Lynne Sachs

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.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

When I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1970s, I had a great aunt named Isabel. Aunt Isabel was passionate about poetry. She loved the works of writers such as Kathy Acker, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, and Marianne Moore, and expressed her admiration for the connection between word and image through her lifelong collecting of books made by artists and poets in collaboration. She had hundreds of these books and was thrilled to show her collection to me throughout my teenage years. Little did I know how affected I would be by the hours we spent together turning the pages of her books. It was during these exhilarating moments of discovery that I began to find my own artistic muse.

I’ve been making personal, experimental documentary films since 1983. I began writing the poems in this book in 2011, the year I turned fifty. It seemed like a good way to mark my first half century and a reason to return in a deep way to poetry, which had always been an integral part of my work. After deciding to write a poem for every year of my life, I asked myself a simple question: How have the private, most intimate moments of my life been affected by the public world beyond?

Once, while visiting an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, I discovered the work of Serbian conceptual and media artist Sanja Iveković. In one black and white video made over a period of fourteen years in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, she created a remarkable visual conversation between her life as a mother at home with her child and her observations on the Yugoslavian police state. In one sequence, she cuts back and forth between a tall glass of milk and a street tussle with soldiers. In another, she shifts from an infant’s eye to state TV propaganda. The effect, for me, was breathtaking. These images created a convergence of shared and distinct experiences that could only be realized by Iveković. By connecting moments in my own private and public spheres, I too could use my writing to construct precise investigations of disparate, yet parallel moments in time. In this way, I gained a better understanding of how and why I had become the person I was at age fifty.

I spent five years writing YEAR BY YEAR POEMS. At the same time, I made an eighty-minute experimental documentary, Tip of My Tongue, which used many of these poems as its skeleton. In the process of making this film, I discovered Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s novel, The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa’s narrator makes an observation: “Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us.” In this single sentence, I found an eight word distillation of my endeavor.

I dedicate YEAR BY YEAR POEMS to my parents, Diane Sachs and Ira Sachs, who gave me a box of crayons and a notebook, and opened the door.

Lynne Sachs

2019