Patria Brown is a poet, writer, teacher, and ritualist. As her husband, Geoff Brown, remarks, “Her head is full of poems.”
She has had phenomenal luck with her family—Geoff, their daughters, Larissa, Sabina, and Mandy, as well as their beloved grandchildren, Rose, Caven, Maxwell, Jasper, and Phoebe, who have been consistently patient and supportive with her work. Patria dedicates her Collective Works with gratitude to them.
Patria remembers her grandfather reciting poetry before she could read. Instead of singing “Twinkle, Twinkle” to her, he read John Donne’s “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star.”
He allowed her to read crumbling books of his poems in the garage of his humble home in Oklahoma City.
Midwestern libraries were full of poetry books. They were her friends as she moved to thirteen homes throughout her childhood. Kansas City provided songs: jazz of the late forties, including Charlie Parker and Count Basie, alongside the slaughter houses of endless cattle.
Her mother was devoted to poetry, reading Edgar A. Guest to her, particularly, “Home.” Two years in London immersed Patria in Shakespeare. During her return to the United States, she found the work of Pearl S. Buck and realized writing poetry was to be her life.
High school in northern Virginia gave Patria years as editor for the newspaper and as a poet and short story writer for the literary magazine. At Douglass College, she was editor for the literary magazine, focusing and extending the way the poems were presented.
While studying for her Masters degree at NYU, she knew she would spend her life writing and teaching poetry. Continuing the moving she experienced as a child, she taught every kind of student wherever she landed— psychology for traumatized ones in New Jersey, language basics to soldiers in Germany who had only a fourth-grade education, and writing and poetry to English as a Second Language students in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
After moving through another thirteen homes, she and her husband found their true home—California. The beauty of the Bay Area was breathtaking. Patria worked with students from Vietnam and Laos, writing with them as well as speaking English, and teaching creative writing at UC Berkeley and Mission College. She read many manuscripts and poems from her students. She placed her poems in notebooks, wondering who would ever read them.
Silicon Valley was a strange atmosphere in which to write poems. She received an offer to write for Apple. She told her dad she had a job as a writer. He said, “But you can’t type.” She could not allow herself to leave her time teaching writing, so she taught classes to mothers who wanted to write creatively while writing books for engineers at Apple and Sun. It was there that she met her good friend, Sage Lee. They would take their coffee breaks in Sage’s office reciting poems to one another. It was at that point that she considered sending out poems to literary magazines. Sometimes they even published them. The typed poems piled up in many folders. Poems were accepted but almost never sent with funds. For instance, the Lucid Stone published “Double Kayak at Summer Solstice.”
Patria connected with women’s spirituality, finding that thirteen mountains introduced by Freyja Anderson around the Bay Area were pivotal in her work. Her first book, “Her Music Hastens on Painted Wings,” a collaboration with painter Barbara Clark, was based upon messages from the blue butterflies from San Bruno Mountain. The light of these threatened creatures filled her with joy.
Later she published another book of painting and poetry called “Under the Boardwalk.” During her teenage years, she had been attracted to the festive sleazy atmosphere of Atlantic City’s boardwalk. Shades and shapes evoked dark shadowy places in her life. Her work expressed expanded history of place through the elements— trees that died to make the board walk — wind that seasoned it— the destiny and longing of the souls that worked and played there.
Finally, Patria published a book of photography and poetry called “Garland of Sonnets,” based on thirteen places in the San Francisco Bay Area as they were seen during the Wheel of the Year. A book on Vines was written and painted, but never published.
After 25 years on the peninsula, Patria and her family left for Bonny Doon, a life in the woods of the Santa Cruz mountains Twenty years of closeness with her daughters and grandchildren heightened her poetry based on the wheel of the year, as well as seven years of teaching Poets in the Schools, and traveling around the world with Geoff.
In 2020, the pandemic rocked her world and her poems— the CZU fires and the bad air changed everything. She felt she had chosen a new life. The Presidio in San Francisco was her home for about a year and a half. Incredible trees, the Pacific Ocean, the flowers, the hikes— all fed the poems. Patria and Geoff moved to a three-unit home with family members in the Duboce Triangle. Her poems grew day by day.
The idea for Collective Works is a project like none other. In the time of San Francisco, Patria had two major surgeries and discovered she has a rare illness— Primary Progressive Aphasia. Her words were disappearing. With the incredible encouragement, thoughtfulness, and knowledge of two dear friends, Leslie Robertson and Virginia Gelczis, she is presenting her collected works in two ways: a website and a printed book of her poems.