Tribute to K. Anne Rickertsen (1956-2022) by Megan Breiseth
A Tribute by Megan Breiseth
During most of her 30 years in San Francisco, Anne lived in a small studio apartment that was a cross between an antique store and a museum, but not housekept. Art, artifacts, zippos, ancient mechanical objects, and dried pomegranates covered every surface. Her loved ones’ phone numbers lived on a chalkboard in the kitchen, but she rarely made phone calls. Her answering machine, and eventually voicemail, greeted you with the poem she’d been most recently working on. She listened to our messages lovingly but didn’t usually return them.
She also showed up. When her loved ones had crises, babies, heartbreak, crazy schemes, and adventures - you could get this beloved hermit out of her house when you needed her. And sometimes even break your way into hers when she might need you.
I first met Anne across the dining room table at a poetry workshop led by Carmen Giménez in San Francisco in 2001. She was reluctant to share her work, but smart and loving toward everybody else’s. When she eventually did share, each piece in courier font, we hadn’t heard anything like it. Each word (and space and punctuation mark) a clean hard punch.
In what seems like no time at all, Anne, fellow workshop poet Kari Bradley, and myself became a trio of crackpot collaborators and family. Together, over the next couple decades, we made collages, paintings, spells, poems, more poems, and a fair number of road trips. Anne is as much a part of my poetry as the paper and ink.
In considering a tribute to Anne, what I want to tell was how she treated others, how she treated herself, how she treated her poems. She honored deep weirdness and loved its beauty. Really saw magic. Worked in service to awe and wanted to put words to the zillion kinds of pain.
Anne was a craftsperson and worked hard at any job she took on. As a poet, she was diligent with the word, precise with its place and shape. Took herself reverently but not seriously. Spent entire nights up writing lists to find one word. Composed concrete poems on her typewriter. Wrote acrostic poems for each of her loved ones.
The poets she communed with most deeply were Anne Sexton, Anne Carson, and Emily Dickinson. She re-read all of Salinger every fall. An entire essay could be written about her love affair with Judy Garland.
Anne was an essential worker, out in the thick of the pandemic. She caught the virus early and never fully recovered. Her autopsy reports her cause of death as complications due to Covid-19… technically, it wore down her heart.
I live with stacks of bins of the collected poems and letters of K. Anne Rickertsen. The leather portfolio she brought to any encounter with any poets. The thesaurus and numerology book she gifted me as necessary tools. The best thesaurus, the semantic version that begins with “being” and “nonexistence.”
A painting her neighbor Johnny made of a woman in oil on wood, fading into or emerging out of it, sharp-featured, glamorous, the backdrop of so many evenings on her couch. A couple of poems that once hung on her bathroom wall - Kari Bradley’s “The Last Thing I Said to the Ocean” and Anne’s own “It was as if she held up a mirror.”
An acrostic poem she wrote me, my name down its margin, mailed on pink paper while I was away at school, now framed. A portrait an artist made of her, black and white, holding a rose - many artists made portraits of Anne - she was a magnet for it.
A small portion of her ashes at the foot of one of my redwoods, under a stone marked x=x. A copy of her bicep tattoo at my wrist. A painting she made of the moon.
The contents of her computer drive. The few remaining copies of her hand-assembled, hand-distributed collections of poems. She didn’t send her poems out to journals or publishers (much, if ever) but she did curate her work and share it with her people.
Anne’s Obituary
co-written with Diana J. Brodie
On June 30th, 2022, the poet K. Anne Rickertsen died unexpectedly in her home in San Francisco. Anne was deeply beloved by a constellation of individuals across the world, and most especially us queers, artists, and crackpots of all kinds. To meet her was to be drawn into her warmth, authenticity, and light.
Anne was a musician, an amateur numerologist, a thesaurus enthusiast, a forklift driver, and Green Bay Packers co-owner. She was the subject of Diana J. Brodie’s documentary “she wears cufflinks” which was featured in 11 film festivals in 4 different countries on 3 different continents.
Anne grew up on a farm in St. Paul, Nebraska, and spent her early adulthood in Mankato, Minnesota. She moved to San Francisco in 1992, connecting her passion for farming and manual labor through her work at Veritable Vegetable and as an worker-owner at Rainbow Grocery Co-op.
Anne was a long-time member of the Women’s Motorcycle Contingency, and ran the helmet truck for Dykes on Bykes for over 20 years. Anne’s three sweet rides were her Harley, a Honda 400Four, and a gorgeous red Moto Guzzi.
Anne was the author of the chapbooks “caught between / the cut / & the scar” and “Round a Circle,” which she published, designed, and assembled by hand. She wrote poetry painstakingly, word by word. She knew her poems by heart and performed them by memory with her eyes closed at readings. She lived poetry and breathed it back into the world.
She was a classy, dapper, bald, butch lesbian. She was rare and precious, brilliant, tender, a fierce believer in magic, a passionate soul. Gallant and chivalrous. A hard working badass. Anne lived her truth, loved her people deeply and generously, and left this planet beloved by too many to count. X=X
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