Ellen Bryant Voigt

• Born: May 9, 1943
• Place of Birth: Danville, Virginia

Overview

Ellen Bryant Voigt is known for finely wrought, compressed forms delivered with a passionate moral sensibility. Profoundly influenced by her extensive early musical training and formalism, her poems push the limits of lyric and narrative as she sets emotionally heightened moments out of time—singing—against the storied linear past and tries to unite them.

Other Literary Forms

Voigt is known for her poetry, but also regarded for her critical essays on poetry, collected in The Flexible Lyric (1999). She explores and defines lyric poetry, narrative, style, structure, form, and other concepts of genre and versification: tone, image, diction, gender, tension, and voice. The central concern is testing differentiation between the modes and impulses of lyric and narrative.

The lengthy title essay develops definitions of lyric and narrative, form and structure, texture and voice that reveal how the elements of each pair are set in tension in the best poetry. Quoting from Randall Jarrell, who regarded tension as “a struggle between opposites,” Voigt considers unity in a poem to emerge from tension, and this emergence is a poem’s necessary function. Lyric is “a moment lifted out of time but not static, movement that is centripetal and centrifugal rather than linear; an examination of self which discovers universal predicament; insight embodied in individuated particulars and at the same time overriding them.” Voigt illustrates her point by briefly tracing the evolution of lyric poetry from the Renaissance through the present to show that form does not limit the poet’s freedom but rather impels the evolution of lyric poetry.

In 2009, she published another book on the craft of poetry entitled The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song. This book concerns the poet's craft and the influences of music on a poem's meaning and construction. In the preface of the book, Voigt notes that "The following pages investigate some of the ways a poet composes with and against and inside the syntactical patterns available in English."

In 2013, Voigt published Headwaters: Poems—a collection in which she eliminated all punctuation to achieve a musical flow and entice the reader to follow her through the poem. In 2023, Voigot published her ninth poetry collection, The Collected Poems. This work is a compilation of eight volumes of all Voigt's poems written across five decades.

Achievements

Ellen Bryant Voigt’s awards include the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (1983), the Emily Clark Balch Award (1987), the Hanes Award for Poetry (1993), the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award (1998), an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2000), the O. B. Hardison, Jr., Poetry Prize (2002), and Pushcart Prizes (2003, 2006). She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Vermont Council on the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets (2001). Kyrie was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Messenger was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. From 1999 to 2003, Voigt was poet laureate of Vermont. In 2002, she was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2003 to 2009. In 2009, she received the Poets’ Prize for Messenger. In 2015, Voigt received a MacArthur Fellowship for her ongoing commitment to poetry, teaching, and her experiments with narrative and lyrical forms in poetry.

Biography

Ellen Bryant was brought up in Chatham, Virginia, by Lloyd Gilmore Bryant, a farmer, and Missouri Yeats Bryant, an elementary school teacher. Experiences of family, along with will and destiny, hard work and choice, natural order and persistence in the face of the unpredictable afforded by farm life, are at the heart of her concerns.

She credits her early and long training in music as her central artistic influence. Not only was it formative in her “impulse for order,” but also it contributed to her love of “solitude.” Surrounded by many relatives, Voigt found her life “exceedingly claustrophobic.” Playing piano was her time to herself:

I can look back and see poem after poem that takes up the friction between that solitary individual and whatever that social unit is, be it small or large.

Music resounds in the body, eliciting sensory feeling. At the same time, it provides a sense of control through form, both constraining and fluid. Relating this to her writing, Voigt has said, “I make a musical decision before I make any other kind of decision. . . . If I can’t hear it, it just never gets written.”

Voigt’s music education began with piano lessons at age four and continued through a degree in 1964 at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she discovered her dislike of performance, her love for music theory, and her passion for literature. While she was working a summer job playing lounge music at a resort, a friend introduced her to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, E. E. Cummings, and William Butler Yeats.

Voigt earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1966, studying principally with Donald Justice. She married Francis Voigt, a college dean, in 1965, and they had two children. Major concerns of her art are the family relationship, its disorders and orders, choice and fate, and opportunities for truth and moral reflection. She taught at Goddard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before accepting a position at Warren Wilson College in 1981.

Each of her books explores the nature of lyric and narrative and their interaction as she strives to keep narrative in the background while plumbing the depths of lyric. Her 1995 collection, Kyrie, disperses narrative through a long sequence of sonnets.

