Fwd: Poets in the Tang, Sunday April 19, 3 pm

[Dan Wilcox]

a great lineup -- I expect to be there --

DWx

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jay Rogoff <jro...@skidmore.edu>
Date: Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 10:19 PM
Subject: Poets in the Tang, Sunday April 19, 3 pm
To: Jay Rogoff <jro...@skidmore.edu>

Greetings, Poetry Lovers,

Here's information about the first installment of Poets in the Museum, a joint adventure of Skidmore's Tang Museum and the Laureate Poetry Series, taking place Sunday, April 19, at 3 pm. And it's free!

Hope to see you there!

Jay

POETS TO DEBUT NEW WORK INSPIRED BY TANG MUSEUM ART

 

            What happens when thirteen poets walk into an art museum? If it has a collection as rich and stimulating as Skidmore College’s Tang Museum’s, poetry can occur.

            Thirteen area published poets encountered All These Growing Things, the current show of art owned by the Tang, in Saratoga Springs, and selected a work that moved them to poetry. They will unveil their new poems on Sunday, April 19, at 3 pm, in the Tang’s upstairs Molloy Gallery, with each poet reading next to the painting, sculpture, drawing or photograph that inspired the poem. The poets and audience will travel around the gallery, moving from work to work and from poem to poem.

            The event, part of the Laureate Poetry Series, is free and open to the public. Saratoga Springs poet laureate Jay Rogoff will hose a roster of poets including Nicola Marae Allain, Peg Boyers, Joseph Bruchac, Catherine Clarke, David Graham, Mary Kathryn Jablonski, Susan Jefts, Marilyn McCabe, Lucyna Prostko, Krista Rivera, Mary Sanders Shartle, and Melora Wolff.

            The poets have written about works by such visual artists as Dorothy Dehner, Carol Hepper, Whitfield Lovell, Jeff Sonhouse, Barbara Takenaga, and an unrecorded Tibetan artist, among several others. They have chosen art ranging from realism to pure abstraction, and from the political to the psychological to the sacred.

            “Poetry about visual art,” says Rogoff, goes back as far as the ancient Greeks, who called it ‘ekphrasis.’ In most poetry we witness a mind at work. Ekphrastic poetry offers the poet’s mind engaging another artist’s imagination. A poet can enter imaginatively into the work, describe it, interpret it, or interact with it in any number of ways. The fine arts enlarge the possibilities for poetry.”

Jay Rogoff

Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate, 2026-2027

jro...@skidmore.edu

Learn about my latest book, Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods,

and my most recent poetry collection, Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems