Working New Poems Like Monoprints by Miriam Sagan

I’m so pleased to have work published in The Sunflower Collective. Here is a section, and the beautiful image chosen accompany the poetry. Click on the link to see it all.

in the ruins
of the lost city
you ask—where
did these people go?
and the dead
open one eye
surprised for just a moment
by our footsteps

Beat inspired Artwork by Divya Adusumilli

Have been working very differently of late. Last October was productive, when my daughter Isabel and I were collaborating at Wildacres in NC. Came home and plunged into prose—draft of a speculative novel, 1000 cups of coffee project, Bluebeard’s Castle material on my father. By mid-spring, I realized i had written NO poetry at all in almost six months, with the exception of haiku as part of a collaboration with my friend Michael Smith. I was stunned, and a bit scared. Well, maybe not that worried as I have many decades of trust in creative process, but surprised.
I started writing poetry in a different manner. I think of the current work as mono prints—I get one pass. The motion is very rapid, associative, and I’m hoping—lucid. Working on making the syntax authoritative even if the meaning is mysterious. Anyway, magazines seem to like them!
The eight poems or sections here are present as one work, which looks good, I think. They were written individually. There are clusters and sequences in the entire project that I can’t see yet.

Making of Two Monoprints by Isabel Winson-Sagan

The title is “I Am Body.” It was done as a palimpsest, over two poems by the artist:

“I Am Body”

I dream of having sex with the dead
Skeletal, flesh departing slowly, laughing face of bone and mirth.
He is a kind lover.
And I am a body.
I am not separate from myself.
I am not at war.
This disease is not my enemy, insidious, inside my very skin, tears me apart.
My brain screams, every second, every day, “Pain! Pain!”
I wake up screaming.
But this is MINE.
This is me.
I am not at war.
I am a body.
I will not overcome, defeat my own bones.
The dead man is kind.
He does not notice.
“It’s not normal,” they say.
“If you only work at it, you can be free”
/Protestant bullshit, Calvinist work ethic built America but it cannot make me believe in a war against myself./
I am body.
I am alive.
And my dead lover waits for me to realize
how the veil between our worlds
is so very thin.

***

“Race War”

There is a race war
In my mind.
I am in a peaceful place
Lama mountain behind
Birds cooing in the early light.
But the mountain
Is on fire.
Smoke fills
The inside of my mouth, tickling, searching.
Farmers thresh the fields
In this pastoral paradise.
The mountains burned 20 years ago
And now,
Black men are being shot
Black women are dragged from their cars and beaten
There is a race war in my mind.
The mountain is burning
Why is my body a battlefield.
No one can apologize for existing.
I never thought that this would happen again,
In my lifetime.
How do I get out?
How do I stay?
If everything is only you,
Why am I burning.

This print was also done during the residency at Herekeke.

Title from a poem by Miriam Sagan: “sober as the Devil and drunk as God.”

My Mother-in-Law Was an Abstract Expressionist

I mix the color. Ink the roller. Ink the small plastic sheet. I rub it with a rag, cardboard, my thumb, left fingers—it’s action painting in miniature!
Suddenly I’m flooded with the presence of my first mother-in-law, Abbie Winson, now deceased. She was an abstract painter, trained by Hans Hoffman. I believe she painted a few summers in Provincetown. She was a link for me with the glorious romantic lineage of the NY Abstract Expressionists. Her work was vibrant and often joyful. She herself, like so many artists, was an introvert, even shy.
Of course as my daughter Isabel’s grandmother she must have influenced Iz in many ways. Iz worked alongside Abbie in her studio from the time she was tiny. There is a lot of permission there for a girl—a grandmother who is an artist.
Apparently there is permission for me too—I just didn’t know it. If Abbie wanted to be Hoffman or Kline (and I’m not sure she did—it seems she mostly wanted to be herself) then I just want to be her. The 1950’s in Manhattan is my early childhood. I love the visuals of that time, from furniture to wallpaper. My little monoprints are a homage to that aesthetic—from here on Lama Mountain.

My First Monoprint Ever!