Women You Should Know: francEyE

From the Zestyverse archives

Mar 19, 2025

When I originally wrote this, it was after learning of francEyE’s death. It was not part of the Women You Should Know series. I am making it so now. In honor of her on the anniversary of her birth.

In her 80s, the poet francEyE sits on a stern wooden bench beneath a stained glass window at the Church in Ocean Park. She wears a floral blouse, a medium red turtleneck and a dark grey blue vest. Her gray hair is pulled back, her glasses are on and she looks off frame right. She also has a gray beard. — I am so sorry that I cannot remember who took this photo of francEyE at the Church of Ocean Park. It is one of my favorites.

The first time I ever got up to read anywhere was at the Midnight Special Bookstore on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The Friday night open mic there was legendary, but I didn’t know that. All I knew when my name was called and I got up was nerves. My lips shook as I read.

But there, in the very front row, nodding and smiling, was an old woman wearing glasses, with long grey hair pulled back and a beard. Yes, most definitely a grey beard. Chin hair. She had gone up to read earlier and did some nature poems. I generally hate nature poems, but I was drawn to listen to these and found in them what I would come to know as many of her best qualities as a poet, insight, humour, and connection to the spirit in everything.

francEyE was my first fan. In fact, she was just about everyone’s first fan. She could be seen at readings throughout Southern and Northern California smiling and nodding as readers took the mic. She seemed to especially encourage new readers. All I knew was that as long as she kept nodding and smiling, I was able to continue reading.

That was August 2002. Midnight Special closed, moved, and closed again. Over the years, I probably went to hundreds of readings that francEyE attended. I’ve listened to hours and hours of her poetry, and she to mine, and us to others’. There were drives to the Cobalt and Coffee Cartel, dinners, and poetry brunches, the camping gear she offered for my trip to Regionals at Big Sur.

When I started my own venue, Down Home, in November 2006, I knew that I needed francEyE to be the first feature. I made sure that she was available on that date, then I scheduled the two other must be there the first night poets – Manuel and George McDonald. As people, these three couldn’t be more different, but as poets, though stylistically diverse, they had those same three qualities – insight, humour, and connection to the spirit in everything. It meant a lot to me to have them all there, and to have francEyE on first.

Long rides to poetry venues with francEyE meant stories. Stories of those she loved, of poets past and future, of her courageous life. She didn’t jump out of planes, or even metaphorical planes. She just lived her life always and according to how she needed to live it. Once she started on that path, she seemed never to have looked back, no matter how difficult it became. She made severely unconventional choices as a woman. She chronicled everything she did, no matter how harsh. She exposed her own weaknesses and flaws. She put regrets on paper without stinting on the details. She wrote tirelessly, and spent her evenings listening and sharing.

She was. Well, those are the sad words of the day. francEyE passed today. At 87 years old. I’d known her about 7 years, and come to know a woman strong, wise, weak, full of doubt, loving, creative, stalwart, passionate, activist, contrary. A woman with a decidedly New England temperament and hippie spirit, who swore that her time in Brooklyn saved her. Who would tell you, when necessary, not to do it like she had. Who fought through bureaucracy to receive the health care she so desperately needed, and which she also, on occasion, fought. Who last time I saw her, said she’d done it all wrong. It was people, she said. People she enjoyed. She had spent too much time alone.

I’m not sure how important that statement really was in the scheme of things. She did love people. And like many of us, needed to find this out by turning in the hand of people we were dealt by birth to find the true kindred souls and our real families. She surrounded herself with a mix of family, friends, and poets who she loved very much. I don’t know how much she would have really changed. It was, after all the solitude and the writing that led her to most of her realizations. When she stopped typing, on any given day, there was a reading of people, somewhere within a few miles, waiting eagerly to see her.

In truth, I think what she was trying to do was cut down on the resistance she felt to the idea of people; not to the individuals she loved so much, not to the masses of people who suffered injustices she would fight as though they were her own battles, whether she was demonstrating for immigrants’ rights or exposing the shame of the situation in a poem.

On a trip to the Bay in 2007, I spent some time with her. We went to visit Cody’s Books, which closed several months later. I wrote the poem below when I heard that Cody's had closed; I did not realize at the time, that it would also be the last time I saw francEyE.