Ellen Bryant Voigt
“What I have always loved about poetry is its two rhythmic systems—the rhythm of the sentence, which is the given, how we think, how we make meaning; and the rhythm of the poetic line, which is wholly artifice, made by the poet every time, in every poem, in every line—and the relationship between them. And yet, my preoccupation and my allegiance had been with and to line, not sentence.”
“Reading Voigt one comes to understand that what we think of as reality is the product of both painstaking observation and imagination.… She favors a language that is both precise and lush, and a narrative that is both immediately accessible and richly layered with meaning.”
“Ellen Bryant Voigt’s giant Collected Poems is both the record of a sensibility and the chronicle of a life. The former remains — as it has since the late 1970s — melancholy, careful, attentive, sometimes consoling, heartbreaking or plangent where no consolation can be found. Voigt’s free verse, laced with casual pentameters, looks at the fauna and flora, agricultural and wild, of the upper South, where she grew up, and at the “first frail green in the northeast,” in Vermont, finding an almost Wordsworthian consciousness in “each blade each stem each stalk,” “the white birch bark and our feral black cat.””
“...one of the most significant poets writing today.”
“These tough, wryly funny, wise, and poignant lyrics erode sorrow and embrace adaptation . . . without denying beauty or love.”
“Since Randall Jarrell, poets have bemoaned the lack of a true poet-critic, a sensibility at once commonsensical, laconic, and appropriately imaginative. Now we have Ellen Bryant Voigt, who offers Jarrell’s combination of wit and gravity—as well as his critical urgency in choosing subjects of scrutiny.”
“Voigt is a seasoned poet in full confident stride. She continues to put the muscle of her craft in the service of her steady sensuous intellect. There is finally a unity in these poems, but it’s the kind we find when what had looked like a mere scatter of stars suddenly discloses the shape of a known constellation.”
“Deceptive in their hominess and welcoming clarity, Voigt’s poems are thoroughly considered creations in which every word, no matter how humble, is worth its weight in gold.”
“To enter the lives of the people who experienced the 1918 pandemic through the personas Voigt creates in Kyrie is to glimpse the power of collective loss and all its reverberating impacts. I found in these poems an opportunity to reflect on our current historical predicament through a different lens. Like Voigt’s subjects, we are all subject to the power of nature, no matter what we did or didn’t do, and no matter what choices we made or didn’t make at any juncture in our life journey.”
Ellen Bryant Voigt was born and raised on a farm in Virginia and moved to Vermont in 1969. She is the author of nine collections of poetry: The Collected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2023); Headwaters (W.W. Norton, 2013); Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton, 2007); Shadow of Heaven (W.W. Norton, 2002), a finalist for the National Book Award; Kyrie (W.W. Norton,1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Two Trees (W.W. Norton, 1992); The Lotus Flowers (W.W. Norton,1987); The Forces of Plenty (W.W. Norton, 1983); and Claiming Kin (Wesleyan University press, 1976). Her collections of essays about poetry are The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Art of Syntax (Graywolf, 2009). Voigt’s honors include Pushcart Prizes, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poets’ Prize, the 2002 Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library; grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, as well as the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
In 1976, at Goddard College, Voigt developed and directed the nation’s first low-residency writing program—a design for graduate MFA study that has been widely emulated— and later helped guide its reincarnation as the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has also taught at Iowa Wesleyan College, MIT, and as a visiting writer at many colleges and universities.
In an interview with the Rumpus, Voigt was asked about what happens when she reads her poems aloud. “I’ve always been very strict about following what is scored on the page when I read the poem aloud, just as I am at every stage of composition,” she responded. “And I recommend that a reader do the same. A silent reading misses a substantial portion of what’s going on in almost any poem—its aural components, its connection to poetry’s beginnings as an art that was sung or danced or spoken. This is one of poetry’s great achievements—that paradox: the carefully made thing remains an utterance.
Voigt has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as the Vermont State Poet. She now lives in Cabot, Vermont and St. Paul, Minnesota.
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© Dudley Voigt
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