Year By Year Poems - Softcover

Sachs, Lynne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0927920204 ISBN 13: 9780927920209

Publisher: Tender Buttons Press, 2019

Synopsis

When filmmaker Lynne Sachs 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. In Year by Year Poems, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems.

About this title

About the Author

Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid form and combines memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy, and Germany sites affected by international war where she looked at the space between a community s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. Lynne was first exposed to poetry by her great aunt as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. Soon she was frequenting workshops at the local library and getting a chance to learn from poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ethridge Knight. As an active member of Brown University's undergraduate poetry community, she shared her early poems with fellow student and poet Stacy Doris. Lynne later discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneeman, and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Lynne has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women s Film Festival have presented retrospectives of her work. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with filmmaker Mark Street. They have two daughters, Maya Street-Sachs and Noa Street-Sachs.

Year By Year Poems is her first book of poetry.

Review

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, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre

The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year Poems distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life. --Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady

In Year by Year Poems, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate. --Michael Collier, author of The Ledge and Dark Wild Realm

Edition details

• Publisher: Tender Buttons Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0927920204
• ISBN 13: 9780927920209
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64