Ellen Bryant Voigt BY Barry Goldstein ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (2007); Shadow of Heaven (2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Kyrie (1996), a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Two Trees (1994); Lotus Flowers (1987); and The Forces of Plenty (1983), all published by W.W Norton; as well as Claiming Kin (Wesleyan University Press, 1976). She has also published a collection of essays on craft and poetry, The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999). Voigt’s honors include the 2002 Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize. In 1976, she developed and directed the nation’s first low-residency writing program at Goddard College in Vermont. Since 1981 she has taught in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. Voigt has worked as an editor for Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets (with Heather McHugh, 2002), and Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World (with Gregory Orr, 1996). She has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2003. She lives in Cabot, Vermont, where she served as the Vermont State Poet from 1999 to 2003.

You grew up on a farm in Virginia; how has that shaped you as a writer? How did you come to live in Vermont? Any writer is probably the last person to know what has shaped her as a writer — although I’m not sure biographers can uncover that either. We all like a neat explanatory narrative, for almost anything and especially anything elusive and complicated; and certainly growing up on a farm, growing up in close proximity to extended family members (both my parents grew up in large farm families not far from each other), attending a small rural school — all this certainly shaped the person I am, the person who makes the poems. But I can think of other plausible narratives that perhaps would provide equally salient explanations. Weird Kid Likes Solitude. Girl Flees Conventional Repressive South. Middle Child Bucks Family Expectations. Flat-fingered Pianist Stumbles Onto Poetry. There are parts of that growing up that seem more evident to me in the poems than others — for instance, the rhythms of the King James Bible — traceable particulars from the biography but not exclusive to it. Here’s another: My mother was a first-grade teacher and taught me how to read at a really early age — maybe that shaped me as a writer more than anything else, even though I didn’t act on it, didn’t start making poems, until many years later. All I can say for sure is that I’m happier when I live in the country. It’s probably why I knew immediately on landing in rural Vermont that this was where I wanted to stay. My husband and I came in 1969 — he had a teaching job at Goddard College. Were your mother and father musicians? What did they think about your becoming a writer instead of a musician? My parents were not musicians but music-lovers. My father especially; his parents had met at a shape-note gathering in someone’s kitchen. Shape-note is an old American a capella tradition based on the solfeggio system — do re mi — that allows untrained singers to “read” music, with the literal shape of the note indicating pitch. My father never did learn how to read actual musical notation, but he sang in the church choir and with a male gospel quartet. My parents bought a cheap upright piano on the installment plan, and made sure all three of their children had piano lessons and played in the school band. We were excused from chores to practice. But I don’t think either of them ever expected or even wished for any of us to be professional musicians. Maybe teachers — of something, anything — my mother’s mother thought there was no more noble calling, and all five of her daughters became teachers (the one boy worked the farm). Three of my father’s four sisters were also teachers. The notion of “becoming a writer” was very foreign to them — and “becoming a poet” even more so. They were quite nervous, with good reason, about how I would support myself.

The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song BY Ellen Bryant Voigt (Graywolf Press, 2009) The Flexible Lyric BY Ellen Bryant Voigt (University of Georgia Press, 1999) Shadow of Heaven BY Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton, 2003) Read & Listen Poetry Foundation Blackbird Lecture

What do you see as the main connection between language and music? They both express or communicate rhythmic sound but perhaps it’s deeper than that? Over the past ten years, I’ve learned a great deal about a particular connection between language and music: that is, the crucial role of syntactical rhythm in the way the brain processes both spoken and written language. I talk about this in some detail in The Art of Syntax (Graywolf Press, 2009). Beyond this constitutional similarity, poetry has other connections to music as well, especially if you think of music as not just sounds but as an architecture. And I try to analyze this also in the book. The main thing to remember, though, is that while there are resemblances, there are also huge differences between the two; even if poems “aspire to the condition of music,” as Walter Pater put it, they are in language, and the rhythmic elements of pitch and duration, for instance, are much more variable, less easily quantified. In your book of essays, The Flexible Lyric, there is a complex discussion on the grammatical and syntactic structures of poems. You have also been quoted as saying that you write your own poems “mainly by ear,” writing by sound first and then going back to see what was said. Is creating a poem, then, first expressing what wells up from a place of deep conception in the writer’s mind then going back and shaping it linguistically? I’m suspicious of many of these particular terms, like “wells up” and “conception” and even “expressing,” which seems to me quite different from making/creating, and I am especially wary of the two-step division which posits conception/expression FOLLOWED BY shape/language. For me, a poem is more like a lens one grinds and cleans, grinds and cleans, in order to see the world. An act of discovery. Frost talks somewhere about a poem being initiated by something seen in the peripheral vision — and of course he’s famous for saying a poem needs to “ride on its melting,” like ice on a hot stove. The great glory of poetry is that it requires — first from the poet, then from the reader — both sides of the brain, working in concert, the rational and the irrational parts, the modules that manage lexicon and those that manage dance. Any poem can start anywhere, in any module, but what one hopes is that it will very quickly stimulate all the others. I have always composed in lines, and for me, the only trigger that leads anywhere is the apprehension of a sort of paradigmatic line. Yeats, on the other hand, could and did start with a sort of prose note, summarizing a dramatic situation that intrigued him (i.e., old man in a schoolroom surrounded by children); what seemed to jumpstart these extremely reductive journal entries was auditioning, and then settling on, a rhyme scheme. What often came late, or even last, was a surprising rearrangement of the stanzas (take a look at the changes he made in “The Wild Swans at Coole”) — and as a result, an entirely different structure, one that feels inevitable to us as readers, but was not available to the poet prior to the “arrangement of language” in rhymed, metered lines.

