Dear Friends and Poets,
I arrived for my yearly visit to Ptown two nights ago with my best friend, the genius Dana Greene. The grip of heat, humidity and smoke has loosened for now, and it feels like and looks like a perfect day so, instead of getting to work right away this morning—admittedly I was foggy as well—I took Weinstein (pet dog) to the bay as the tide was coming in. I’m realizing that the West End is to me the preferable spot for a walk and a swim, so I made my way and we found Weinstein’s old friend Rabi (pronounced ‘rabbi’), a short blond hound. I’m staying on the East End at Olga’s. Olga’s dead. Her home however continues, very much as hers, I imagine; I hadn’t been here when she was alive but her collection of small paintings by local artists is still on the walls, her books, the small details, things, effects in what I once heard a friend call “the adult drawer,” and some of her clothes continue to hang in the small addition to the unit, a walk-in closet lined with foil, into which you take a step down. This isn’t morbid or goth; it somehow feels like a life force, not Olga per se but something energetically Olga, a field of Olga extended into time and space by the love of people who still feel her and are tending. It always feels impolite when I say or write that someone is dead in that way: Dad’s dead, David (brother) is dead, etc, but despite this feeling of being wrong I continue to want to use, and use, this language. Maybe it’s me attempting to materialize the dead in their deadness. For example, there is alive Sinéad O’Conner/Shuhada' Sadaqat—gone, but there is also dead Sinéad O’Conner/Shuhada' Sadaqat, which is all the ways she exists for us since she passed this week at the age of 56. It’s different, we feel her differently and are broken by the tragic loss and yet we feel her and how she propels, and we’d like the propulsion to continue.
As I was walking, I thought I heard someone call “Brucie” and I entered a reverie about the great poet Minnie Bruce Pratt: feminist, Lesbian, communist, ICON, author of the groundbreaking and gorgeous trans stories of S/HE, Crime Against Nature, We Say We Love Each Other, four other volumes of poetry and numerous political essays including the oft-taught “Identity: Skin Blood Heart.” Minnie Bruce was a Hera to me even or especially as we began to be friends in the mid 1990s, her YES to me then and since then is very much how I have yessed myself toward being a poet. Pratt, who died on July 2 at the age of 76, had a double first name, Minnie Bruce, and this second part was critical. She didn’t answer to Minnie, and in fact, her elders, her grandchildren, and Leslie called her “Brucie” (and “Grandma Brucie”). Leslie is by the way, and importantly, Leslie Feinberg, iconic author of Stone Butch Blues (1993), Transgender Warriors (1996) and numerous essays and articles including many many articles for the Workers World newspaper which Minnie Bruce continued to edit and distribute until her death. International, trans, anti-racist, working class struggle was the lived experience of daily life for both Minnie Bruce and Leslie, who was the love of Minnie Bruce’s life and her spousal partner in desire, politics, life, art for 22 years until Leslie’s early death in 2014. Their marriage was iterated in various stages of legality and politics and their own political personal ambivalences multiple times during that time. Minnie Bruce’s memoir, a first draft completed just before her sudden grave illness and death, is framed by the multiple obstacles and engagements of marrying Leslie, and it is titled Marrying Leslie. I was honored to be, am honored to be, one of the readers of the first draft of this book, a marvelous, wild and vast epic of their daily radical histories, which for Minnie Bruce was intertwined with poetry and, maybe causally, of dream. (Are all poets dreamers I find myself wondering.) One of Minnie Bruce’s intentions, in collecting a chronological story of her 22-year life with Leslie, is to attend not only to her own biography and theirs together but also to the unwritten biography of Feinberg, specifically the centrality of her commitment to working class struggle. Which was equally Minnie Bruce’s.
Coming here to Ptown with Dana has become a yearly ritual, our solo time together here, and this year we have a week to spend. It’s nice to be lucky with the weather. Amid the global experience of environmental collapse that has been evident this year and this summer I’m tempted to say that it hasn’t been an easy year for anyone but I stop myself… after all I just had a session of psychoanalysis in which I revisited my tendency towards specious and often overly elaborate efforts to implement logics of equity, of us-all-being-in-it-together-isms. No, can’t get everyone to be all in it together, although wouldn’t that be nice? But, my fantasy human drive—common care for others and earth—is a good spotlight for reverie about Minnie Bruce Pratt, whose imagined communities and ideals were being turned real in real time by her life work as a poet, activist, family member, friend. (She was an avid lover and knower of all things plant life—her physical environments are veritable characters in her works.) When I probably misheard the call of “Brucie” I had the nutty thought that I would love to have the opportunity to name a pet Brucie and somehow keep her adorable, gracious, communist, caring friendship-liness close and alive to me as energy. I’ll end this letter in the poethical space of The Poetry Project—where my friendship with Minnie Bruce began at a reading by Randall Keenan (1963-2020)—with some quotes from her last published work of poetry, Magnified, that came out from Wesleyan in 2021 and which I blurbed, amazed at her work manifesting the ongoing propulsion of her revolutionary love affair with Leslie.
