Some Poems by Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard was a good man.

His poems have a goodness.

They are good poems.

The poems don't aspire to be good. They are good.

Why am I talking like a first grader reviewing a book?

Oh, no reason.

Good? How are they good?

You go Joe Pesci on me.

Because it is your nature.

You read. You write. You dispute. You conquer. You grieve. You look cautiously. At the battlefield. You wonder. You go eat a sandwich and it tastes funny.

Joe Brainard seems to have walked around that WET FLOOR/PISO MOJADO where you just fell and cracked your ass.

And yes...we all saw it.

I will never be as good a person as Joe Brainard's poems are good to their readers.

If you are a straightforward person, you might call some of these poems confessional.

If you are a cagy intellectual, you may have to call them conceptual to feel good about liking them. If you do like them, that is.

I don't really think they are either of those things, because those things are mere categories. And these are poems.

I think they are very mortal poems. Funny poems. Funny but mortal in that way certain portraitists of centuries past could show you mortality and humor at the same time in their portraits. This funny, beautifully odd person is going to die. And here I have made him luminous. What for?

In that sense, Brainard was still a painter when he was a poet. He could get that ghostly, unspoken subtext in there.

Here are some poems from New Work (1973), one of those books I keep in my tiniest, closest bookshelf, with other books that drop down quickly like oxygen-masks when the plane is ready to go down.

Nobody makes mortality funnier. Check especially the Connecticut trip journal excerpts. The poetry of the diurnal doesn't get any better.



    FEAR

A good life should be lived without fear.

On the other hand, trying not to be afraid of something you are afraid of is stupid.

Avoiding fear is no good.

The only solution is to give in to fear, and then try to overcome it.

Nothing can be understood from a distance. And nothing, of course, can be understood until it is understood.

Only by not being afraid of the lion, but of the fear in you that makes you afraid of the lion, can fear be overcome.

In this area I am a total flop.




    THE ZOO

   A very sad thing happened at the zoo. Judy, Bill's mother,
became very sick and died.





    IF I WAS GOD


If I was God
up there in heaven
looking down at us
I think
I'd find it hard to believe
that I'd actually done it.







    POEM


Sometimes

everything

seems

so

oh, I don't know.







    SUNDAY, APRIL 2nd, 1972


     If you want to know what it's like to have a rug pulled out from under you (don't bother) (and besides, I'm sure you already know) try having a show. I've never felt so totally empty in all my life. So empty I don't even feel bad(?). Actually, I do. I feel like shit!






    SELECTIONS FROM "SELF-PORTRAIT: 1971"


WHEN I WAS A KID

When I was a kid my main desire in life was to grow up and get out and make everybody like me.


NOW

Now I'm out and as grown up as "grown up" means anything (not much) and still I'm trying to make everybody like me. The only difference is that now I know better.



WHY I AM A PAINTER

One reason I'm a painter is because I'm not a movie star.


CONCEIT

To tell you the truth, I don't think I'm as conceited as I have the right to be.


MY BIGGEST FEAR

My biggest fear is that some morning I'm going to wake up to find that I don't like myself anymore.


FOUR O'CLOCK

When it gets to be around four o'clock and I have no plans for the evening I start getting nervous.


WHY I LEAVE MY SHIRT OPEN

Many years ago Joe LeSueur made the mistake of telling me I have a terrific stomach.


SHY

If being shy is just a habit, it's a hard habit to find a replacement for.


TERRIBLE AT LEAVING

I say "Well, I guess I should be going" and nothing happens.


ART

Art to me is like walking down the street with someone and saying "Don't you love that building?" (Too.)


ME NOW

Funny, I don't remember having much to do with how I got this way.


I WONDER

God, when I think back----------------Am I still that transparent?






    LIFE


     If someone knocks on your door you have two choices. To open it, or not to open it. However, should your caller insist upon entering by force...well, that's life too.




    IT'S A SMALL WORLD


     I was working hard in a truck stop. My brother introduced me to a friend. This friend said, "I have a brother in the Navy." I said, "Oh, nice," and went about with my work. Several months later my brother's friend's brother (the one who was in the Navy) came in for a hamburger. He said, "I just got out of the Navy. I have a brother who has a friend who has a sister who works in a truck stop. Could it be that you are she?"




