Robert Herrick: Her Legs

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Joe Brainard: cover for Slice, from Tom Clark's Once mimeo series, 1965

Fain would I kiss my Julia's dainty Leg,

Which is as white and hair-less as an egge.

Robert Herrick: Her Legs, from Hesperides, 1648

This post gratefully remembers two longtime friends. The mimeograph stencil drawing at the top is one of many wonderful works generously donated to grace divers early and doubtless unworthy TC magazines and books (The Sand Burg, Stones, Air, Neil Young, et al.) by the late great artist Joe Brainard. Joe was a dear friend and remains a hero in art for me. Robert Herrick, a fine-work goldsmith's son, has been a hero in poetry for me, lo these many and sundry epochs. I could never wish to touch the hem of Robin Herrick's garment in the art, yet with great pleasure from afar have long been buoyed by its aethereal -- to borrow the term Herrick coined out of need to describe the flow of Julia's clothing -- liquefaction. Joe Brainard and Robert Herrick, in fact, have sometimes seemed to me to possess certain similarities as artists. Both were self-effacing virtuosi of the art of the clear line and the nonjudgmental embrace of an evanescent and endlessly varying, wondrous world of appearances, as though that world were indeed all that is. Both convey for me something of a sense of what another cabinet-maker genius in this same vein, Joseph Cornell, once called in a diary note "the 'all-over' feeling that makes of the incidental a never ceasing wonder and spectacle of the spiritual".