Poetry Pop Up with Christy Hengst and Miriam Sagan

Poetry in Public Places reported on our project:

Poetry continues to pop up in New Mexico, with a collaboration between artist Christy Hengst and poet Miriam Sagan! 😀

This porcelain-and-cobalt rendering of Miriam’s poem “I Pull the Baby” is attached to a bridge spanning the Santa Fe River. “That bridge seems to have become something of a message board,” says Christy, “with wheat pasted cartoons and earth day chalk graffiti… I thought it would be nice to add Miriam’s down to earth voice, which to me is simultaneously irreverent and reverent.”

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So, that was the first stage on installation. In a little more than 24 hours, the piece vanished! Always a hazard with informal public pieces, and often part of the process.Still–where did it go?

Christy had some afterthought musings:

Since it was Sunday and it’s unlikely that the City was out working that day to take it down, I imagine all kinds of places it could be right now.

I imagine it is hanging in a permaculture jungle oasis like the one I visited once in somebody’s backyard on the westside of Santa Fe; it is tied with twine to bamboo stalks, in amongst the ferns and fragrant fig trees and with the sound of trickling water nearby.

Or, I imagine that it is laying on a small wooden table that is pushed up against the window of a yurt, overlooking the Taos Mesa, with the late afternoon sun slanting in while somebody cooks beans.

I hope it is not in the trash, but if it is, and it gets taken to the dump, then I imagine a raccoon who is nosing around, dragging it — clinking along — to her lair and leaving it at the entrance; a shiny white chain glinting in the moonlight, of no use but somehow special.

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In any case, I was touched and delighted that Christy wanted to work with my poem. It lives on in my imagination!