“Song and Story”

“Song and Story,” the concluding poem of Two Trees, Voigt’s fourth volume of poems, distills the chief concern of her artistic life. She gathers and articulates the two impulses that have driven her, that she sees driving human life. Music reaches from the nontemporal realm into story with its softening, easing rhythms; the singer has emerged from pain and reaches back to another who is immersed in pain. The impulse of lyric is thus hope, promise, choice to continue, and praise of the nontemporal or cyclical against story’s inevitable onward movement toward death of the individual. As Stephen Cramer has written, “Voigt’s work as a whole recites the tale of one artist’s 'will to change.’” Her own story encapsulates the story of human choice.

Claiming Kin

Voigt’s vision matured over two decades from discovery of the body’s music, its breathings and varied motions in the midst of life. The rhythms of family are set harmonically and then oppositionally, as in the title poem, “Claiming Kin.” Writing of her mother, the poet begins:

Insistent as a whistle, her voice up

the stairs pried open the blanket’s

tight lid and piped me

down to the pressure cooker’s steam and rattle.

Other household objects the mother wields make their insistent noises, while the poet as a small child is a “pale lump blinking at the light” of her mother’s “shiny kingdom” of noisy “razzle-dazzle.” The mother has another, a night rhythm apposite to the poet’s self, a “Soft ghost, plush as a pillow,” who “wove and fruited against the black hours.”

In “The Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin,” the Madonna “Mourns . . . as if reaching for fruit,” and a priest’s blessing of young girls joins music and fruit, joy and hurt:

when the bells release

a shower of pollen,

each mouth opens to rapture

like a wound.

Pain is the price of joy. Composed of loose iambics and snatches of ballad rhythms, these poems’ rhythms function to advance and constrain extremity let loose by often shocking images: the beheading of a hen, a jealous child wishing her older sister dead, a dream life of murdering, “stones/ with their mouths sewn shut.” Music reaches into silence to seed it, but each person remains isolated; song is not much help to any but the poet herself.

The Forces of Plenty

In her second collection, The Forces of Plenty, Voigt shifted toward narrative. Less concerned with capturing the intense emotion in a moment of time through lyric’s music, she renders small vignettes with people now listening to the sounds the world offers. The music is quieter, calmed by interludes of stopping the daily round to listen. In “The Spire,” a poem about the function of lyric and reminiscent of Marianne Moore’s “The Steeple-Jack,” a church on a mountain provides connection to townspeople. Forms made by human hands and thought “can extend the flawed earth/ and embody us,” giving lives the continuity of story. However, the bells of the church ring over “the village/ houses . . . allied in a formal shape/ beside a stream, the streets concluding/ at the monument. Again the ravishing moment/ of the bell,” at which the townspeople are pictured stopping each of their various businesses, each having its own ongoing rhythm, as the bell inserts sound into their time to call them momentarily out of linear time to lyric ecstasy.

In Voigt’s estimation, “Taking the Fire Out,” was a “watershed” pointing toward The Lotus Flowers. Each of the poem’s six sections presents a small narrative scene rendered with lyric intensity and questioning. The repeated line “Nothing is learned by turning away” bespeaks the poet’s honest effort to choose to know what is true.

The Lotus Flowers

Composed in the wake of her parents’ deaths, The Lotus Flowers revisits the poet’s southern childhood and revises its terms and story, moving sharply and clearly in short narratives toward lyric conclusions. Writing in “Short Story” of her grandfather killing a mule, she is not sure what the truth is, “The story varied/ in the telling.” Each person has a version, each according to his experience, highlighting the difficulty of reaching across a gulf separating each. “A Song” portrays an alienated singer who can find no comfort, no way out of pain.

In “The Lotus Flowers,” a group of adolescent girls camping in the wilderness is connected like spokes in a wheel, each small self necessary to the bright whole as the lesser stars in the constellations they view overhead are essential to constellations and the stories told about them. In this poem, narrative delivers a clear vision that resolves on the timeless intensity that is lyric’s signature.

Two Trees

In Two Trees, Voigt arrives at her matured vision: The singer, who has emerged from grief, now reaches back to those still suffering. The poems move on classical and biblical myths of innocence and experience. The rhythms too are more classical, more certainly iambic, weaving in and out of pentameter. The rhythmic strategy holds tradition in its bosom as the men and women Voigt writes about hold the story of birth, life, death, and begetting in wisdom and sorrow. Lines move in and out of tradition, in desire of reaching “over the wall” of the line, as the “first man and woman” do in “Two Trees,” desiring both Edenic trees—of knowledge and of life—that are “over the wall.” The formal problem is recognized as one of balance between story and song, but it is song that the poet aligns with hope, with the human will to strive for the beauty and felt fulfillment of oneness and connection, the theme that marks this volume.

