In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Janée J. Baugher

Your poem, “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Goodbye My Love 2008,” blends loss and love in a unique format. What inspired this poem from the painting of Wyeth’s? What made you choose the format of footnotes for this poem?

Wyeth was born in 1917. By the time he painted Goodbye, My Love in 2008, he had a sense that his life was in a dénouement. Ultimately, that work did become his last public painting, and it was a fitting companion image to the last poem in my book influenced by his life and art, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles.

An important craft element in poetry is form-follows-function. My years-long work with Wyeth’s images led me to trying a myriad of options for how I should best present the content. Once I had decided on the poems’ point-of-view—persona poems from the perspective of Andrew Wyeth, artist-at-work—I then conceived of the poems’ cry-of-the-occasion. Ultimately, I imagined that my footnotes could be physically attached to the bottoms of each paintings’ frame, thereby acting like footnotes in a book, in that the text offers commentary or a new layer of information.

The phrase, “The sky’s orb? Whether moon or sun is my prerogative” is such a wonderful line. It gives so much license to the creator (or to any author or artist). It appears in the middle of the poem and ties everything together. Can you talk about the importance and creation of this line in relation to the poem?

I was actually thinking more about the viewers’ license which ultimately might differ from the artist’s idea. Whether we are discussing the visual arts or creative writing, there must be space for the viewers’/readers’ imagination. Art of any type is a symbiotic experience, wherein the audience’s active participation is part of the deal.

Some of the lines of footnotes are factual, as seen by your own footnotes. What was your process in crafting this piece, in weaving your interpretation with the facts of Wyeth’s life?

I’m always open to seeing how both primary and secondary research informs my creative writing. One of the reference books that I use was by Richard Meryman, in which Andrew Wyeth is quoted as saying, “I have this hate within me,” and also “sometimes I think I’m not very artistic.” These testimonials of self-doubt from a well-established painter were surprising but also authentic and relatable. Every little tidbit I learned about Wyeth offered me kaleidoscopic portals into his paintings from which I wrote over a hundred poems. 

I love how much of your work is based in ekphrasis. What drew you to this? Where did your love of getting creative insight from imagery begin?

While in graduate school, I was interested in making poems in which the self could be subverted, as in the T. S. Eliot quote, “Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It’s this philosophy that has informed and guided my ekphrastic poetry, though in my craft book The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020), I encourage the readers to write from all angles of their personhood. Because I suffer from artist-envy, working creatively in the service of aesthetics I could call my raison d’être, but let’s not get too precious. Politically, things are very tense in this country. Because I know my propensity for depression, I must limit what ugliness comes into my life. I could write ekphrastically because the world is burning, but I choose to write because the world is beautiful.

You have a book The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, coming in 2026, seen here: TUPELO PRESS PROUDLY ANNOUNCES THE RESULTS OF THE 2023 DORSET PRIZE . What draws you to this painter?

The Wyeth paintings that I’m enamored with are not only bereft of human figures, but are ones in which the quotidian is made beautiful—a white sheet on a laundry line drying in the wind or the shadows of sunflowers against a house, for instance. For me, his work (which is subtle, of nature, and abstract) lends itself to the act of deep-looking, which is another way in which I can detach from my ego. 

What literature or other paintings influence your work? What authors do you return to?

Over the decades, I keep returning to the poetry of Jane Hirshfield. And because I have an interest in the artist’s creative process, I love rereading Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right side of the Brain. Moreover, poems that concern nature are also my favorite, and to that end, the newly released volume of the ecopoetry anthology, Attached to the Living World is my current obsession.

What are you working on now?

Since late 2021, I’ve been writing a book that treats mental health, tentatively titled “Suicide in the Mirror: A Lyric Memoir.” I am currently finalizing edits for that project, as well as working on the launch of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Tupelo Press). On a non-literary note, I recently reignited my interest in the flute and will be auditioning for a community orchestra within the year. Regarding the next poetry book, I’m beginning to draft ideas for a collection influenced by my first love, human anatomy and physiology.

Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020). She’s an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress. The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-2025 CityArtist grant. For her third poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, Baugher won Tupelo Press’s 2023 Dorset Prize (forthcoming in 2026).