Joe Brainard’s Collaged Spaces

Brainard was not only an illustrator and friend to many New York School poets, he was also an avid letter writer, collage artist, miniature artist, cartoonist, and serious poet. How is contemporary poetry involved in an overlooked dialogue with collage art? This chapter suggests a general tendency towards assembly across the disciplines of text and image which govern both first- and second-generation New York School aesthetics. This chapter showcases how Brainard’s work instigates and propels the collaged poetry of The New York Schools from the real and influential side-lines of their poems? This examination of Brainard’s work argues that though his work sat in the margins of New York School poetry, it informingly lined, bound, and shaped the spatial poetics of this avant-garde American school.