I REMEMBER by JOE BRAINARD
recovered by ANDY FITCH

Line by line, Joe Brainard’s 1975 I Remember text may not appear “abstract” enough to merit attention from experimental poetry’s advocates. Yet, I Remember’s repeated phrase (like the hoary chorus from some Broadway standard, now serving as point of departure for jazz improvisations) offers a hummable hook that can keep its more-esoteric modal changes
disarmingly accessible:

I remember a purple violin bottle that hung on the wall with ivy growing out of it.

I remember very old people when I was very young. Their houses smelled funny.

I remember on Hallowe’en, one old lady you had to sing or dance or do something for before she would give you anything. (19)

Excerpted from Brainard’s greater project, this sequence appears to corroborate conventional assessments of the poet as darling diarist of the diminutive. Folksy content and colloquial phrasing combine in camp record of commonplace fact. But even here, the poet’s pervasive, protean presence (I remember when I was young) ensures a constant figure/ground reversal (with “I” serving both as active-subject and absent-object of inquiry).
Meaning emerges in multisensory, multigenerational flux, for instance, as Brainard’s audience (identifying with the “very young” poet) gets coaxed into wincing at the smell of old people’s houses, then (restored to a more mature appraisal) smiles at Brainard’s “funny” diction, in short succession—in a work charged with kaleidoscopic reference and stripped of coherent plot. Like a purple violin-bottle with ivy growing out of it, the obviousness, the immediacy of any single I Remember entry gets mediated by its infinitesimal, incremental status amidst an exhaustive (138-page), additive arrangement.^[i] Amplifications and qualifications, associations and inversions proliferate as new entries appear alongside each other (none gets subordinated to greater narrative trajectory). Once assembled as a composite text, moreover, such “concrete images” and “tactile impressions,” such “simple” syntax and “obvious” content foreground a complex Pop translatability. For they allow the poet to integrate empirical investigation, nostalgic reminiscence, and quasi-schizophrenic semiotic experiment into a single, studded text. And if this serialized accessibility makes Brainard’s project seem all the less ambitious, or less sophisticated, one need only consider the extent to which I Remember’s eternal (anaphoric) return problematizes the paradigmatic (progressive) course of classic autobiographical narrative.