KATE BRAVERMAN R.I.P.

I didn't know Kate well, and in my memory of our few encounters they were contentious, which I certainly could be and so could she. But I was happy to have my work in a poetry anthology along with hers. It was called "POETRY LOVES POETRY" An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets edited by Bill Mohr and came out in the mid-1980s when we were both still living in L.A. She had lived there since she was nine and was famous for her darkly lyrical prose about the city. You can find many quotes online from her novels and interviews that are exceptional, here are two:

"They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?"

"Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend."

They sum up nicely her intentions and impact I think. And here's a lovely stanza from "Fortunate Season" one of two poems of hers in the anthology:

In a silk-lined drawer
I keep a gold bracelet
wide as a fat man's thumb.
And a ruby ring bright as Mars
that one night in August
when she hangs low and close,
almost touching the gate
like a great rare moth.

If you don't know her work, check it out, that's where writers rest when they're gone.