John Brandi

John Brandi

John Brandi, Madhya Pradesh, India 2009
Born (1943-11-05) November 5, 1943
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation Poet, Travel Writer, Painter, Educator

John Brandi (born November 5, 1943, Los Angeles, California) is an American poet and artist. San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman has said of Brandi:

"He has been an open roader for much of his life and like his two great forebears, Whitman and Neruda, has named the minute particulars, the details of his sojournings … infusing them with a whole gamut of feelings— compassionate, mischievous, loving and righteous. It’s what’s made his poetry one of the solid bodies of work that’s emerged from the North American West since the ‘60s."

[1]

Life

Brandi is a native of southern California. He studied art and anthropology at California State University, Northridge, and graduated in 1965; while there, he met poets Jack Hirschman and Eric Barker, as well as singer Pete Seeger, who encouraged him towards social work. From 1966 to 1968 he lived in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer, working with Quechua-speaking farmers in their struggle for land rights. In the Andes he began publishing his poems in hand-sewn mimeograph editions, a trend that preceded the alternative press movement. After his travels in South America, he returned to the United States, protested the war in Vietnam, moved to Alaska, then to Mexico, and finally to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where he met poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder, and a key member of the San Francisco Renaissance, David Meltzer, who published Brandi's first collection of prose poems, Desde Alla. In 1971 Brandi moved to New Mexico, built a hand-hewn cabin in a remote canyon, and founded Tooth of Time Books, which published the first books of several poets who would become internationally recognized.

During his early years in southwestern United States, Brandi traveled with Japanese poet[2] Nanao Sakaki, compiled That Back Road In, and earned a living by teaching as an itinerant poet. In 1980 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He has remained a resident of New Mexico, and continues to teach as an itinerant poet, supported by numerous grants from state arts councils, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and the Just Buffalo World of Voices.

In the 1960s Brandi traveled the Americas from southern Chile to Alaska; in 1979, he traveled to India to retrace his father’s journey as an army soldier in the India-Burma Theater. He has since visited Nepal, Ladakh, Sikkim, southeast Asia, China, Cuba, and Indonesia.

He has remained a resident of New Mexico, where he continues his rural lifestyle in the northern mountains. An ardent traveler, he has sought source and renewal in the geography of Asia and the Americas, as well as dialogue and exchange with people living below the radar of the mainstream. He has been a guide and lecturer for U.S. university students studying in Mexico, Java and Bali. In 2009 he gave the keynote address for the Haiku North America conference, Ottawa, Canada. In 2010 he was invited to speak and give classes at Punjab University, India. His readings abroad have included Paris, Kyoto, Chandigarh, and in Chiapas and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Work

As a poet, Brandi owes much to the Beat tradition, and to poets as diverse as Federico García Lorca and the Japanese haiku masters. As a painter, his mixed media work, often integrating words and paint, is bright with expressionist colors, while his more subtle haiga paintings draw on Asian influences. Brandi's paintings are specifically informed, as is much of his writing, by his world journeys. He was introduced to the art of traveling by his parents, who drove him through California’s diverse landscapes, gave him a box of paints, and encouraged him to sketch and write what he saw and experienced.[3]

John Brandi’s numerous publications include poetry, travel essays, limited-edition letterpress books, hand-colored broadsides, and modern American haiku. He has lectured at the Palace of the Governors Museum, Santa Fe, at Idyllwild Arts, California, and has been a guide and lecturer for university students studying in Bali and in Mexico.

Bibliography

Poetry

Haiku and haibun

Stories

Edited

Translations

Poetry Awards

References

  1. ↑ quoted from Jack Hirschman’s preface to Visits to the City of Light (Mother’s Milk Press, 2000) as stated on the following site http://www.pilgrimsbooks.com/poetry.html#anchor721165
  2. ↑ Nanao Sakaki
  3. ↑ Santiago, Soledad (April 13–17, 2007), "Broadsided by Deja Vu", Pasatiempo, The New Mexican, archived from the original (– Scholar search) on October 13, 2007
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