Janée J. Baugher, THE ANDREW WYETH CHRONICLES

Poet Janée J. Baugher reads from her new book The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, an imaginative narrative of the painter’s creative life, rife with both losses and pleasures. 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

While the poems in The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles can be enjoyed individually, as a whole this book reads like an autobiography of what Baugher imagined Andrew Wyeth’s creative life to be. She employs the footnote form to write a book-length narrative of art-influenced (ekphrastic) poems in which the Andrew Wyeth character 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—a white sheet drying outside on the line or sunflowers’ shadows against a house. As for her writerly process, studying the work of this particular artist was a decades-long meditative practice of deep-looking, a method by which Baugher detaches from her ego. Wyeth’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors became portals through which Baugher could explore linguistic possibilities and invent worlds beyond her immediate awareness.

WINNER OF THE DORSET PRIZE FOR POETRY

“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.” —Judge, Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent

Janée J. Baugher, the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020), has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress. She’s a longtime assistant editor at Boulevard magazine (St. Louis) and lives in Seattle where the Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-2025 CityArtist grant to complete her memoir, Suicide in the Mirror. Her third full-length poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, was selected by Shane McCrae for the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2026).

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