Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2007SYR15
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Past a Sagging Gate
poster information
Description
Past a sagging gate
Of stars, the city takes long
sips of the cool moon
I teach English and Creative Writing at Jamesville-DeWitt High School, and I live in Baldwinsville. So every morning, I commute through the city. And there's one point in the drive east on I-690 when Onondaga Lake is on my left, the city lights are across the horizon in front of me, and the road cuts through the middle of the lights. Especially in late fall and winter, when it's dark, that point seems to be a gate to a jeweled city.
Because I find a rich poetic subject in the relationship of city to nature, my imagination connected the lake to the moon, and I imagined that the city and the moon have a kind of relationship where they take refreshment from each other. The image for the poem came into my head all at once: the lake, the moon, the lights, the stars, the city.
What was hard was, I tried to illustrate the city at night, but when I took my reference pictures, it was daylight. I couldn't take good quality pictures at night, because it's dark. So I had to go in the day, take pictures, then go back at night to see what the streetlights were doing. I couldn't follow the exact photos. I had to figure it out.
I don't go downtown much, so I just picked one of the more popular streets. I thought it would be busy. But when I went, around 10 p.m., it was very, very quiet. I would not say cold and desolate, just very calm.
I like that the piece is kind of abstract. The moon is obviously bigger than it's supposed to be. It's realistic, but it isn't. So maybe it makes people think a little more.