Poet Andy Young addresses the crowd at the closing of the exhibit “Show and Tell: A Brief History of Photography and Text.” Photo by Kelci Baker.

On March 12th, surrounded by images with text and text about those images, I gave a gallery talk for the closing of Show & Tell: A Brief History of Photography and Text. It was actually less a talk than a reading and a musing on the relationship between text and image. Many of the poems in my recently published poetry collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart (Carnegie Mellon University Press), are ekphrastic—that is, they derive their inspiration from visual art.

For my poems, the inspiration is very often a photograph. Three of the people in the audience were actually photographers, and it was thrilling to hear how they responded to the relationship of text to image. One said that he wished that there were no wall texts at all, that people were made to confront a piece of art on its own terms. As someone who is text-obsessed and converts nearly everything into words already, I found this a provocative and frightening idea.

I read three poems, two of which are in the  new poetry collection. The two poems from the book were based on photographs by Josephine Sacabo (whose photograph graces the cover of my collection) and by Brazilian photogrpaher Sebastiaõ Salgado. The third poem I shared, “Self Portrait of a Head Replaced by a Sunrise on a Moving Train,” I wrote for the event; it was inspired by a self-portrait in the collection by Duane Michals, I shared reflections on the origin of each of the three poems and offered ways in to writing an ekphrastic poem for those who might want to try.   

–Andy Young, Creative Assembly Resident 2025