Another example: I reprint in The Flexible Lyric a few of the crucial drafts of Bishop’s “One Art” — there’s no sense of any “conception” in the initial draft that I can find, although there is a great deal of linguistic play around some common and even clichéd notions about losing something. What focused it — or her — came early, with another sort of play, the development of the refrain lines for a villanelle. But I don’t see any “welling up” until the very last drafts, in the emotionally complex and really heartbreaking self-admission of the final stanza, as though elicited from the unsuspecting poet by the formal arrangement she herself created.

The great glory of poetry is that it requires — first from the poet, then from the reader — both sides of the brain, working in concert, the rational and the irrational parts, the modules that manage lexicon and those that manage dance.

But to repeat: there’s no right way for a poem to begin, or unfold. At some point in the process, the poet needs to look at the word choices, the rhythm, the images, the tone, the structure, all of it. When one does what — that is so much a matter of temperament, and may also change from poem to poem. It always feels like a mystery, and a gift — which is why we throw up our hands and call it inspiration. We don’t have sufficient access to our own brains to explain it any other way.

In reading The Art of Syntax, philosophical questions assert themselves, given that the book discusses how the mind conceptualizes and expresses language, i.e., in ‘chunks” or “fundaments,” in subject/verb patterns. Have your studies touched on why nature and the human mind seem to either make patterns or attempt to defy them? From what do you think patterns arise?

Those questions are interesting but way beyond my ability to answer them. In fact, I don’t know who can answer them yet — or even which field of inquiry they belong to. The discoveries of neuroscience have been astonishing, once there was the MRI and fMRI (functional scan) to look inside the skull and report on brain activity. But the knowledge is very partial and constantly being updated and may never be complete. It does seem, though, that what we think of as “intelligence” is a brain capacity to sort through huge amounts of data input, deciding what is important and what is not, and registering recurrence: in other words, discovering a pattern. Some of the pathology studies indicate that with damage to that facility, we simply get overwhelmed — Oliver Sachs is very readable on some of these cases, and there is now a learning disability described as insufficient “Executive Function.”

What has interested me — what I try to convey in the book — is the correspondence between a “normal” brain and the foundation of art — I draw on the parallel to music, but can you name any art that does not depend on pattern and variation?

As both writer and teacher, are there certain aspects in the development of a poet that seem true for most? How would you define your own progression as a writer?

I can’t think of any generalization that would be both accurate and useful — at least, none that would follow a fixed chronology. I was drawn to poems by a formal appetite, a love of pattern. Others may start with some particular subject matter. At some point, however, unless one is satisfied by an experience essentially cathartic or self-expressive, the one essential requirement may be reading and rereading and learning how to read great poems.

What are some of the challenges for someone putting together a first book?

For every book, resolving that structural issue is the crucial thing. And every time is like a first time, because the material at hand is different — what you figured out before is not going to be much help. The particular challenges each time probably emerge to a large extent from the period over which one wrote the poems at hand. Often, with a first book, a poet is fresh from completing an apprenticeship, and probably has tried all sorts of modes and voices, in the search for her own; the major challenge to the collection then centers on how to choose from and then integrate very diverse kinds of work. Other times, though, a first book will have an amazingly high degree of formal or even tonal coherence already in the pieces — I’m thinking of, say, James Tate’s The Lost Pilot. For that kind of collection, the challenge is often finding sufficient range and variation.

Whatever the case, I think the hardest thing, especially the first time one does it, is setting aside any notions of one’s “best poems” or “weaker poems” which can lead to all sorts of false and dangerous and self-deluding arrangements, just as it would when making an individual poem. The task is first to be ruthless in deciding what to stand by and letting go of the rest; and second, to then treat all the pieces as equals and find the arrangement that best honors the individual poem and simultaneously lets it contribute most effectively to the whole, the tonal or formal arc of the book.

