Art Chowder January | February 2022 Issue 37 | Page 31

An intimacy and also a tremendous lack of boundary . A completely integrated experience that never felt real .”
Sandy recalls that her contribution to the business was always done piece by piece . She would learn different aspects of creating the lamps , beginning with just foiling all of the glass . As she got older she got to branch out and hone her skills in soldering and cutting the pieces , but in all the years in the studio she never created a lamp from start to finish . “ This book in some ways is an effort for me to create one of those lamps out of poetry , each poem a glass square .”
“ I think in anything that I read that holds its weight , there ’ s always a story lurking behind the story .” In the same way that her personal experience existed in the foreground of disaster in “ Boats for Women ,” creating an undercurrent of her life woven into poetic analysis of survival in dire situations , a larger story lurks behind the poems of “ The Glass Studio ”. “ One of the poems takes us to the Pulse nightclub in Orlando , Florida where we ’ re there the night of the shooting . Other poems take you with me to bars in Nebraska where I was looking to meet women , and other places like the bars that my grandfather used to drink in .” The word glass appears in every poem in the book , and in many of them the glass is a drinking glass .
Sandy has yet another book in the works that pulls us back again to the themes from “ Boats for Women ,” this time in an entirely different form . For this project , she will be creating a book of poems through erasure poetry from one text , “ a book called ‘ A Night to Remember ’ from 1955 written by military historian Walter Lord .” This book was the first written on the definition history of the 1912 Titanic disaster . “ There ’ s a poem in ‘ Boats for Women ’ called ‘ A Night to Remember , You ’ re Beautiful Gone ’ that is the prototype . I randomly took two facing pages from ‘ A Night to Remember ’ and did an erasure of those two pages to create that poem and after I did that I found that process so satisfying I decided I wanted to do the whole book and see what would come of it . I just never feel like I ’ m done with the Titanic . It just permeates my every waking hour . I just can ’ t shake it for whatever reason .”
You can find more information about Sandy and her book “ Boats for Women ” on her website at www . SandraYannone . com , and anyone is free to join the “ Cultivating Voices ” community by joining the “ Cultivating Voices Live Poetry ” Facebook group .
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