Blowing up Paper Bags to Pop

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. 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

Aesthetics · Art · Assemblage (archaeology · Epistemology · Literary criticism · Literature · Narrative · Poetics · Poetry · Sociology · Subject (documents · Testimonial · Artistic and Creative Research · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• Reading autobiography

  Julia Watson, Sidonie Smith•Reading autobiography•2001

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• Frank O'Hara

  Martha George Meek, Marjorie Perloff•American Literature•1978

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