Tag Archives: Paul Auster

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

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.

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