Frances Dean Smith, a Santa Monica, Calif., poet known as FrancEyE who was inspired by Charles Bukowski, lived with him and had a child with him in the 1960s, has died. She was 87.

Ms. Smith, who had been living in a nursing home in San Rafael, Calif., died June 2 at a hospital in nearby Greenbrae of complications from a broken hip, her daughter, Marina Bukowski Zavala, said.

A singular character affectionately called the Bearded Witch of Ocean Park -- or, as Mr. Bukowski fondly referred to her in one poem, Old Snaggle-Tooth -- Ms. Smith had lived in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica for decades.

Her work under the pen name FrancEyE was published in poetry journals and gathered in the collections "Snaggletooth in Ocean Park" (Sacred Beverage Press, 1996), "Amber Spider" (Pearl, 2004), "Grandma Stories" (Conflux Press, 2008) and "Call" (Rose of Sharon Press, 2008).

John Harris, who co-founded with the late Joseph Hansen the long-running Wednesday night poetry workshop at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, Calif., and ran the Papa Bach bookstore, described Ms. Smith's work as "down to earth and emotional without being at all sentimental."

"She was a very prolific writer. My God, she wrote a lot!" he said in an interview last week.

Although Ms. Smith had been writing poetry in fits and starts nearly all her life, she arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1960s determined to reinvent herself, leaving behind the man she had divorced and the four daughters they had produced during an unhappy marriage.

At 40, living with her mother in Garden Grove, Calif., she wrote to Mr. Bukowski, the writer who was making a name for himself with rambunctious, gritty works describing life on the urban edge. They met in 1963 and struck up a relationship, and Ms. Smith moved in with him. Their daughter was born a year later, and Ms. Smith moved out three years after that, seeking what she called "a calmer environment" to raise her child.

But Ms. Smith acknowledged Mr. Bukowski's influence on her work, saying later that he gave her the courage to devote her life and her energies to poetry.

She attended workshops at the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles and the Bridge bookstore in Hollywood and began churning out poems.

More than 90 of Ms. Smith's poems from the mid-1960s Unitarian workshop -- along with nearly 70 of Mr. Bukowski's -- were discovered in 1994, not long after Mr. Bukowski died of leukemia, in a gold-painted metal file box that had been left on a trash heap at a curb in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, west of downtown.

An evaluator from the auction house Butterfield & Butterfield called Ms. Smith's poems from the box "an intimate look into their sometimes tumultuous relationship." Most of them were signed Frances Bukowski or fdb, for Frances Dean Bukowski. Later a friend said the name Frances sounded like a plural, so they toyed with a nickname, and Ms. Smith latched onto FrancEyE.

By 1970, she had moved to Santa Monica with her youngest daughter. She worked at a string of unsatisfying day jobs, often struggling to make ends meet but, as she wrote a few years ago, "I was finally getting the feeling that I know who I am."

Frances Elizabeth Dean was born March 19, 1922, in San Rafael. Her father died when she was a child, and his family took his widow and two daughters into their home in Lexington, Mass. She became interested in poetry and as a teenager had poems published in Scholastic magazine and the influential Saturday Review of Literature. She attended Smith College for two years but left at the onset of World War II to join the Women's Army Corps, based in the Washington, D.C., area.