I'll Write You a Good Letter

The first time I fell in love with Joe Brainard was in the early 2000s, a decade after his death, when I glimpsed one of his collages in my then-boss’s Upper West Side apartment. The collage was of a butterfly, and it hung above a piano on the pink walls. The second time I fell in love with Joe Brainard, it was with Brainard the letter writer. In the hotlanta summer of 2009, I found his letter to publisher Annabel Levitt in Emory University’s archives. He explained that the cover of Ted Berrigan’s Train Ride (1971), which he had designed, required a specific shade of red: “About the red, I think it ought to be simply a true red: Light enough to be bright, dark enough to be brilliant. Like (off to my right) the red stripes on a package of ‘Tareyton’ cigarettes.” He included the cigarette carton with the letter.

This missive doesn’t make it into Daniel Kane’s beautifully edited Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard (Columbia University Press, 2024), but that sense of true red—brightness and brilliance in equal measure—does. Indeed, by the end of the book’s nearly four hundred pages, one wants to delete the comma in the title and simply love Joe. Kane’s previous work—All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003) and his edited collection Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School (2006)—is devoted to New York’s multifarious and often promiscuous art scenes, and Kane’s careful curation continues here. Arranged in what he calls an “accordion,” in hopes that the reader may “jump in and out at different moments,” Love, Joe’s structure permits the reader to start and stop, with the imperative to love repeatedly picked up and dropped off mid-sentence, mid-page, or mid-life.

I am, admittedly, a Brainard lover. I edited a collection of essays about his poetry and visual art, and I’ve been writing, talking, and thinking about him for nearly twenty years. Although I never knew Brainard personally, his writing makes me feel like I did—better than I know myself. I stare for long, intermittent periods at his various works in their various forms: collages, paintings, letters, poems, notes in the margins of other people’s poems. Brainard’s longtime friend Ron Padgett calls devotees like me “fanatics.” So inflected are we by what many critics describe as Brainard’s purposely “minor” art, that this new collection hooks us on what might be called the minor art of letter-writing itself.

For the new reader, Kane offers a broad-stroke view of Brainard the person. The 19-year-old boy from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was, as Kane reminds us, already intent on becoming an artist when he moved to New York City in late 1960 or early 1961. Brainard’s move came with a rejection of formal artistic training: He left the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio, where he’d been awarded a scholarship, after only a few months to pursue a life among New York City’s art coteries. But he was also following old friends. Padgett, whom Brainard first met in elementary school in Tulsa, was already there, as were Berrigan, Patricia Mitchell (later Patricia Padgett), and, soon, Dick Gallup. When Brainard, Padgett, and Gallup were in high school back in Tulsa, they’d collaborated on the ambitious literary journal, the White Dove Review.

These details matter, as they reveal that the cohort Brainard spent the rest of his life living among, collaborating with, and writing to formed in childhood, moved to New York more or less together, and loved each other from young ages. This love finds its way into almost every letter, and even into Brainard’s visual output. A small, untitled, and unassuming collage from 1978, for example, has occupied my mind for years: It features two empty guest checks, layered with a postage stamp, a crudely sketched cigarette atop a fragment of paper, and a pink rose rendered in watercolor. On the top right corner, the number of the guest check is left in true red. For me, the collage implies a narrative of everyday love. It evokes the experience of being at a diner with someone who makes for good company—for the duration of a smoked cigarette anyway. It’s incomplete in the classical sense; no information is offered about who ate what, but there’s a kind of allure in that emptiness. In subtle but visually arresting ways, the collage is bound together in a kind of muted tenderness.

Artworks like these were created in parallel with Brainard finding his place in New York (despite occasional stints in Boston, Vermont, California, and elsewhere throughout his lifetime tenure on the Lower East Side). Kane situates Brainard within the New York School of poetry—but, uniquely, doesn’t suggest that his work was integral to its aesthetics. I have argued elsewhere that the school may be better understood with Brainard centrally situated: as an informing character, one whose aesthetics shaped the second generation New York school’s own as it came to fruition. Some scholars go so far as to call Brainard’s coterie the “Tulsa School.” I’m not alone in wondering where the lines should be drawn. The scholar Rona Cran is one of many in the field who agrees that the first generation included five key poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler), but that the second cohort slips into hazier focus as one steps away from its still slippery center (New York? Tulsa?). Cran offers this clarification:

[The New York School] describes a much larger school, or movement, made up of poets with similarly overlapping lives in the broad lineage of this so-called ‘first generation’–a ‘second generation’ of poets whose work consciously and unconsciously explores, expands, and complicates the irreverence, collaborative-ness, and attentiveness to environment pioneered by the original five. Key second generation figures include Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Lewis Warsh, Maureen Owen, Michael Brownstein, David Shapiro, Bill Berkson, Frank Lima, Tony Towle, Tom Clark, Aram Saroyan, Eileen Myles, and, of course, Joe Brainard.

