Gina Evers, director of Mount Saint Mary College’s Writing Center and First-Year Experience programs, will have her poetry featured in the “Poets Respond to Art” exhibition at Arts Mid Hudson from March 21 to April 20.
The gallery is located at 96 Dutchess Turnpike, St. F, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. It can be viewed Tuesday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., or by appointment. An artists’ talk and poetry reading will take place on Sunday, April 16 at 1 p.m. To register, visit https://www.artsmidhudson.org/2023-poets-respond-to-art
The “Poets Respond to Art” show features a collection of 36 local poets and artists in a celebration of National Poetry Month. The art-inspired poems will be on view alongside the visual art.
“I’m excited to be included in this event,” noted Evers. “One of the magical things about making art is that, in the process, you create understanding: first for yourself, and then for your audience. Being able to do that collaboratively moves artmaking into a deeper way of knowing. The new experiences and understandings you create are collectively shared, and being a part of that process is exhilarating.”
Evers’ featured poem is based on an ink-on-paper drawing entitled “Grief” by Laura Montoya. The piece depicts three figures rendered in dark ink. The center figure is a young woman holding a maraca.
“While taking in Montoya’s work, I was struck by how much movement is present in a still drawing…that uses only dark ink,” Evers said.
Evers’ response piece is titled “Play a Maraca for the Dead” and uses the seguidilla poetic form. Seguidillas are seven-line poems that rely heavily on meter and sound. The style follows a repeating syllabic structure and includes assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds).
“I wanted to use the dance-like form to capture that movement I see in the visual art, while also honoring the circularity of the process of grief with the repeating syllabic pattern,” Evers explained. “I was also thinking about what a maraca sounds like while I was writing: lots of ‘s’ and soft ‘c’ sounds.”