Many editors seem to prefer publishing poetry collections that have a central focus or tell a story. There seem to be less books that are simply a collection of a poet’s best recent work. Should a poetry collection always have unity to the point that a kind of story is told? Where does unity leave off and a book-length sequence like Kyrie begin?

Kyrie
BY Ellen Bryant Voigt
(W.W. Norton, 1996)

To my mind, a book is another form, like a poem but longer, even more complex, more inclusive. I’m not sure what you mean by “unity,” but if you mean some sort of coherence, something that decides matters of inclusion and exclusion, something that makes the whole larger than the sum of its parts — then yes, I think that should always be present in a book, just as it must be in a single poem. But it certainly doesn’t have to be either thematic or narrative. Kyrie is a sequence based on both thematic or at least dramatic coherence (imagined survivors of the 1918 influenza epidemic) and narrative structure (there’s a time-line running through it, and recurring characters as in a novel). But I’d say its primary source of coherence is purely formal: each separate piece is more or less a traditional sonnet. Certainly the formal variations interested me far more than the epidemic ever did, and the narrative structure was a late addition, a way to manage focus and pacing within that single-minded dramatic circumstance.

Set aside whatever editors may or may not prefer, since that’s the business of publishing, not writing; and expand a bit that notion of “unity,” to include more than focused subject matter or “a kind of story.’’ Without some sort of formal/structural element in the project, how would one know what is or is not one’s “best recent work”? Or, whether there was enough of it to make a book? Or, what order — what structure — would be best for the individual pieces?

Messenger
BY Ellen Bryant Voigt
(W.W. Norton, 2008)

In your book, Messenger, New and Selected Poems, there is a wonderful poem entitled “Redbud.” You write, if only I could be, or want to be, more like/that boy: ignorant, stunned, human. The “ignorant boy” is Acteon, who was caught watching Artemis, and because of that, his own hounds tore him apart. What is the implication in the poem?

Ignorance is extremely dangerous — it doesn’t enhance a life but restricts it. At the same time, knowledge is also dangerous; it leads us to overlook things, to assume things, to fall in love with categories and systems. The poem is actually about power, whatever its source (and knowledge is indeed a power), and its limitations.

You’re known for reading poems well. How do you feel about the performance aspect of poetry?

One can certainly perform poems, just as one performs a role in a play, seeking to enhance what’s on the page with an individual presence and voice. I have zero skills in that regard and no interest in it for my own poems. At the same time, almost all poems have some inherent aural component, and I have always been immensely concerned with the sounds of poems. If I’ve known for “reading poems well,” I suspect it’s only because I myself compose largely by ear, and for me the page is very much like a musical score: if I’ve done my job, another human voice could duplicate the sounds of the poem, and certainly I try as hard as I can, when it’s my own human voice, to be faithful and attentive to the score.

What was it about the cultural conditions in 1976 which made it seem right for starting a low-residency program for writers?

I wasn’t looking at the culture at the time but at my adult undergraduates — including some wonderful writers — who didn’t happen to live close to a residential graduate program but wanted to continue their passionate studies. By 1976, there were quite a few of those programs around, but they all had the same workshop model essentially created by Paul Engle at Iowa. And it seemed to me there should be some alternatives, some other sorts of apprenticeship, some structural (and economic) models that might swap all-of-us-teach-each-other for greater individual response from an experienced mentor. Certainly that was something I wished for, and needed, when I’d been at Iowa a dozen years before.

It’s fair to say, though, the sixties and the seventies were a time when conventional assumptions about education were being reconsidered and new consideration given to the importance of an individually-tailored curriculum. And also a time when there was a zeal among young writer-teachers who wanted the next generation to have more opportunities than what we had, and believed passionately in teaching itself. Believed, that is, that the writing of poetry can be taught, the way dance or composition or painting are taught — not to think one can supplant talent and instinct but to nurture and compliment talent and instinct. The other big sea-change, then, was to create those occasions for both active teaching and active learning, beyond putting a group of nascent writers into the same room once a week with one writer of national reputation who may or may not have an deep interest in their work or any of the skills great teaching requires.

We called it “low-residency” because of the semester-long independent projects: this was the current term for some early experiments with BA students. But in our program, the residency periods are very high intensity, providing what the fully residential model cannot: team-teaching, an opportunity for faculty to hear one another’s lectures and classes, a high level of discourse about the art of writing, and a much greater number and range of available faculty mentors.

Someone else might point to an increased number of voices being heard at that time — more women and minorities being published, more writers who’d been exposed to contemporary work through Poets In The Schools and other curriculum changes, certainly a broader aesthetic range in American letters — if you’re suggesting there were many more writers who wanted to do graduate work in creative writing, I think you’re right. I just don’t want to suggest that we were aware of it when we embarked on this adventure.