Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2022SYR07
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
Touch my Loft's Brick Wall
poster information
Description
Touch my loft's brick wall,
Hear the machines rumbling,
Feel our history.
The building where I have my loft used to be the Standard Shipping Co. of Oswego, where 425 employees made four million pounds of yarn a year for factories around the world.
When I touch my brick wall, pass by the giant pulley in our lobby, or see a worker's name, “Lori”, on a beam in my kitchen, history comes alive.
The yarn made here is a literal thread linking generations from those 19th-century workers to us. I hope my poem evokes the spirit of pride in our historic architecture and the need to preserve it as a tactile link to our history.
For this illustration, I enjoyed contrasting a poem filled with sensory images with the cold metal of technological progress. I liked the idea of overly sophisticated snowplows texting poetry to each other. Couldn't they just beam the messages directly? Will A.I. goof off as much as us humans? Do machines have an artistic soul somewhere in all that binary code?
Regardless, it was fun to juxtapose the future with the past—both, in large part imagined. Presently, however, factories are being converted into living spaces and literature is being consumed via screens; hand-inked drawings colored in Photoshop.
Syracusan elements include the orange/blue of the sunset/sunrise and the definitively regional mounds of wintery precipitation.