Pop Poetics

Pop artists often get praised or criticized for their use of commercial imagery, and yet their contributions—particularly to literature—are generally ignored in preference to a focus on precisely this sort of “lowbrow” iconography. Adopting artist-poet Joe Brainard as its principal focus, this project presents “Pop poetics” not as a minor, coterie movement meriting a sympathetic footnote in accounts of the postwar era’s literary history, but as a missing link that confounds and potentially unites any number of supposedly rigid critical distinctions (authenticity versus formalism, the “personal” versus the mechanical). Pop poetics matter, argues Andrew Fitch, not just to the occasional aficionado of Brainard’s I Remember, but to anybody concerned with reconstructing the dynamic aesthetic exchange between postwar art and poetry.