My Mentor, My Muse from Alta - by Janet Fitch 

Remembering Kate Braverman on the occasion of Squandering the Blue being reissued in July.

Squandering the Blue, Kate's first short story collection, will be released as part of Doubleday's new reissue series, Outsider Editions, devoted to bringing renewed attention to overlooked works in the literary canon.  

SPRING MONOLOGUE 

I want to tell you everything.

I drank poison.

I deserted my son.

I did it for love.

I tried to drink god.

I opened my heart and found

only the knife and cold communion

of the mystery in passage.

O, the myriad clutter of my mistakes.

My contrived ruin and greed

for the ineffable, as if that equilibrium

of crystal and flower petals were bankable,

were a flame I could eat.

And this is a spell to control madness.

Breathe deep.

Repeat this.

I will survive.

I must.

To hear voices is not enough.

They must be orchestrated, taught technique.

It was not men or women I loved

but the manic pulse of insanity.

I trusted it, thought it permanent

like a congenital defect

or a chemical reaction

of moonlight and a certain type of skin.

But it betrayed me, found someone

younger who died better

and with more style.

Hang on.

I am absolutely certain.

I lived to tell you this and only this.

Let your womanhood emerge.

Feel it beating, breathing.

It could rise from your shoulders

like feathers or straw.

Trust it.

Listen.

Save yourself.

The bruised dissolves as it should,

used up, exposed as obsolete,

a subspecies, inarticulate.

You shed it easily.

This is the moment of divinity

and grace of which you have dreamed.

This is the cradle, intact

in corridors without fraudulence

or the deliberately deformed.

Not blood words but something else,

more a flute than a drum

but equal in power,

still able to haunt, kill and transform.

Surrender.

Merge with this geometric square of April.

Make sacred what you touch.

Not history or events but the details.

Yellow canna beside a lawn.

Dusk light across a redwood porch.

Your integrity is defined solely

by what you can hold,

can press with your lips.

There is more immortality in one kiss

than in the stones of pyramids.

Defend no borders but those of sensibility.

Be one woman truly, wholly and you

will be all women.

Tend one garden and you will birth worlds. 

Read the latest essay by Leah Mensch 

DIGRESSIONS ON GETTING TO HEAVEN, MEMORIAL, AND ASKING YOUR FRIEND FOR MONEY SO YOU CAN SEE BOB DYLAN PLAY IN SAN FRANCISCO: Leah Mensch on “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”

The Braverman Archive is seeking help with photos of the poetry pergola in Grand Hope Park which features a quote by Kate Braverman. We do not have any images of this and would like to include here. 

Grand Hope Park is in Downtown LA. If anyone can share photos, credit will be give and we will be forever grateful.  See the About page for contact. Thanks!

Kate's first book of poems Milk Run published January 1, 1977 by Momentum Press turned 50 this year. 

Read: A Poet Recalls Her Youth

"I was writing my first poetry, my first of what would be the Milk Run poems. I read “Cobalt Blue” and everybody stood up and cheered. They didn’t just applaud enthusiastically. It was utterly kinetic. I could feel the room change temperature and I could feel trees in forests on other planets catch on fire.....That night at Beyond Baroque was my christening. Every one was clapping, they were cheering, and I felt my whole life was just beginning." - Kate Braverman 2008

Squandering the Blue back in print from Penguin Random House. 

From the publisher:
The debut story collection from Los Angeles writer Kate Braverman assembles a vivid patchwork of interconnected narratives set in Southern California. Through brief, often haunting snapshots of women’s lives, Braverman presents portraits of individuals and communities entangled in cycles of longing and substance dependency—with affection and addiction often being destructively braided together.

“Falling in October” is a spoof of the art communities as well as a feminist post-nuclear story; in “Points of Decision,” a troubled woman tries to free herself of an abusive relationship; and in the highly-anthologized “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” a recovering alcoholic navigates the challenges of motherhood and new sobriety while developing a risky relationship with an enigmatic stranger.

Squandering the Blue sees Braverman explore an underlying concern with articulation—how individuals interpret, label, or suppress experience while caught in the shadow of the potential for a better life.