Blowing up Paper Bags to Pop: Joe Brainard's Almost-Autobiographical Assemblage

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Amidst Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's ‘Fifty-two Genres of Life Narrative’ I aim to insert yet another mode—the Popography: a form of displaced autobiographical documentation derived from self-propulsive/self-obscuring reference to board games, soap operas, and celebrity scandals. As a case study of popography's ambiguous place in contemporary poetic discourse, I examine the secondary literature concerning poet-collagist Joe Brainard. In his startlingly intimate, yet abstractly structured texts, Brainard both adopts and problematises the position of the historically grounded literary-subject. Brainard's work, I argue, thus offers a timely antidote to the paradigmatic critical split that divides ‘testimonial’ from ‘language-based’ poetics. My overall point is that, just as classic content/form distinctions dissolved when art critics encountered the work of Warhol and his peers, so current ‘transparent’/‘opaque’ distinctions should be recalibrated in response to accessible/abstract poetry like Brainard's. For the categorical split between an ‘authentic’ and an ‘experimental’ poetics obscures popography's most pressing implications—the acknowledgment that much ‘real life’ experience now centers upon our attention to, and identification with, simulacral mass-media narratives. Popography, I argue, need not suggest a capricious departure from documentable fact, but rather a concerted effort to expand life writing's scope into the purportedly ego-eclipsing domain of postwar popular culture.