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Rick Moody on Revisiting Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”

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Teachers & Writers Magazine Winter Issue, excerpt three
A Kind of Magic
: On Reading, Teaching, and Being Inspired by Joe Brainard

This week we are posting an essay by the novelist Rick Moody, the third piece from the magazine’s feature on Joe Brainard. Brainard’s book-length poem I Remember has something of a cult following here at T&W. Nearly every one of us has taught an I Remember lesson using Brainard’s work at one time or another. The poem’s spontaneity, playfulness, frankness, generous spirit, and unassuming tone have made fans of readers, writers, and teachers since its publication in the 70s. The publication this year of The Collected Works of Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett (Library of America) prompted us to revisit I Remember in the winter issue ofTeachers & Writers Magazine, where we take a new look at the qualities that have encouraged teaching artists across the country to turn to the work again and again.

Strange, Guileless, Incredibly Moving
by Rick Moody

I came to Joe Brainard relatively late, which is a humbling thing to admit. If you were schooled in the experimental writing of the sixties and seventies, like I was, you believed that experimental writing did certain things, had certain consistent preoccupations. Experimental writing was anti-establishment, it was sexually explicit, it was cynical, it was malevolent, it was concerned with philosophy, it was often comic, and so on. Mostly the writers of this work were white, male, and straight. I read all the canonical writers in the experimental pantheon, and that was a lot (reading all of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, for example, can fill a few years). I was a keen student.

And I therefore felt that I had learned all that I had to know about the furthest-out fringes of literary experiment. I already  even  accounted  for  language poetry, and Oulipo, and Stein, all of that stuff. I knew what I knew. Until I went out to dinner one night, ten or twelve years ago, with Paul Auster. We talked about a lot of things we both liked—Beckett, of course, and  Hawthorne, and  then  at  some  point  Paul  said “You’ve never read I Remember? Well, you have to come back to the house, and I’ll show it to you.” So I went back to his house and down into Paul’s library (which is substantial), and he pulled out a copy of I Remember.

Now, in fact, one of those curmudgeonly, white, straight, experimental guys had said to me, back in college: catalogues are too easy. That has not stopped me from making some extremely long lists in my own work, now and again, but I have always fashioned them in a state of some embarrassment. However, what I immediately recognized in the eruption that is the catalogue entitled I Remember, even as I gazed on it in Paul Auster’s library, is that the author was not in any way being facetious or literary, nor did he have any interest in whether a list was a good or bad idea from a literary-historical perspective. His list was automatic. And true. This I admired greatly.

I further admired that there was no beginning, middle, and end to I Remember. And no particular reason why you should start at the beginning and not skip around. I Remember is composed in little seizures of memory, not in the prison house of chronology. And this too was liberating for me. I came to see not long after that I was very moved by this work, and that I was not alone in being incredibly moved by this work. There’s a whole cult of Brainard enthusiasts, and with good reason. This work is free (in the jazz sense of the word), it’s strange, it’s guileless, it’s in- credibly moving, it has nothing to do with literature, except that in its exile from the guilds and schools of literature, it turns out to be better in many ways than more traditional literary work. Which makes it plenty literary indeed.

Meanwhile, for some twenty years, I’d been wrestling with how to tell the story of the death from Alzheimer’s disease of someone I had known and loved. I had tried many conventional dramatic ways to deal with this material, and had always been short- circuited by the inherent sentimentality of the story. The unlocking finally came after I had read Brainard’s I Remember, after I had come rightly to appreciate its myriad excellences. My story was called “She Forgot” and it wasn’t autobiographical, and it was (because I was operating under this Brainard star), just a list of things that a certain character had forgotten. It was less free, it was more narrative, it was unconfessional, it was elegiac. And so: not as good as Brainard. But it was meant as an homage to Brainard’s incredibly canny form, and, simultaneously, as an effort to make use of this very organic and reflexive structure. Brainard did not exhaust the catalogue; that is, he made it useful all over again. I owe the story in question to Joe Brainard’s memory. And to Paul Auster. I always remember my debts.

Rick Moody is the award-winning author of Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, Demonology, and, most recently, The Four Fingers of Death.

 

 

 

 

 


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