Kyrie

Kyrie threads a narrative line across fifty-eight sonnets, each a moment of lyric expression in the voice of one of several recurring character-speakers from a small New England town during the winter of 1917-1918, as World War I was concluding and a deadly influenza epidemic raged. By giving a voice to individuals immersed in loss, fear, and grief, Voigt reaches into the heart of lyric’s capacity to express common bonds in the depths of shared feeling. The rhythmic strategy of moving from the sonnet’s conventional iambic pentameter base reaffirms lyric’s tradition of reaffirming social contact. The volume recalls Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), but instead of speaking honestly finally only from death as his characters do, Voigt’s speak from life, drawing forth emotional energies to cope with the threat of death surrounding them on two fronts. The power of the combined voices singing rises over and against epidemic and war, “The sun still up everywhere in the kingdom.” Unlike the constricted, mostly failed lives of Masters’s characters, Voigt’s characters continue to look forward with hope. Singing celebrates life and exceeds the time of destruction and its effects.

Shadow of Heaven

Voigt’s sixth book, Shadow of Heaven, presents a sustained vision of nature’s double largess, providential and violent. From the opening section (“The Winter Field”), the sounds of the outdoors clatter and bang, the dead will not “shut up,” but the poet recognizes that whole life is made from the “one stubborn root,” which gives rise to “this one life.” In a sequence of fifteen twelve-line lyrics, moments of attention bring things into being: a flower, a construction machine, a squirrel, a hawk, emerge in a “swivel” of the head. They transform: A hawk becomes the poet’s daughter, who has flown and “salted” the mother’s garden; grief revolves with plenty, but humans are exiles who do best “to keep a little distance from what we are.”

Messenger

Messenger, a selection of poems from Voigt’s previous six books plus ten new poems, condenses the power of her craft and vision. The new poems drive home color and sound, wildly reverberating nature’s largesse in the figures of trees, small birds, a thistle, and a chunk of fat laid out to lure beings into sight. The poet stands apart, still the exile, but now one who has returned “To do something with it: to make something of it” through language (“The Hive”). The messenger, unlike the angel of the Annunciation, does not bear comfort, but a sword announcing death. The poet who had started out in lyric as a way of stopping time writes here of the inability to stop time, counterweighted—eased—by the in potentia of artworks hidden from their birth in material wood, voice, and language.

Bibliography

Baxter, Candice, and Wendy Sumner Winters. "A Conversation with Ellen Bryant Voigt." The Missouri Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2009, p. 70-83. Project MUSE, dx.doi.org/10.1353/mis.0.0092.

Birkerts, Sven. “From the Farm.” Review of Messenger. The New York Times Book Review, 25 Feb. 2007, p. 26.

Chappell, Fred. “Ellen Bryant Voigt and ’The Art of Distance.’” Sewanee Review, vol. 113, no. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 422-41.

Hacht, Anne Marie, and David Kelly, editors. Poetry for Students, vol. 23. Thomson/Gale, 2006.

Holden, Jonathan. “The Free Verse Line.” In The Line in Postmodern Poetry, edited by Robert Joseph Frank and Henry M. Sayre. U of Illinois P, 1988.

Schley, Jim. "Ellen Bryant Voigt Talks About Her New Landmark Volume of 'Collected Poems.'" Seven Days, 20 Sept. 2023, www.sevendaysvt.com/arts-culture/ellen-bryant-voigt-talks-about-her-new-landmark-volume-of-collected-poems-39136467. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. “Ellen Bryant Voigt.” Interview by Ernest Suarez. In Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets, edited by Suarez, T. W. Stanford, and Amy Verner. U of Missouri P, 1999.

"Voigt, Ellen Bryant." MacArthur Fellow Program. MacArthur Foundation, 2015, www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2015/ellen-bryant-voigt. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. “MacArthur 'Genius' Ellen Bryant Voigt: 'Poetry Is An Intelligence'.” Radio Boston, WBUR, 12 Oct. 2015, www.wbur.org/radioboston/2015/10/12/ellen-bryant-voigt. Accessed 27 Nov. 2017.