Where’s Nancy?: Twenty Four I Wonder’s

I wonder why no one thought of it before: The Nancy Book (Siglio Press), a collection of Joe Brainard’s oeuvre-within-an-oeuvre featuring Ernie Bush­miller’s Gioconda of the postwar funnies, produced in various media between 1963 and 1978.

I wonder if it’s worth saying right off that the Nancys are by and large less beautiful than most of Brainard’s art. Less, for instance, than the modestly ravishing pen-and-ink illustrations with which Brainard graced the books of numerous poet-friend-collaborators. (The Vermont Notebook, with John Ashbery, and The Champ, with Kenward Elmslie, are terrific examples.) Carter Ratliff calls Bushmiller’s own line “crisp but uninspired,” omitting how well it met the needs of mass newsprint reproduction. Brainard came to mimic it perfectly, when he chose.

I wonder if sustained discussion of the Nancys isn’t akin to explaining a joke. They’re so deft and likeable that calling their jibes at (mainly) sex and art history “critical” seems gravely misleading.

I wonder whether anyone needs reminding that Nancy herself was never such a raving beauty either.

I wonder how little biography we can safely get by with: Born in 1942, Joe Brainard was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was the town’s prize- and scholarship-winning art prodigy as well as, from age eight, his ­mother’s favored dress designer. With high-school poet-chums Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, he headed for New York City in 1960, where, within a couple of years, he discovered Pop and assemblage. By 1963, he had ­quietly but decisively come out as gay. Alongside his visual art, he wrote a fair amount of disarmingly un-“literary” prose, most famously the lapidary 1970 autobiography I Remember and its sequels. Increasingly uncertain about the merit of his work, he largely withdrew from exhibiting it publicly after 1976. He continued to split his time between the city and a country home in Calais, Vermont, with Elmslie until his death from AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.

I wonder if the additional facts supplied (“Joe smoked Tareytons”) in Ron Padgett’s and Ann Lauterbach’s ­lucid and affectionate essays are a help or a hindrance to an audience who didn’t take the Tulsa Sunday World growing up or eat new peas with the artist in Calais.

(I wonder this as one highly susceptible to coterie-envy: I devoured Padgett’s 2004 biography, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard, much as Padgett says that its subject devoured novels “for the pleasure of characterization.”)

I wonder why Brainard chose Nancy’s name for the subjects of two prose pieces, both from 1963, also included...