Double Trouble in the Roaring Twenties: Valery Oisteanu and Lynne Sachs (PRINCE)

02/18/2020

New York poets Valery Oisteanu and Lynne Sachs make distillations, sometimes with words, sometimes with images. As a collagist, Valery imbibes the detritus of visual culture, using the materials he has consumed to construct surreal, oneiric designs. As an experimental filmmaker, Lynne collects images and sounds and reshapes them into cinema poems that warp and enliven our awareness of reality. In the mid 1980s, Lynne’s father Ira Sachs met Valery and his wife Ruth in Bali, Indonesia at the beginning of their shared multi-year engagement with the island and its rich culture. Soon, Ira introduced Valery to Lynne during his visits to New York City. It was during these regular familial interactions over thirty years that Lynne and Valery discovered their shared passions for making image-based work as well as writing poems. Tonight’s Double Trouble reading at McNally Jackson marks their first public poetry convergence, as they celebrate the beginning of the Roaring Twenties!

When Lynne turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. With intro by Paolo Javier and design by Abby Goldstein.

An Evening with Tender Buttons Press

Fort Greene Store:
Tuesday, February 4, 7:30 PM
An Evening with Tender Buttons Press
Featuring Lee Ann Brown, Katy Bohinc, and Lynne Sachs


Reception to follow


Lee Ann Brown founded Tender Buttons Press in 1989, naming it after Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. The press aims to publish the best in experimental women’s writing, and the poetics of all Tender Buttons books gives rise to an extraordinary range of innovative forms and modes. To celebrate the press’s 30th birthday and the publication of the new Tender Omnibus collection, Greenlight hosts a night of reading and conversation featuring three Tender Buttons poets: Lee Ann Brown, Founder and Editrix of Tender Buttons and 2018 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow; Katy Bohinc, author of the poetry collections Scorpio and Dear Alain, among other works; and Lynne Sachs, filmmaker and author of Year by Year Poems. Each will read from their own work as well as that of other Tender Buttons poets, followed by a panel discussion on “The Life and Times of an Indie Poetry Press.”

Event date:

Tuesday, February 4, 2020 – 7:30pm

https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/event/evening-tender-buttons-press

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs reviewed by Sharon Harrigan • Cleaver Magazine

01/15/2020

by Sharon Harrigan

When Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she asked herself one simple question: How have the private, most intimate moments of her life been affected by the public world beyond? The poems she wrote in response turned into this book. One poem for each year.

Sachs is a well-known experimental filmmaker. Year by Year is her first book of poetry, and in many ways it can be appreciated as the logical extension of her career as a visual storyteller. She describes her films as combining “memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes.” Such a description might also be applied to her poems. Year by Year dips into memoir when it recounts events in her personal life. The glimpses into current events have a documentary feel. When Sachs describes moments she was present for but cannot possibly remember, such as her own birth, the book takes us into fictional territory. The hybrid form (memoir/documentary/fiction) is one experimental element. But even more innovative is the way she often presents us with two versions of the same poem. The handwritten draft and the final typeset poem face each other, resembling a book of poems in translation where the original and translated versions run in parallel.

I first read Year by Year in two sittings, focusing only the final versions of the poems. It is unusual for me to consider a poetry collection a page turner, but this book was. It propelled me through time from the poet’s birth to the birth of her daughters and beyond, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War.

On my second read, I scrutinized the handwritten drafts alongside the final versions, one poem at a time, letting them resonate individually. The experience was fascinating not only because it showed what choices the poet made to tighten each poem, but also because reading the two versions side by side created a not- quite-synched stereo effect, or perhaps something close to a superimposed image in a film.

In “1962,” for example, the final version reads: “Two baby girls brown and blonde/at home with mom and a nurse.” The draft version is less distilled, but it has its own appeal: “A plan, an American plan, two eggs any style, not the Continental breakfast, baby girls blonde and brown at home with mom and a nurse, a black woman whose name no one remembers.” In particular, the fact that no one remembers the nurse’s name, in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1960s, sets the stage for the Civil Rights events that will happen in the later poems.

