Description
An ekphrastic experiment in imaginative biography and personal detachment.
The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles presents an imaginative narrative of the painter's creative life, rife with both losses and pleasures. Janee J. Baugher employs the footnote form to write a book-length narrative of ekphrastic poetry in which the character of Andrew Wyeth chronicles his internal musings. The sixty-three Wyeth paintings that influenced these poems (dated 1938 through 2008) are the ones in which Baugher delighted in how the quotidian is made tender, like a white sheet drying outside on the line or sunflowers' shadows against a house.
Studying the work of this particular artist was a decades-long meditative practice of deep looking, a method by which the author detaches from her ego. Wyeth's paintings, drawings, and watercolors became portals through which she could imagine worlds beyond her immediate awareness and in which she could explore linguistic possibilities.
About the Author
Janee J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, as well as the full-length poetry collections, The Body's Physics and Cooerdinates of Yes. In 2008, she held a two-year post as a Humanities Washington Inquiring Minds Speaker, in which she lectured across Washington State on writers and visual artists of the Lost Generation. Her poetry has been adapted for the stage and set to music at the University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music, Contemporary Dance Theatre (Ohio), Interlochen Center for the Arts, Dance Now! Ensemble (Florida), Otterbein University, and the University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Educated at Boston University and Eastern Washington University, Baugher has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress and on Seattle Channel TV. Recently, she was a judge for the Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize (Fotogenia Festival, Mexico City). She's a longtime assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and lives in Seattle, where the Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-25 CityArtist grant.
Reviews
"The first two poems of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles so excited me that I had to stop reading, stand up and leave the room, and cross a few items off my daily list of things to do before I could return to the manuscript-I knew I wouldn't be able to judge the manuscript fairly if I just rode that initial buzz to the end. But as I walked down the hall, and then down the stairs, I was thinking about those poems, and in particular about the form in which the poet had chosen to write them-each poem is a series of numbered notes, some lineated, some written like prose, each note implicitly guiding the reader to more information about a poem's titular painting. The notes brilliantly stitch the act of composition to the page while also holding the poems open-the best lyric poems, after all, are finally irresolvable; they cannot be finished, closed. Via the notes, one sees through the paintings to which they refer, and imagines oneself in the position of Andrew Wyeth himself, a step away from the painting he has just made, or is making, so that one traces the poet's ekphrastic experience from behind the painting, as it were, rather than in front of it. What a strange, impossible effect! But in The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles it is achieved again and again. And it's an effect I couldn't, it turns out, walk away from, and having done the things I had stood up to do, I climbed the stairs, walked back to my desk, and sat down to The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles again, still buzzing, held open." * Dorset Prize Judge, Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent *
Book Information
ISBN 9781961209534
Author Janee Baugher
Format Paperback
Page Count 76
Imprint Tupelo Press, Incorporated
Publisher Tupelo Press, Incorporated
Weight(grams) 200g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 10mm
The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles presents an imaginative narrative of the painter's creative life, rife with both losses and pleasures. Janee J. Baugher employs the footnote form to write a book-length narrative of ekphrastic poetry in which the character of Andrew Wyeth chronicles his internal musings. The sixty-three Wyeth paintings that influenced these poems (dated 1938 through 2008) are the ones in which Baugher delighted in how the quotidian is made tender, like a white sheet drying outside on the line or sunflowers' shadows against a house.
Studying the work of this particular artist was a decades-long meditative practice of deep looking, a method by which the author detaches from her ego. Wyeth's paintings, drawings, and watercolors became portals through which she could imagine worlds beyond her immediate awareness and in which she could explore linguistic possibilities.
About the Author
Janee J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, as well as the full-length poetry collections, The Body's Physics and Cooerdinates of Yes. In 2008, she held a two-year post as a Humanities Washington Inquiring Minds Speaker, in which she lectured across Washington State on writers and visual artists of the Lost Generation. Her poetry has been adapted for the stage and set to music at the University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music, Contemporary Dance Theatre (Ohio), Interlochen Center for the Arts, Dance Now! Ensemble (Florida), Otterbein University, and the University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Educated at Boston University and Eastern Washington University, Baugher has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress and on Seattle Channel TV. Recently, she was a judge for the Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize (Fotogenia Festival, Mexico City). She's a longtime assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and lives in Seattle, where the Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-25 CityArtist grant.
Reviews
"The first two poems of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles so excited me that I had to stop reading, stand up and leave the room, and cross a few items off my daily list of things to do before I could return to the manuscript-I knew I wouldn't be able to judge the manuscript fairly if I just rode that initial buzz to the end. But as I walked down the hall, and then down the stairs, I was thinking about those poems, and in particular about the form in which the poet had chosen to write them-each poem is a series of numbered notes, some lineated, some written like prose, each note implicitly guiding the reader to more information about a poem's titular painting. The notes brilliantly stitch the act of composition to the page while also holding the poems open-the best lyric poems, after all, are finally irresolvable; they cannot be finished, closed. Via the notes, one sees through the paintings to which they refer, and imagines oneself in the position of Andrew Wyeth himself, a step away from the painting he has just made, or is making, so that one traces the poet's ekphrastic experience from behind the painting, as it were, rather than in front of it. What a strange, impossible effect! But in The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles it is achieved again and again. And it's an effect I couldn't, it turns out, walk away from, and having done the things I had stood up to do, I climbed the stairs, walked back to my desk, and sat down to The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles again, still buzzing, held open." * Dorset Prize Judge, Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent *
Book Information
ISBN 9781961209534
Author Janee Baugher
Format Paperback
Page Count 76
Imprint Tupelo Press, Incorporated
Publisher Tupelo Press, Incorporated
Weight(grams) 200g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 10mm
