Julia Vinograd, the bubble lady

 

Sometime before 2018 I bought a lot online and one of the books was this one by an author I had never heard of before. Then in March 2018 my family went to SF for a family vacation and while in the city I made a point of visiting The Beat Museum and City Lights Bookstore. At The Beat Museum I found a better, earlier printing of this book and bought it. 

Then I started to do some research on this poet. The bubble lady. A Berkeley, California mainstay. A poet who lived off her annual - and I do mean annual book sales. She produced a book a year and lived off the sales of her books that she hawkishly did as the street poet she was. 

As amazed as I was at her output, I began to look for and find copies of her chapbooks. THEY interested me in ways that her later books didn't. The ones produced by Zeitgeist Press didn't have the same zing (for me) as her earlier ones did. But, the later ones did provide her with a steadier income which, as a street poet, is what she needed most. 

Sadly, later the same year that I happened across her book at The Beat Museum, she past away. 

I continued to seek out and get as many of her chapbooks as I could find before the prices - well, they began to get ridiculous. 

Julia's legacy truly began after her passing. A volume of her collected work appeared,A Symphony for Broken Instruments: Selected and Unpublished Poems by Julia Vinograd was published in 2019 (haven't gotten it yet), a documentary has been made of her life. She has a lifetime of friends and admirers who are not willing to forget her anytime soon. Nor should they. She made some astute observations about culture and life that remind me of early Frank Zappa. Darn near painful at times.