L ove, Joe presents a selection of Joe Brainard’s letters stretching from 1959 to 1993, offering a unique, intimate view of his personal and artistic life. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard created many works that range across a variety of forms, from New York School–aligned writing to Pop Art–adjacent art. He drew on the everyday and popular culture with amiability, wit, and generosity. In this Q&A, the renowned author Daniel Kane discusses what inspired him to conceive of this book, as well as the pleasure and joy he hopes Love, Joe will spark in readers.

Q: How did you get the idea to edit a book of selected letters by Joe Brainard?

Daniel Kane: I had finished a book on punk and poetry that was published by Columbia University Press in 2017. I was working on a couple of other smaller projects and doing my university teaching. Around 2019, I asked myself, “What’s next?” I knew I didn’t want to write another academic monograph. And, in my office one day, I happened to pick up Ron Padgett’s memoir about his friendship with Joe Brainard, which I had read already but decided to flick through again. Seeing excerpts from Joe’s letters to Ron in that book was a proverbial aha moment. They were just as winsome, wise, and goofy as any of Joe’s brilliant visual works or published writings. If the excerpts are this great, imagine a whole book filled with Joe’s letters! You know—the more Joe, the better!

Q: I get that! So how did you end up finding the letters that made it into Love, Joe? Was that a hard process?

Daniel Kane: I knew from previous research trips that there were loads of Joe’s letters in archives in places like New York University and the University of California, San Diego. So that was a start. But then Padgett, who was Joe’s childhood friend and serves as his literary executor, did me the greatest favor of all. “You should talk to Keith McDermott,” he advised. (Keith was Joe’s lover in the final years of Joe’s life.) He then added: “You should get in touch with Maxine Groffsky.” (Maxine was a long-time friend of Joe’s who, as the former editor of the Paris Review, published several of his works in the journal.) Ron also connected me to a lot of other people as I worked on the book, and they were all incredibly forthcoming and generous in sharing their letters with me. That was a joy—meeting these people in their apartments, handling the precious letters Joe sent them, talking to them about their memories of Joe.

Q: What guided you as you made your choices?

Daniel Kane: I wanted to show readers that Joe was a profoundly “nice” person and artist, but a complicated and even at times difficult one, too. I also wanted readers to get a sense of the uniqueness of Joe’s relationships. The way he addressed someone like the poet Ann Lauterbach was totally different from the way he addressed, say, the artist Fairfield Porter. That’s why I organized the book according to correspondent rather than in a strictly chronological fashion. The problem was that there are literally thousands of letters to choose from!

Q: So how did you choose some letters and reject others?

Daniel Kane: I ended up developing this insane Excel spreadsheet that was color-coded by addressee, dates, and themes. It helped a lot, and the organizing themes included headings such as “Sex,” “I Remember,” “Oil Painting,” “Gossip,” that kind of thing. But ultimately a lot of my choices were intuitive. Some letters obviously had to make it in, such as the one to poet Bill Berkson where Joe goes off on the abstract-expressionist painter Barnett Newman, writing things like: “All I know is that, to me, if art has an enemy, it is Barnett Newman. He is like death.”

In terms of Joe as a visual artist, I found the letters he wrote to painters like Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter incredibly revealing. In the Porter letters, there are so many of these don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it sentences like: “Had a real disappointing week or so with birch trees. I love them so much I was ‘saving’ them, expecting a sort of real music. But, alas, I cannot seem to find their source of warmth.” So much sensitivity there!

Q: Brainard is now recognized as a queer icon, an artist who was open about his sexuality in his work and life at a time when it was quite unusual to be so completely “out.” How did the letters you read speak to that fact?

Daniel Kane: Yes, given how so much of Joe’s visual and verbal work was overtly queer, it was important to include letters that reflected his sexuality. I was particularly moved by a lot of the letters Joe wrote in the 1970s and early 1980s to his younger gay friends, when he’s just outrageously sexual and joyous about it. Take this passage from a 1979 letter Joe wrote to his friend, the writer and biographer Brad Gooch:

     At any rate—I’ve been doing drawings for “Gay Sunshine” all day, and just want to tell you what a help you’ve been: you down under that table all day, licking and sucking and eating me all over, below my waist. Just how I like you best in my fantasies: cleaning out my asshole, licking my feet, sucking my dick, and hungrily drinking gallons of piss. Your pretty face in my crotch all day. Outrageously “using” you, and abusing you. So—thanks a mint, kid—you do it good.

What makes this outstanding to me is that hilarious phrase: “thanks a mint, kid.” It’s a totally incongruous statement to make given the overall tenor of the letter, and something I can imagine only Joe Brainard writing.

Q: And yet, in reading the book, I noticed that not all the letters have that kind of zing. Many are devoted to describing Brainard’s immediate surroundings, what he’s been reading, the reflection of sunlight on the surface of a pond . . .

Daniel Kane: Totally. And so important, too, given how devoted Joe was in both his work and his life to identifying and celebrating quotidian, bright moments. Take, for example, the final letter in Love, Joe, which was written to Bill Berkson around 1993. This was when Joe was suffering from a variety of AIDS-related illnesses and knew he didn’t have much time left in this world. The writing (to my ear, anyway!) is so exquisitely pitched that it practically reaches the condition of music. And it embodies a love of life so deep, so sweet, I can barely stand to read it.

Dear Bill,

Let’s see. It’s Monday morning, just after breakfast—(orange juice, cinnamon roll, banana)—and today promises to be a perfect summer day: blue sky, sunny and warm: a rarity this odd (and cool) summer. So picture me this afternoon out in the middle of the lake—white swimming trunks—floating around on a bright red air mattress, blissed out of my mind. Though, of course, anything could happen between then and now.

     And—really—that’s about it for news. I read and sleep and eat (miss you). And time flies.

     Black beans are soaking in a big bowl of water on the kitchen counter, for supper tonight. With basmati rice. And left-over ham. And orange jello (made from scratch). With maybe heavy cream and blueberries on top. A sprig of mint.

And so now you know everything!

“Happy birthday!”

&

lots of love,

     Joe

P.S. All best to Lynn!

It’s like a chamber piece, isn’t it? The way that short phrases like “(miss you),” “And time flies,” and “A sprig of mint” punctuate longer, more melodic lines. Or how a simple list of foods works like a motif: breakfast (orange juice, cinnamon roll, banana), then dinner (black beans, bowl of water, basmati rice . . .ham . . .jello . . .cream . . .blueberries . . .mint). The improvisational way Joe moves from topic to topic, item to item. The “P.S.” that’s like a coda. Such a slight little letter, and yet so profoundly moving.