In “1966,” “fields of daddodils that never drooped” becomes “Droopless daddodils.” The conversational tone shifts to a pared-down diction that sounds more childlike and more artful at the same time.

The draft version of “1978” includes “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which the final version simply calls, “a feminist book on the body/I wish I loved.” The line breaks allow us to read the sentence as a whole and as a fragment, at the same time. We infer that the narrator wished she loved the book, but also that she wished she loved the body, the female body, her own body, enough to be comfortable learning more about its sexual functions. Having the name of the book on the facing page adds to the emotional impact, because so many of us know that book well, a cultural touchpoint that reminds us of how uncomfortable it can be to attempt to claim our bodies as our own.

The first poem in the book sets the tone by introducing the concept of time—the time of day, the time of year, the time of life of the poet’s parents when they became her parents: “Born at dinner time on an August evening,/the child of a twenty-one and twenty-three-year-old” are the opening lines. The use of time adds to the cinematic quality of the poem, grounding us in an “opening shot,” instead of the abstract or fuzzy entrance to a poem that a reader might expect. .

The poem “1964” immerses us in a scene that shifts from close up to zoom, from a little girl’s room to the vast night sky. We see the magical thinking of a young child, who might believe she can reach the stars or that she can change her parents’ behavior. The poem suggests the lack of control children have in their lives and the way they cope by refocusing their attention outward. As Sachs puts it, “My mother and father are fighting on the other side of the door./I lick the window next to my bed and pretend to taste the stars.”

It is not surprising that a poetry book by a filmmaker is lush with images. Even something as visually static as a phone call becomes vivid and tangible in “1982,” when the narrator is making a transatlantic call to her brother: “His hello transforms this dirty glass box/into four dynamic movie screens.” The poem then offers us glimpses of what the narrator imagines she sees on those screens, the events she is missing by being far from home. The poems also sometimes convey abstract concepts as physical objects, such as in “1961” where the future is a crystal ball that the newborn drops from her hands. It shatters and scatters “down the hall/out the front door of the hospital/into the sweltering darkness.” The “camera” zooms in to the tiniest of hands and then pans out to the room, the building, the outdoors. We can imagine two different “cameras” filming at the same time at vastly different scales.

Natural beauty and headline-making violence appear in the same stanza, showing, with that juxtaposition, that we cannot escape from the world around us. In “1999,” for example, “In our front yard now, Columbine grows wild./With each bloom, I think of her, a mother too.” The narrator cannot even look at her Columbine flowers without thinking of the Columbine school shooter. Again, Sachs uses something visual and concrete to pan over to the homophones they might prompt in a reader and writer alike.

Similarly, in “2004,” the narrator’s daughter’s first solo ride on the subway is made to coexist with explosions in the Madrid metro by terrorists. The public and the private collide in its own kind of explosion on the page in a visual way.

The book ends with the fifty-year-old narrator looking back over her life—another visual reference. The scene is her birthday party, where she “perform[s]/split-second happiness for the camera.” The last stanza reads:

I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror
take another look at my own silent film
and listen once again to the soundtrack
I’m playing over and over.

This scene can be interpreted literally as the narrator watching a film she made. But the “film” is also a metaphor for her life, her private and public memories, and, by extension, this book. The last line is “I’m playing over and over.” As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.

Reading and Book Signing with Lynne Sachs

Thursday, Jan 09, 2020 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM

Join us for a reading and book signing with Lynne Sachs for her book of poetry, Year by Year ($19 paperback, Tender Buttons Press).

Lynne Sachs grew up in Memphis and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. This collection of poems, one for each year from 1961 to 2011, began as a half-century mark in Sachs’ life. Reflecting on history and memory, the poems themselves became the basis for her film, Tip of my Tongue.

“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys, and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.”   

—Phillip Lopate

https://www.burkesbooks.com/pages/events/33/reading-and-book-signing-with-lynne-sachs

San Francisco Public Library

General Collections, Staff Picks, Winter 2019 to 2020

https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/list/share/534134407/1549603439

These are recommended titles from the collections managed by staff in the General Collections & Humanities Center at the SFPL Main Library for Winter 2019-20.

