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It makes perfect sense that poets be drawn to the plastic arts; whether that attraction is critical, ekphrastic or practical, the act of creating a composition from the ether of words shares many formal concerns with making something new from the relative nothingness of color, line and light. It seems that the impulse of painters toward the poetic and poets toward the painterly are indelibly intertwined.

Co-curated with Alice Quinn of the Poetry Society of America, POETS is an exhibition of artwork in a range of materials by six pre-eminent American poets. A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Star Black, Joe Brainard, Mark Strand and Marjorie Welish have created works of art that elucidate the processes and approaches to their written output. With passion and vision, focus and fortitude, their visual voices are as singular as those written voices upon which their reputations rest.