(Above: I took this photo while waiting for one of the phones to become available at MoMA during my visit there back in July when I was in NYC for the month. This is the explanation of the exhibit from MoMA’s website: “In 1968, at the dawn of a telecommunications revolution, John Giorno began delivering instant poetry through Dial-A Poem, a free telephone hotline in New York City. Reinforcing that ‘much poetry is intended to be heard, not merely read,’ he invited a cross-disciplinary network of peers to recite their works, which he recorded and played back using industrial-sized answering machines. The result was ‘a collage of other poets, which becomes a work of art in itself that changes daily.’
“Giorno’s vision for a shared, open-access repository of information was groundbreaking in a pre-digital world. Dial-A-Poem was first presented at MoMA in the 1970 exhibition Information, organized by Kynaston McShine. Galvanized by social movements, including opposition to the Vietnam War, Giorno incorporated numerous works by radical poets and political activists. This gallery features notes and documentation that illustrate how he originally arranged the poems, as well as phones containing 200 randomized poems selected by the artist in 2012 from his archive of thousands./ Organized by Erica Papernik, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, with Danielle Johnson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.”)
I blocked out an afternoon during my month-long stay in New York back in July to go wander around the Museum of Modern Art. There were some specific things I wanted to see, New Photography 2023 and The Encounter: Barbara Chase-Riboud/Alberto Giacometti. But it was the wander I was also looking forward to since a stroll though a museum is both soothing and bracing to me, that balance I seek manifested in the unbroken metaphoric bridge between two seemingly opposing feelings which constitute the zone I can inhabit when my own artistic work is being successfully engaged or I am encountering the art of others - performative or visual or literary - an incongruous setting that is both corridor and drawing room, its vistas in no need of windows. During my wander that day I happened upon the Dial-a-Poem installation that stilled me. I waited for one of its phones to free up and then stared at the numbers on the rotary face of it staring back at me when I sat down at the table that held it. I ran my fingers along the dial awaiting for the instinct to stop and then dial. I wondered what voice reading its own poem would fill my ear. I began to cry when it was the voice of Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS in 1994, reciting many of the choral litany of lines from his poem-as-memoir, I Remember. Joe and I traveled in some of the same social and art world orbits and I’d see him at a favored gay bar, The Ninth Circle. I didn’t know him well but I had an instant crush on him. His gangly grace appealed to me, as did his talent. There was a bemusement about him but it didn’t make him cynical. He wore the sly whimsy that limned his collages and assemblages - or “constructions,” as he called them - and his later oil paintings (he is in the collection at MoMA) and his wondrously unmannered poetry with a nonchalance that itself was limned with a kind of quiet dignity. “His modesty is the modesty of the gods,” his friend, fellow poet John Ashbery, said of him. In 2012, Matt Wolf made a short documentary about him narrated by another friend and fellow poet, Ron Padgett, who grew up with Joe in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York City around the same time. The narration is interspersed with Joe’s reading of many of the lines from I Remember. You can view it here.
(Above. Portrait of Joe Brainard by Peter Hujar. 1977.)
(Above: A page from Brainard’s, The Nancy Book. )
(Above: A first edition copy of I Remember for sale at AbeBooks for $475.00)
Here is an excerpt from I Remember:
I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.
I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember when my father would say "Keep your hands out from under the covers" as he said goodnight. But he said it in a nice way.
I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail.
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember a little boy who said it was more fun to pee together than alone, and so we did, and so it was.
I remember a fat man who sold insurance. One hot summer day we went to visit him and he was wearing shorts and when he sat down one of his balls hung out. I remember that it was hard to look at it and hard not to look at it too.
I remember a very early memory of an older girl in a candy store. The man asked her what she wanted and she picked out several things and then he asked her for her money and she said. “Oh, I don't have any money. You just asked me what I wanted, and I told you.” This impressed me to no end.
I remember my parents' bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn't have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old
I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.
(Above: A catalogue of one of Brainard’s art exhibits. I had this next to my bed for the five years I lived in Hudson, New York.)
Brainard’s assemblages were appropriations which he reimagined into new shapes, a shifted perspective which gave them a new visual rhythm just as his master work, I Remember, found a reimagined rhythm to the roll call of remembrance that makes of life a metronomic march with purpose to its small and steady steps instead of its just being a showy parade with dropped batons and droopy uniforms.
Here, in honor of his memory today, I also remember:
I remember when I learned to spell Mississippi.
I remember when my father would read the newspaper sitting on the toilet while my little brother and I took a bath together. I remember it as my first knowledge of intimacy without knowing the world itself.
I remember not wanting to be at my own sixth birthday party and thinking “Pin the tale on the what?” and rolling my eyes for the first time.
I remember how my eyes watered from the dye in the fabric store where my grandmother worked sewing drapes behind a local furniture store. I remember its heightened smell.
I remember wanting to go sit with the Black people in the balcony of our segregated movie theatre in my Mississippi hometown.
I remember eating Ritz crackers with peanut butter and marshmallows on them browned in the toaster oven after school and watching Amos and Andy and Father Knows Best and Where the Action Is and trying to see the dicks inside the pants of Paul Revere and The Raiders.
I remember listening to Andy Williams on the stereo.
I remember standing at the door of my brother’s room in the summer and praying for a thunder storm so I wouldn’t have to play in the Little League game that night.
I remember when my Little League coach committed suicide.
I remember when I hit a home run and the feel of the ball on the end of my bat that I was told was the “sweet spot.” I remember wondering if the boy I liked too much would then like me back in the same way because I had hit it.
I remember the first time I dreamed about him. I still do.
I remember when my mother screamed in the emergency room when my daddy died in a car wreck when I was seven years old.
I remember what she looked like in the casket the next year when she died of cancer.
I remember the first time I realized the difference between pity and sympathy.
I remember sitting at the window and watching my brother and sister play outside and wondering how they could be so happy. I remember resenting their happiness.
I remember the first time I ejaculated and not knowing what had happened.
I remember driving into New York City on August 19th, 1975, in a Ryder truck having driven it from Mississippi with an old friend.
I remember doing a Quaalude at a bar and barely making it home.
I remember the smell of Grether’s Pastilles and cigars in the back seat of the car with Henry Geldzahler as we’d head to a dinner or an art opening.
I remember my friend Josh dying of AIDS in Louisville and flying down to see him before he died and his watching a western with the volume turned too high when I walked into his hospital room and going to a drag show that night and crying and the next day telling him I loved him as I said goodbye.
I remember the first time I had gonorrhea when I was 17. I was in New York and apartment sitting for a friend and staying in the apartment the whole time reading his copy of The Front Runner and being in pain and so scared of my own body.
I remember the portrait of Janis Joplin above the juke box at The Ninth Circle.
I remember Joe Brainard standing at the jukebox with the glow from its lights illuminating his face as he stared down into it trying to decide which song to play. I remember his hitting the buttons with the hand that held his cigarette.
I remember the smell of cigarettes in bars - and patchouli.
I remember going to a New Year’s Eve party at poet Howard Moss’s apartment and sitting between Edward Albee and Paul Taylor and Taylor not knowing who Jerry Falwell was when I talked about him and The Moral Majority.
I remember the first time I saw New York City Ballet.
I remember seeing Leontyne Price in Aida at the Met.
I remember watching Dynasty at Uncle Charlie’s.
I remember the song I thought Joe had played on that jukebox when Jagger began to sing about what was puzzling me and that it was the nature of his game.
I remember looking at Janis then Joe. I remember listening to Jagger.
I remember the first time I heard somebody call it jism.
I remember being told about Jesus.
I remember the first time I realized it could be a Spanish boy’s name.