Hey, how’s your 401(k) doing, presuming you’ve got one? Has your nest egg tanked, or are you reluctant even to take a peek at it? With recession looming, it may be instructive right now to give some thought to what philosophies and activities helped people survive harsh economic times in the past. One might take some comfort in the thought that the president’s tariffs may have inadvertently given the biggest boost in years to the sustainability movement: When the prices of foreign-made goods skyrockets, the traditional New England advisory to “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” suddenly acquires fresh appeal.
But what to do for fun, when you’re faced with canceling cable TV subscriptions just to economize? It’s no coincidence that the Great Depression ushered in the Golden Age of Hollywood, since movie tickets were a relatively cheap form of entertainment and people felt the need for lightweight diversions from their troubles. Written for a stage musical in 1927, the song “The Best Things in Life Are Free” became a popular theme of the Depression, and resurfaced again in pop culture when folks were enduring rationing during World War II. Considering how usage of free resources such as food pantries and libraries goes up whenever the economy takes a dive, maybe “The free things in life are best” hits closer to the mark.
So, maybe it’s a good time to think about how to keep our minds off all the bad stuff that’s happening in the world without spending much money. If it’s a nice day, you can take a walk someplace with a nice view. If you’ve got a teetering pile of to-be-read books or an overflowing basket of clothes that need mending, you can start catching up. If your church has a choir, you can join in and get high on harmonics. It might not be too late to get a plot in a community garden and grow some of your own food this summer.
Or, here’s a thought: What about rediscovering poetry? Remember that day in high school when you read an assigned poem that really caught your ear, whose message resonated for you personally? If you’re like most people, you probably stopped reading poetry after college — not because it wasn’t enjoyable, but because it wasn’t under your nose all the time. Or maybe you never got into it at all, because you thought poetry was something meant for the intellectual elite, which you thought didn’t include the likes of you. Well, Saugerties photographer and gallerist Robert Langdon has a message for you: “Poetry is for everyone.” And it’s accessible to all, via bookstores, libraries and public readings.
About six years ago, Langdon, then-owner of Emerge Gallery, launched the Saugerties Window Poems project, designed to boost locals’ awareness of the rich motherlode of poets living and working in their own community. He reached out to downtown merchants, seeking public places to post poems during April — National Poetry Month — and to poets he knew, asking them to submit samples of their work. Plenty of people wanted to participate, and it became an annual tradition. Suzanne Bennett, director of ShoutOut Saugerties, became the primary sponsor after Emerge shut its doors in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
Together Bennett and Langdon began to organize additional poetry-related events each April, including one public reading of the featured poems by their authors. This year, the Poems in the Windows live reading will take place on Sunday, April 27 from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Pig Bar and Grill. Another reading spotlighting three prominent Saugerties poets, Tina Barry, Mikhail Horowitz and Guy Reed, will be hosted by Ohana Café from 3 to 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 24. Admission to both events is free.
There’s an exciting new element to the 2025 Window Poems project: the introduction of a visual arts component, courtesy of artist Joanne Pagano Weber. Most of the storefronts that are posting a poem this year have also hung one or more life-size cutout portraits of people from Saugerties. “I want this to encourage awareness that this is Poetry Month,” says Pagano Weber. “My hope is that they’ll be eyecatching, make people say, ‘Oh, what’s this?’”
Pagano Weber, who was born in the Bronx and grew up in Rockland County, had a career as a textile designer before switching over to teaching art at Union College and the College of Mount St. Vincent, after the design field began doing everything on computer. She and her husband, poet Bruce Weber, lived in Brooklyn and Queens but came up to the Catskills on weekends in the 1990s to hike. In 2006 they bought a house in the Manorville neighborhood of Saugerties, and three years ago, having retired, moved to Barclay Heights. Together they began organizing monthly open mics for writers, artists and musicians at the 9W Diner, called Dialogues for the Ear and Eye, along with an annual poetry marathon on New Year’s Day. Weber, along with fellow Saugerties poet Patrick Hammer, Jr., also hosts regular open mics at the Inquiring Minds Bookstore and Café.
In 2021, Pagano Weber received a Susana Meyer Creative Arts Award from ShoutOut to do a “community-building artistic project.” Her proposal was to create life-sized figural drawings of ordinary Saugerties residents and show them in public spaces. “I always wanted to do portraits of people where I lived,” she says. “I’d been doing a lot of abstract works, but I hadn’t really done faces for a while. I wanted them to really feel like those people. It brought me to appreciate the uniqueness of each person.”
Her Saugerties subjects are, with few exceptions, not celebrities or even well-known local characters. “I wanted to do people I didn’t know — portraits of people who represent a swath of the population. I’d just ask randomly. One of them is somebody who works in Price Chopper.” Many said no, but Pagano Weber took photographs of those who did agree, and used them as a basis to sketch outlines in charcoal on large pieces of corrugated cardboard. “Then I go over it with black acrylic paint.”
Ultimately, she created portraits of “25 people and five dogs,” which were exhibited at a couple of art shows in town. It was at one of these that Pagano Weber’s work caught the eye of local poet Will Nixon. Author of a 2015 collection of acrostic poems about Woodstock characters, Nixon had become involved with the Window Poems project by 2020. In April, at the outset of the pandemic, he had a sort of artistic epiphany while walking the “ghost town” streets of Saugerties. He began taking photos of deserted shop windows and posting them on Facebook. “It got me to take this idea of writing a book for Saugerties,” he says.
That volume of poems, titled If Not in Heaven, Then in Saugerties, gradually took shape; but he needed a new illustrator after the 2022 death of Carol Zaloom, whose linocuts had long graced the covers of his previous books. “As soon as I saw Joanne’s portraits, I said, ‘I want those for the book,’” Nixon recalls. “We ended up putting nine of Joanne’s figures on the cover. People love them. People recognize them.”
If Not in Heaven, Then in Saugerties was published this past December, and Inquiring Minds was set to host a launch event. Nixon proposed hanging one of the portraits in the bookstore window to help promote the book. It didn’t happen in time, but Poetry Month was not far away, and the thought of putting up the figures all over town fired Nixon’s imagination. He began approaching local merchants who were involved in the Window Poems project; Inquiring Minds, the Newberry Artisan Market and Smith Hardware agreed to participate right away. Others soon followed, and mayor Bill Murphy reached out to the owners of several empty storefronts. Eventually eight locations were identified as appropriate sites on Main and Partition streets, ruling out those that get too much direct sunlight that would damage the artworks.
And now, until the end of this month, Pagano Weber’s portraits are posted in those shop windows for your enjoyment. For each figure, she added a speech bubble with a quote encouraging viewers to read some poetry — especially by local poets. You can visit www.shoutoutsaugerties.org/all-events to download a copy of Robert Langdon’s Poetry Walk map, which includes the sites with the drawings along with all the storefronts posting poems. For a full listing of Poetry Month and other arts-related events in Saugerties, check out www.saugertiesarts.org/calendar/april-events.
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