However New York School poetry is defined, many readers first come to know Brainard through I Remember, an atypical, formally experimental memoir published in 1970. It offers a haphazard pastiche of things remembered—the haphazardness the source of its beauty. About the book-length poem, Brainard wrote to Anne Waldman in 1969, from Calais, Vermont: “I feel like I am everybody . . . It won’t last. But I’m enjoying it while I can.” Waldman published the book through Angel Hair Press, which she founded with her then-husband Lewis Warsh, and published its two sequels as well. Brainard explains that I Remember “is about everybody else as much as it is about me.” His letters indicate that he was writing the book that May in Calais—his summer spot with longtime partner Kenward Elmslie. The book and its curation are frequently referred to throughout various letters, including one to Bill Berkson, to whom he writes “it is GREAT . . .  it’s a ‘self-portrait’ if ever there was one.” This enthusiasm follows many reflections from Brainard that his memory—along with things as mundane yet necessary as spelling or good health—was imperfect. My own favorite moment occurs early in the book’s counter-Proustian list of seemingly random and everyday, solemn, genuine remembrances:

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie. 
I remember how much I cried seeing South Pacific (the movie) three times.
I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.

I love these lines because they move the book in that same “accordion” effect that Kane cultivates in the letters: start-stopping echoes of dailinesses rhyme across days and lines. The “cry” of his “mother” is amplified in “apricot pie” and “cried”; “time” chimes with “times”; the implicit liquid quenching of a “glass of water” calls out to the liquidity of tears and then sets off more echoes in “ice” throughout the following pages. The implication is that life rhymes, and there is a sort of arbitrary order to everyday things which surfaces when meditated upon.

When Brainard advocates for the beauty of the everyday (as he often does in these letters, while baking a strawberry shortcake or soaking black beans, for example), he also writes about the beauty of city life. In his letters, the city’s sparkle is indistinguishable from the spark-inducing energy of camaraderie. Take this letter to James Schulyer from 1968:

Today was (is) the most beautiful day I can ever remember: very sunny and very cool. And very quiet: Sunday. Many Sundays seem somehow odd to me, but today was just perfect. I do love it here. It just doesn’t make sense to go back to the city. Except for people. That’s where so many of the best people are, to me.

It’s possible to think of Brainard’s letters as love letters to New York itself, especially since he wrote many of them during periods when he was away from the city and longed to reconnect with friends there.

The one-sidedness of any collection of letters leaves one wondering how they landed. How many of the letter writer’s pursuits were a fictionalized, self-deluded, or forced account, and how many were a revealing self-portrait (as Brainard calls I Remember) in the form of letters? In a note to Berkson from 1993, Brainard writes:

It’s Monday morning, just after breakfast—(orange juice, cinnamon roll, banana)—and today promises to be a perfect summer day: blue sky, sunny and warm: a rarity this odd (and cool) summer. So picture me this afternoon out in the middle of the lake—white swimming trunks—floating around on a bright red air mattress, blissed out of my mind. Though, of course, anything could happen between then and now.

How many of Brainard’s cinnamon rolls and, later, “black beans . . . soaking,” are true? And how much of these collaged stories of a life in letters are the kind of pastiched products we offer to others, and also in the telling—to ourselves—to make things feel smoother than they may be, to make the variousness of a human life, one’s syncopating heart, one’s turbulent mind, digestible in letter form? That is, a sense of co-creation is implicit in any letter; the recipient tethers the writer to a kind of embodiment. In the case of Brainard’s letters, this play is both joyful and elusive. Brainard is gone, but before he left, he promised us a person and an artist who would try hard to tell things truthfully. As in a letter to Pat Padgett written during his obsession with the number “7” in 1963: “In my work I’m trying to avoid being clever, being surreal, and being absurd. I want to most of all touch a place of being quietly disturbing, that grows and grows in no direction.”

Brainard is hungry in these letters—hungry for art but also quite viscerally suffering the effects of poverty. Another letter to Pat Padgett, written from Boston in 1963, starts:

This is another one of those really not a letter at all. I just can’t seem to sit down & really write. I’ve been working all the time. Mainly I just wanta at last send my new poem for you & Ron to read. My newest collage is a fantastic, & still uncompleted, homage to M.M. I shan’t begin to describe it. Two new miniature landscapes. I’m working with things inside of things inside of things in side of things. Also I’m working with things being obviously the “wrong” color: ex: a pink airplane, a blue and orange Lucky Strike label, a purple bird. Other things I think I notice about my work:

(1)    It is sorta “decadent”, which I like : isn’t Pop art, too, decadent kinda? (?)

This hungry, lonely period of “working with things inside of things” ultimately yielded some of Brainard’s signature series and pieces, including the 1962 painting 7-Up. Created around the same time as Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans, 7-Up resists the pop-reality of Warhol’s aesthetic in favor of a “decadent” rendering which is “working with things being obviously the ‘wrong’ color.” (Brainard’s 7-Up is light blue and red, and the paint almost appears to melt “decadently” off the bottom of the canvas.)

