John Brandi - Life

Life

John 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 toward 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. He met Beat Generation poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and a key member of the San Francisco Renaissance, David Meltzer, who published his 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 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 the Indonesian archipelago.