Please join us for an evening celebrating the publication of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane.
Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard worked in a variety of forms, from New-York-School-aligned poetry to Pop-Art-adjacent artworks, including wild riffs on the comic strip character Nancy. Love, Joe presents a selection of Brainard’s letters that stretch from 1959 to 1993 addressed to artists and friends such as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Fairfield Porter, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol. The letters, edited and annotated by Daniel Kane, allow readers to witness an extraordinarily fertile moment in New York’s history, when literary and visual arts intersected with happenings, proto-punk and psychedelic rock concerts, and experimental music and dance performances. The evening will include readings by Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Anne Waldman, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, and Ann Lauterbach—reading aloud from and discussing the letters included in Love, Joe, with others TBA.
We hope you can join us at 7:30pm for a reception before the event.
This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.