Like those Shakespeare plays that feature transformative moments offstage, Love, Joe reveals that it was often in moments away from New York—as in Boston—that Brainard’s resolve forms and hardens. It was in Boston, one could argue, that Brainard grew into his “ambition,” as Kane calls it, to find his own way, to be both “true” and indirect, and to be honest without ensuring “niceness.” I am glad that Kane offers the letters to Pat Padgett early on, because this is a point in the collection in which the reader softens to Brainard too: the letters reveal humility, tenderness, and sadness, as in another 1963 letter to her which ends with a P.S. “And of course I will write more & better things later as I will always write more & better things later.” Or take another P.S that ends a letter written to James Schuyler from a 1969 summer in Vermont:

P.S. All this stuff about my wanting to change my life (totally) is probably just a fantasy running around in my head. So please don’t take what I say too seriously. It is true. But I don’t know how true. But I don’t seem to know anything these days. Not that I ever did. But at least I used to think I knew something. Once again—

Love, Joe

Indeed, letters from Brainard are often tinged with this sadness of “not knowing,” usually as he deliberates on the sacrifices necessary to devote his life to art. In a 1963 letter to Berrigan, Brainard writes:

Dear Ted,

Ugh. Things are going terribly, so I won’t write much. I really just have a favor to ask of you: to send me $8 by Mon. Hope like crazy this is possible, for they’re kicking me out Mon. if I don’t pay my rent. I don’t know if you’ll have any money or not, but could you borrow it for me on my honor to pay back as soon as I get a job? I’ve got to get a job you know, for a few weeks at least; I mean I’ve no longer got a choice. I never thought it’d come to that, but it has : no choice. Too bad. I’ll write you a good letter once I’m able to write a good letter. It’s not that I don’t want to (that I haven’t already). Sorry to put you in the position where I’m completely relying on just you. I am tho. I read tons, and that’s about all. Lately mostly Dostoyevsky.

So un-cute is this letter from Boston that Brainard follows it up with an apology: “And rather than continue the shit bit, I won’t continue it by saying I was a shit for writing that last letter. . . .”

In another letter, this time to his high school friend Joan Brix, in October 1960, Brainard offers “a sermon.” Brix is not a long-term correspondent, or, at least the letters to her here come only from early in Brainard’s epistolary career, but his letters to her demonstrate the earnestness of a school note:

First I shall give you a sermon. I hope to God I’ll change. I hope Ron changes, you change, & everyone changes. Joan, I can’t stay 18 all my life. I’m by no means a perfect person. I want to grow & let my personality & art improve so please don’t die when I come home Christmas a changed & somewhat different person. I’ll hope you’ll like me just as much & and even better. Please don’t slit your wrists either.

This “sermon” makes me wonder if Brainard knew Frank O’Hara’s “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s,” published just three years earlier. The letter seems to echo O’Hara’s call for “more” (“I hope there will be more / more drives to Bear mountain and searches for hamburgers . . . more discussions in lobbies of the respective greatnesses of Diana Adams and Allegra Kent, / more sunburns and more half-mile swims . . . let’s advance and change everything, but leave these little oases in case the heart gets thirsty en route”) while acknowledging how times “change” but doesn’t “change” the love within a caring friendship.

Love, Joe encourages a sense of friendship with Brainard—one that promises to deepen when the letters are read alongside an examination of Brainard’s art and poetry. Indeed, my complaint about this book surfaces as a spoiled whine: I wish that images were integrated within the text, so that when Brainard refers to an artwork he is completing, the reader might get to see it. While images of letters are incorporated whenever they include images themselves, and occasional drawings are offered when they accompany letters, and while the letters are often artworks in their own right—decorated in Brainard’s all-caps font, and frequently headed or signed off with his tag-line, or a number, or his favorite expression of the week—one still aches for a fuller sense of Brainard’s art. In an April 1963 letter to Pat, for example, he explains that he is working on two collages, including 7-Up. Three letters later, he signs off with “Love, 7.” Because this “7” is sketched, the reader is offered an image of it, but not of its important namesake painting. Readers coming to Brainard’s writing for the first time through this lovely collection of numbers, drawings, postscripts, and much more will miss something ineffable. At worst, this absence will make readers suspect there’s an entire conversation happening offstage that they are not (yet) privy to; at best, it will inculcate a thirst for more.

I confess that I leave this collection wishing that I’d known Brainard in real life—that I’d been lucky enough to receive one of these letters in hard copy, in his characteristic all-caps font, a “7” scribbled somewhere along the way. I will have to do instead with Love, Joe and its imperative to love Brainard, with thanks to Kane for reminding us of all the reasons why we should.