Palm Latitudes resists classification because it was my literary aim to write a “millennial” novel, to use words and blocks of words in a new way. I wanted to write a book by a woman, about women and for women readers. It fragrantly disobeys the (male) rules of a novel. The novel is composed of poems. It’s a quilt of a novel, with the fabric being poetry. I selected words for their female resonance. I wanted to feminize English. I wanted to tropicalize English I wanted to find female sounds and rhythms, a whole other geography, fragrant, lush, hot, pagan. A language indigenous to California, which has a different diversity and history and geography from Eastern United States. The color spectrum is different, the relationship to nature and god.

A feminist writer explores issues of gender, what it is to be female, to experience a female universe with female boundaries and possibilities. Of course, feminism isn’t as plausible today as it was 20 years ago. Women wanted a revolution and instead they got Ophrah Winfrey.

 Growing up in Los Angeles was a profound experience in being marginalized. LA was hardscrabble, raw, a frontier outpost. From a literary point of view, LA was a ragged renegade village where people could barely sign their names. The inhabitants were considered sub-literate. It was frustrating, being a serious artist in LA. The isolation, the hostility of the natives and the New York culture. It was also an anomaly of beauty. The raped tropics. The abnormal seductive colors. Los Angles was a gorgeous atrocity.  Los Angeles was dream talk and rumor. Coyote howl, bits of desert salt. I was a poor girl in a savage distant place and I looked to literature as a mode of legitimacy. The city was being built as I grew up. The freeways were still beanfields; there were fish in the bay. We were credible. We thought they were building the city for us. Los Angeles was a failed experiment. It used to graze sun-dazed and stupid. Now it has teeth and it’s malicious.

 Poetry is my natural state. But poetry was too formal and specialized, too rarified and other worldly, with rules I felt genetically incapable of. So, I adapted my poetry to give the illusion of prose. I wrote dialogue and interspersed it between poems, particularly in my early novels, which are written around set pieces of pre-existing poetry. Instead of publishing 40 poems as poetry, as a document only several hundred people will read, I publish 400 poems disguised as a novel that thousands read. It’s an aesthetic act of insurrection. Poetry and fiction are increasingly mutually exclusive. To be an intellectual, one used to have to know a bit of poetry. Now such knowledge is no longer expected or even tolerated. The mainstream of intellectual culture has amputated poetry from its collective repertoire. Even literary novels barely survive.

 I would like my readers to read Palm Latitudes out loud. I write incantatory prose, which is words and phrases constructed around sound and rhythm, meant to be read for the ear. If you write silently, then one idea will naturally lead you to another idea. If you write for the ear, one sound will lead to another, words chosen not for their intellectual content, but for their poetic content. Not written, but rather composed. Writing for the sound and rhythm, rather than the obvious eye coherence leads to surprises, to choices that are more unpredictable and improvisational. -- Kate Braverman, 2003.

Brave New Girls: Female Archetypes, Border Crashing, and Utopia in Kate Braverman's Palm Latitudes

ShaunAnne Tangney  
Minot State University