David L. Ulin remembers I Remember

Over at the LA Times" Jacket Copy" blog, book critic David L. Ulin spotlights Joe Brainard's prose poem/memoir/singular masterpiece I Remember:

The idea behind "I Remember" is as profound as it is simple: to reconstruct the past as a series of short, loosely connected paragraphs, each one beginning with the phrase "I remember." The effect is that of a kind of pillow book, a collection of diaristic aphorisms that together add up to a life.

"I remember bunk beds," Brainard tells us; "I remember rick-rack earrings." But he also remembers what it was like to come of age in the 1950s and early 1960s (he was born in 1941) as a gay man, an artist stuck in a provincial city (Tulsa, Okla.), and what it meant when he finally got out. In that sense, the particularity of his "I remembers" can't help but blur into the universal, speaking for every one of us who ever felt misunderstood or out of place, who ever tried to piece together a vision of the world and how it operates from the fragments of experience and perception that make up our memories.