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Postcard from August
60 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1990
2 people want to read
About the author
Kate Braverman
33 books84 followersKate Braverman (born 1950) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
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October 31, 2022
First, just to be clear, this is not a book by Janet Gray, but is, instead, a 75-page poem by Kate Braverman, published not by Illumination but by Illuminati with a cover painting by Jan Zaremba [see image here: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/5...].
Okay. That's said.
In the 19th stanza we read of a "pastel simultaneity". What might that mean? What did Walter de la Mare say, that "every poem, of course, to its last syllable is its meaning". We must read to the last syllable in order to understand those two words and their place in the overall meaning of the poem.
So, so many questions to ask the poet. I’ll begin here: Is it, to its last syllable, a conversation with the male body poetic? And we can play with that question. Flesh it out to include the male mind poetic, the male soul poetic, the male language poetic. Can we exclude from the body poetic the body politic? How do places (Sonoma, Bodega Bay, Molera Beach, Poipo, Lihue, Hollywood, Los Angeles), their contrasts and contradictions, their colors and their sunsets feed and fuel the fires of language? Does a myth ever end?
Okay. That's said.
In the 19th stanza we read of a "pastel simultaneity". What might that mean? What did Walter de la Mare say, that "every poem, of course, to its last syllable is its meaning". We must read to the last syllable in order to understand those two words and their place in the overall meaning of the poem.
So, so many questions to ask the poet. I’ll begin here: Is it, to its last syllable, a conversation with the male body poetic? And we can play with that question. Flesh it out to include the male mind poetic, the male soul poetic, the male language poetic. Can we exclude from the body poetic the body politic? How do places (Sonoma, Bodega Bay, Molera Beach, Poipo, Lihue, Hollywood, Los Angeles), their contrasts and contradictions, their colors and their sunsets feed and fuel the fires of language? Does a myth ever end?
Displaying 1 of 1 review