After an often fifty years in service to the word, and a volatile and unforgiving writing career, Kate Braverman died in October 2019 in relative obscurity. She was 70. That she left little behind was not really of surprise.
“I don’t keep journals,” she said in 2005. “I write poems.
I’m working on a book about her life, my life, and trying to archive / memorialize women on the margins—both Braverman and my Arab-Jewish immigrant family. I want to hear from you!
I love hearing stories of all kinds—tender, difficult, beautiful, sinister—but particularly ones you might not find in a traditional biography.
Tell me about the time she wrote “YAWN” across your short story in red pen; how you felt the first time you read “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta;” what about that reading in Riverside you’ll never forget—for the better or the worse? Tell me about working for her mother in the early eighties; that line from Wonders of the West you still remember, thirty years later.
Perhaps the least reliable narrator of her own life, Braverman hardly ever offered consistent biographical information. In her 1986 master’s thesis, she writes: “I lied to everyone. // I did it for the poem.” I think this sentiment of deception in service to the word is one of her life’s greatest truths. For the better or the worse.
Looking to Audre Lorde’s “biomythography”—a marriage history, biography, and myth—I want to allow Braverman something she was often not granted in the literary world: the ability to exist not in spite of, but alongside, her contradictions and life built on myth and syllable.
Best known for Lithium for Medea and “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” for which she won an O Henry in 1994, Braverman died tragically under-celebrated. While I hope to see Braverman’s papers preserved in a special collections archive one day, I’m interested in asking questions that fall outside a traditional artist’s archive. How can the poem function as an archive? How can the body function as an archive?
When you learn someone’s history in reverse, the way I’ve learned Braveramn’s, the way I’m learning my immigrant family’s, everything becomes memorial, shattered with a tender urgency. But Braverman always worked with this urgency, this fire—"without a net / without a rope”—as she put it, in a poem called, yes, “Living Posthumously.”
“I have no other reason to write than to change the world,” she once said. “A book is to incite, a book is alter perception and policy, and to write a book for anything less than that is an exercise in vanity, in futility.”
Photo by Rod Bradley
For me, it started with Lithium for Medea. I read the novel, unknowingly, a month after Braverman died while trying to grapple with my own lineage. The protagonist, Rose, is twenty-seven, trying to learn her fraught family history through collusion, chance, and cycles within a series of letters with her institutionalized cousin. All the while, she’s spiraling deeper and deeper into the throws of addiction, while her nuclear family (and Los Angeles) falls through her hands like sand. “Hard evidence had nothing to do with my life,” Rose eventually concludes, which felt truer to my life (and Braverman’s) than anything I’d ever encountered in literature or critical theory. This sentiment continues to resonate, and her work continues to draw me in.
Maybe it is easier for me to love Kate Braverman because we did not know one another. Her blows did not reach me. After nearly five years of research, I am less sure than ever I will ever know her, that it is possible to know her.
But of this, I am more sure than ever: I believe in the sum of her sentences and vision and devotion, as flawed and destructive as parts may be.
Want to hear more about my project?