Renowned experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. In 2011, after deciding to write one poem for each of the fifty years of her life, Sachs asked herself, “How have the private, most intimate moments of my life been affected by the public world beyond?” The graceful, diaristic poems that she went on to produce successfully distill events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail, and gentle humor. Thus in “1969” a young Sachs imagines Neil Armstrong calling on the telephone, then turning “to look at all of us (from the moon).” This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.

Four Poets Gather to….. – Court Tree

December 10, 2019 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Four Poets Gather to…..

An evening of round-robin readings with Brooklyn writers Michael Ruby, Michele Somerville, Erik Schurink, and Lynne Sachs

Tuesday, Dec. 10, 7 to 9 PM
Court Tree Gallery
371 Court St 2nd Floor (at Carroll St.) Brooklyn
Free and open to the public.

“I’ve been working hard to think about what the four of us have in common and the one thing that came to mind is that we all have children who are now young adults. I happen to know for a fact that our distinct experiences of having children, being with children, and thinking about our own childhoods have been a great resource for each of us in our work. With this in mind, I invited Michael, Michele and Erik to join me to read from their collections.” – Lynne Sachs

Michael Ruby is the author of many poetry books, including Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013), ebook Close Your Eyes (Argotist Online, 2018), ebook Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018) and The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), as well as a trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012). He also co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and works as an editor of articles about U.S. politics at The Wall Street Journal.

“If ‘experiment’ means anything when we speak of experimental poetry, Michael Ruby’s gathering (in Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices) is a moving testament to the still real possibilities of such a venture/adventure. His project here—to explore “the varieties of unconscious experience” as they come to him—is an aspect of what Gary Snyder once described as “the real work of modern man: to uncover the inner structure and actual boundaries of the mind.” That Ruby’s workings with memory, dream, and the experience of language between sleep and waking issue in a new and powerful work of poesis is something to be celebrated and experienced by all of us in turn.” – Jerome Rothenberg

Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of two books of verse, Black Irish (2009) and WISEGAL (2001), and a third, Glamourous Life, which will be published by Rain Mountain early in 2020. She was born on the island of Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn.

“Somerville takes us on a grand cosmic ride on that fine line between the divine and the sacred. Along that ride, Madigan Somerville never loses her sense of humor and never stops having fun.” — Joanna Sit

Erik Schurink creates evocative art experiences and interactive exhibits to engage people and build community. He is Director of Exhibits at Long Island Children’s Museum.

Erik Schurink’s poetry is structurally driven by literary constraints and arrangements.
His Cryptozoo (Proteotypes, 2012) is a journal in which he and eleven other writers respond to animalistic images he photographed. His work has been featured in AMP Always Electric, 13 Writhing
Machines, Upstart: Journal of English Renaissance Studies, An Oulipolooza,and others. He is a contributing artist to Abecedarium NYC and Galerie de Difformité. He co-leads the monthly Writhing Society workshops at Brooklyn’s Central library.

Lynne Sachs often includes her poetry in her films (Tip of My Tongue, House of Science, Biography of Lilith), allowing her to draw in her reader through a play with language. She began Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019) as a half-century marker in her life, one for each year from 1961 to 2011.

“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” — Phillip Lopate

http://courttree.com/event-name/four-poets-gather-to/

Year by Year: Poems by Lynne Sachs

Contributed by XYZ Type on Nov 26th, 2019

Year by Year, the first book of poetry by filmmaker Lynne Sachs, is the result of a deep collaboration with designer Abby Goldstein. Typeset in Study with headings in Freight Sans, the poems are presented adjacent to handwritten journal pages, emphasizing the relationship between content and form. The author’s eccentrically-lettered dates are isolated and collected on the book’s cover to create a cacophony of numbers that reflects the movement of time.

With one poem for each year from 1961 to 2011, the collection began as a half-century marker in Sachs’ life, reflecting on history and memory. The handwritten poems themselves became the basis for her 2017 documentary Tip of My Tongue.