    NO STORY

     I hope you have enjoyed not reading this story as much as I have enjoyed not writing it.




...and from "Some notes on a trip to go see Alex Katz's show in Hartford with Anne Waldman and Michael Brownstein and Pat and Ron Padgett"....(excerpts)

_________________________________________________________________________

   Anne just call in the middle of shaving to say not to rush.
They just got up.
_________________________________________________________________________

   Finding a pair of clean underwear no easy matter. (My last.)
Around this time of year I become totally impractical.
_____________________________________________________________________________

   Ron takes over the wheel. 55 more miles to Hartford.
________________________________________________________________________________

   A bag of dried apricots is brought out. (Yellow raisins were rejected.) And now peanuts. The plain health store kind.
________________________________________________________________________________

   Passing a graveyard I wonder why the world isn't literally covered with graveyards, considering how, over the years, so many people have died. (?) Ron and I discuss this, but with no conclusions.
___________________________________________________________________________________

   Almost at Hartford a big sign said "Brainard Road" which Anne said I ought to write down.
__________________________________________________________________________________

   "And a Brainard airport too," Ron just said.

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   "At the museum now looking at "Upside Down Ada," one of my all-time favorites.
___________________________________________________________________________________

   As slight headache continues I'm having a hard time (upstairs among the permanent collection now) seeing individual paintings individually. Even Pollock and DeKooning, today, seem dusty and a bit sad. (Old-hat.)
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   Just can't seem to get beyond the big gold frames today. (Old Masters.) Which reminds me how extroverted Alex's paintings are by comparison. So easy to look at, as they come out and meet you half way.
__________________________________________________________________________________

   A Goya with one of his large beautiful neutral areas of "no color in particular" that neither recedes or comes forward is the only painting upstairs that really touches me today.
__________________________________________________________________________________

   The old lady in the museum gift shop says she knew Wallace Stevens. And that one shouldn't believe everything one hears about him. (In response to Ron's saying that he was an old grouch.)
___________________________________________________________________________________

   On our way now to look up Wallace Stevens' house. Such a pink sky. The Capitol building has a gold dome.
__________________________________________________________________________________

   As we pass the insurance company Wallace Stevens worked for Ron says it "looks like" his (Stevens') poems.
___________________________________________________________________________________

   "Asylum Apartments" (a new high-rise) gets a big laugh. Well, a chuckle.
___________________________________________________________________________________

   As we only know the street and not the house number, we're having a hard time figuring out which house it is. We ask several people but nobody even knows who Wallace Stevens is.
__________________________________________________________________________________


   Found it finally. A big white house with gray shutters partly hidden by many bushes. (118 Westerly Terrace.) Anne rang the bell and asked if this was the house. ("Yes.") "A very rude lady," Anne said, when she got back to the car.
____________________________________________________________________________________

   Onour way to check out Mark Twain's house Anne (reading a guide book) says that there used to be twenty publishing houses here. Pat adds that the first American cook book was published here.
____________________________________________________________________________________

   We found it just in time to grab some post cards. From the outside, in the dark, it looks exactly like the house one would imagine Mark Twain would have lived in.
__________________________________________________________________________________

   We are heading back to N.Y.C. now, by mistake (a wrong turn) looking for a way to turn around. We pass a big factory building with a beautiful Ruissian-looking blue and white dome with a white horse on top. "A glue factory, maybe," Ron says.
__________________________________________________________________________________

   The 25c Michael dropped in the toll box didn't make the green light go on so we all quickly rolled down our windows (having just smoked a joint) but nobody came over, and nothing happened, so we drove on.
___________________________________________________________________________________

   Silence inside the car now. The night is so black and the lights are so white. As we nearly end our trip. "The End" in the air.
____________________________________________________________________________________

   Michael, afraid we might not quite have enough gas just turned off somewhere in New Jersey--a series of closed gas stations--but here we are now, getting one dollar's worth.
___________________________________________________________________________________

   New York City looks pretty good over there. When I see the city from far away I like to try to imagine someone I know in the city, in their apartment, doing whatever they might be doing. It's a hard place to believe you live in if, at the moment, you don't.