Poetry as ‘urgent' VR? Meet Saratoga’s new Poet Laureate.
Jay Rogoff is bringing a fresh vision to the role, with a nod to history and plans for a busy slate of public events.
This exciting Positively Saratoga news is brought to you by our friends at Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY — Saratoga’s first-ever Poet Laureate — the great Joseph Bruchac — finishes his inaugural two-year term in January, and his successor has just been named. Jay Rogoff brings years of teaching experience and a complementary sensibility — where Bruchac’s work has long been anchored in nature, Rogoff has turned to inspirations such as baseball, immigration and classical ballet. “Joe is a deeply spiritual poet of the natural world,” Rogoff says. “I grew up in New York City, and my work tends more to be of the human-made world.”
Rogoff — whose wife, Penny Jolly is a renowned art historian — retired from Skidmore in 2018 after an incredible career teaching diverse literature and writing courses (think modern poetry, Shakespeare and film adaptation). He says he misses his college students — although in his new role, he’ll soon be working with new ones of all ages.
“Poetry is an urgent kind of virtual reality,” he says. “It puts us directly into the mind of another person through creating the impression that the human being on the page is speaking directly to us.”
The Dispatch: Tell me about your own writing.
Jay Rogoff: My first published book, The Cutoff, is set in the world of minor league baseball. Other books, or sections of books, have dealt with my family’s immigrant experience, dance as both art and metaphor, the relationship between love and mortality, and even, in a book-length sequence, Paris in 1870, the year of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the ballet Coppélia. I am also extremely interested in poetic form, and a good deal of my work attempts to negotiate between form and looser rhythms.
TD: Tell me about your origin story with poetry and how you fell in love with it.
JR: I wrote my first poem at 5, soon after my father first let me play around with his typewriter (a sturdy Smith Corona portable, with a rough, brown metal case that I loved). It was a rhyming narrative called “The Last of the Gacks”—my childish imitation of Dr. Seuss. I got serious about poetry, ironically, at the Bronx High School of Science, where my English teacher, Mr. Levy, helped instill a love of it and had us all write it. In addition to the usual classics, he introduced us to Sylvia Plath (this was only a few years after her death and the publication of Ariel), and I was knocked out by what poetry could do, the powerful emotional impact it could have.
TD: What can you share about the sorts of programs you’d like to bring in during your two years?
JR: Since the 250th anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence and the Battles of Saratoga will fall during my term, I’d love to get young people thinking about the themes of freedom and of “turning points” —since the Saratoga conflicts are often called the turning point of the American Revolution — as topics for poetry.
I will give a handful of readings throughout my term, and I hope I can find some funding for other Saratoga area poets to join in them. I’d like to institute a Favorite Poem reading during April, National Poetry Month, where people can come read a poem that has special significance for them. Several area poets are skilled translators, and I’m thinking about a presentation called Found in Translation, where they can discuss the process of translating poetry from another language and share some of their work. And in addition to conducting poetry workshops, I’m toying with holding a series of Poetry Repair Shops, where I would make myself available for people to come show me a draft of a poem and see if I can help them think of ways of improving it.
