably with “will” in England, connotes obligation, even a sense of a legal contract.