1987 LETTER AUTOGRAPH BY POET Joe Brainard TO A NOTLEY

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Double your traffic. VINTAGE 1987 LETTER AUTOGRAPH BY POET Joe Brainard TO ALICE NOTLEY..PLUS POSTMARKED MAILING ENVELOPE....PLEASE CHECK MY SITE FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS. I BOUGHT OUT AN ESTATE WITH A COLLECTION OF POET SIGNED POEMS, LETTERS, (MOST TO ONE ANOTHER), AND OTHER LITERARY ITEMS. MOST FROM FAMOUS POETS FROM THE BEAT GENERATION, AND HIPPIE ERA.......Joe Brainard was born in Salem, Arkansas, in 1942, but shortly thereafter his family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up. From an early age Joe showed artistic talent, winning virtually every art contest he entered. He even designed his mother's dresses. Artistic talent seemed to run in the family. His paternal grandfather wrote poetry, his father drew and painted (until the obligation of supporting a family turned that into a fading dream), and two of Joe's three siblings became artists, aided by private art lessons. For Joe, art was a calling, but it was also a way that he, a gentle, skinny, unathletic stutterer, could deal with the world outside his home; the world of public school in a working-class neighborhood. At the age of 16 Joe got to know two fellow classmates who, like him, felt somewhat marginalized: poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup. Through them he met two graduate students at the University of Tulsa, the poet Ted Berrigan and Patricia Mitchell, both of whom would prove to be lifelong friends. Still in high school, Brainard, Padgett, and Gallup produced The White Dove Review, an art and literary magazine. After graduation and a few months of study at the Dayton Art Institute, which had given him a full scholarship, Joe moved, in late 1960 or early 1961, to New York City, where Padgett had gone to study at Columbia. Berrigan soon followed. Joe stayed for two years, living in low-rent tenement apartments on the Lower East Side and barely scraping by—sometimes selling his blood so he could eat. Then, feeling his art needed a radical change, he moved to Boston, where he spent a penurious and lonely year but did discover new directions for his work. Back in New York in the fall of 1963, he quickly met a galaxy of literary and artistic stars who became his friends, such as Joseph LeSueur, Frank O'Hara, Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch, Alex Katz, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Rudy Burckhardt, and Yvonne Jacquette, soon followed by Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thompson, and others, as well as younger poets later associated with the St. Mark's Poetry Project, such as Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Tony Towle, Tom Clark, Larry Fagin, and Michael Brownstein, to name a few. In 1964 Joe began a close relationship with Elmslie that, despite other lovers, lasted until the end of Joe's life because it was based on the kind of love that comes partly from deep companionship and mutual artistic admiration. Later on, for several years Joe had a passionate relationship with the actor Keith McDermott. Breakthrough moments for Joe came when Larry Rivers picked him as a companion artist for a group show at the Finch College Museum in the fall of 1964, followed a few months later by Joe's first New York solo exhibition, at the Alan Gallery. Subsequently he showed regularly at the Landau-Alan and Fischbach galleries, and took part in many group shows around the country and abroad, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Yale University Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. His early paintings and assemblages showed the influence of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, but Joe's work soon distinguished itself by its lyricism, wit, warmth, and generosity, combined with his penchant for making art that was unabashedly beautiful. Joe's work ethic and singleness of purpose—as well as his use of amphetamine—allowed him to produce art at an astonishing rate. For example, his 1975 show at Fischbach consisted of 1,500 miniature works. It was praised by New York Times art critic John Russell as "the wittiest sho... read more

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