Brautigan's work in both poetry and prose … provides a post-modernist instance of primitivist poetics in as pure a form as one could wish and also helps to clarify some of the differences between modernism and post-modernism in general. (p. 52)

As a poet and maker of fiction, Brautigan seems to come as close to a painter like Grandma Moses as it is possible for a writer to do; though sometimes his allegorical intentions and utopian or pastoral politics suggest a greater affinity with the early nineteenth-century Quaker and primitivist painter of a long series of variations on the theme of the Peaceable Kingdom, Edward Hicks. Insofar as his prose books can be considered novels, they are a re-invention of the novel, a project carried out in seeming ignorance of the history of literature and representing a kind of childhood of fiction, personal to the point of self-indulgence, open-ended, radically picaresque. This is probably most true of Trout Fishing in America, which often gives the impression of being invented or created ex nihilo, in a kind of isolation from the entire world, past and present, of literary method and discourse. But on another level Brautigan's ahistorical naiveté is deliberate, a calculated assertion of freedom from convention or the willful and sometimes arbitrary satisfaction of a whim. "Expressing a human need," he says near the end of Trout Fishing, "I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise." And he then proceeds to fulfill the wish by giving us … "The Mayonnaise Chapter."… Thus Brautigan ends his book by introducing into its imaginative confines an artifact (whether invented or authentic makes no difference) that could never be mistaken for "literature" but that is a fully serviceable if highly oblique metaphor for his vision of pathos and continuity in American life. Brautigan's willingness to use such texts, the fact that he grants them entry into "literature," is indicative of his primitivist impulse not only to clear the ground but to widen it as well, to make it hospitable to utterances and verbal shapes and even inarticulate desires whose literary value and viability are essentially unrecognized. To this extent he goes even further than [William Carlos] Williams in the democratization of literature, in the offer of recognition and "a say," so to speak, not only to the ordinary and the familiar but to motives and impulses that just barely make their way into written form. (pp. 53-4)

It is tempting, though probably misleading, to regard Brautigan's work as a revolutionary act of sabotage directed against the institution that American literature becomes in [the final image of his short story "1/3, 1/3, 1/3"]. He wants, after all, not to destroy the institution but to throw open its gates and allow for a greater intermingling between what goes on inside them and the rest of the verbal world. In the larger field of his fiction, at any rate, the distinction between his own sophisticated writing and the primitivism of his sources and subject-matter remains clear despite the intermingling. But in his poetry we come into contact with a voice and a strategy that can usually be categorized as belonging pretty definitely to the primitivist side of the distinction. Its minimalist tendencies, along with the gentle, almost unconscious wit and innocence of its speakers, suggest that in his poetry Brautigan is viewing the world from inside a primitivist perspective as opposed to the juxtaposition and manipulation of several perspectives that take place in his fiction. Nor do his poems carry the same sorts of social and political implications to be found in his stories and novels. For the most part turned in upon themselves, they are almost narcissistic in their self-involvement and self-regard. (p. 55)

More than anything else, it is probably the flatness and the apparent artlessness of his poetry that are boring and even offensive to some of Brautigan's readers. But it is precisely these elements that constitute what is meant by a primitivist poetics (though Brautigan, admittedly, takes them to a blatant extreme). His disregard for the conventionally "poetic" is grounded in the assumption that anything more than a direct, immediate and simple response to things would be dishonest, while on another level it implies that he does not know how to write in highflown, literary language, which he distrusts anyway as a distraction, an intrusion between him and unmediated experience. But the most fundamental assumption behind this resistance to the "poetic" in Brautigan is that "poetry" does not reside in language or even in the text of the poem; it is, instead, a latent possibility in reality and can "happen" at any moment. In this sense his poems are opposed to the romanticism of the confessional mode, in which it is assumed that the poet is a special person whose perception is privileged and whose work gives voice to experience that is unique and intensely charged. For a poet like Brautigan …, poetry is whatever happens to him, a continuing, everpresent possibility, and he is, almost helplessly, its servant, rather than the other way around. In one poem he records how he has to get out of bed and put his glasses on in order to write it down, so that a good deal of his poetry amounts to a commentary on itself. Accordingly, Brautigan's poems are often reproductions of the circumstances which brought them into being…. [For] example, "April 7, 1969":

              I feel so bad today
              that I want to write a poem.
              I don't care: any poem, this poem.

Poetry of this sort works like a self-fulfilling prophecy and involves a kind of magic. It delights and surprises because it is so outrageously self-conscious. Before our eyes a desire to write transforms itself into something written. A desire to produce a poem, by virtue of a sheer act of self-recognition, becomes a poem. There can be no better dramatization of the notion that poetry is an act of recognition as well as one of craft, and in Brautigan the craft is pared down to the recognition itself. The result may be disturbingly quiescent in the sense that, given the attitudes behind such work, the writer is left helpless before experience, neither exercising control over it nor attempting to interpret it. It may be artless in fact and even trivial, but the undeniable insistence in such writing is that poetry is ultimately located in experience itself, an insistence that demotes the text to an occasion of recognition. And what is recognized is that the true ground of poetry lies beyond all texts, in the world outside the institution of literature. (pp. 56-7)