Ellen Bryant Voigt
Poetry (available from W. W. Norton & Co.):
Messenger: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming 2007)
Shadow of Heaven (2002)
Kyrie (1995)
Two Trees (1994)
The Lotus Flowers (1987)
The Forces of Plenty (1983)
Claiming Kin (Wesleyan University Press, 1976)
Essays:
The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999)
Mention that you're reading poetry and the first question you are likely to get is a skeptical-sounding, Can you understand it?
If the poetry in question is that of Ellen Bryant Voigt, the short answer is yes. Her pensive poems, often arising out of telling observations about nature, may not strike the same chord of instant recognition in readers as Billy Collins' witty vignettes, but their chime resonates far longer. She has the gift of calling to mind the exact character of an animal or flower with a few, choice words. A mother cat in one poem "will go inside to cull her litter, / addressing each with a diagnostic tongue"--addressing and diagnostic are unexpected but delightfully accurate. Sunflowers past their prime are "reedy, rusted [...], drooping over the snow like tongueless bells" outside the hospital window where the speaker's mother lies. Daffodils are "archipelagic in the short green / early grass" and "crayon-yellow, as in a child's drawing of the sun."
Excerpting such phrases does little justice, though, to the whole arc of any one of Voigt's poems. I would call her poetry lyrical--as in song-like--but she prefers the term lyric poetry. Voigt, Vermont's State Poet from 1999 to 2003, not only writes poetry but teaches it in institutions around Vermont and at the Warren Wilson College MFA writing program in North Carolina (Vermont is her home). She rewrote some of her lectures as essays collected in The Flexible Lyric, where she defines the lyric poem as a "moment lifted out of time but not static," as distinct from narrative poems that tell a story or depend on a chronological ordering of events. Where other contemporary poets draw from the power of storytelling and its basis in sequential, linear time, Voigt's poems--and the ones that she admires--derive "movement" from the tension of opposing forces.
A poem called "Pastoral" from her second published volume, The Forces of Plenty, might serve as an example. "Crouched in the yard, /" it begins, "he brings his dirty hands up to his mouth. / No, No, I say. Yuck. Hurt." Gradually, the scene becomes clear: a mother is watching her toddler play in the yard, on the alert for any sources of danger. These start to accrue in the middle stanza: "The fire will hurt. / The stick will break and stab you in the heart." Yet such increasingly alarming possibilities are held in a kind of tension with the speaker's observation on looking up at the blue sky that everything is "the way I might have dreamed it," which is to say, just like the peaceful, rural scenes typically represented in a pastoral poem or scene. The poem ends with an image of the child "weighing" what seems to represent the two forces at odds in the poem: berries in one hand and stones in the other.
I have said that the speaker in "Pastoral" is a woman, but in fact the poem contains no indication of gender. Voigt is one of the nation's few women poets to be honored by both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle committees, as well as with a host of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim and Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundations. She is thus highly aware of gender, as well as the distortions and oversimplifications that arise from reading a poet's work exclusively through the lens of gender. She even takes issue with the phrase "women writers": "The coinage appears direct and uncomplicated, but the use of a noun as a modifier is never without some ambiguity: does the term indicate women who write or writers who are women? That is, what is the relative importance of gender to an aesthetic? [...] Has any other critical classification conscripted so many writers a priori?" ("Poetry and Gender," The Flexible Lyric).
If women writers of poetry can be grouped together at all, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously did in their literary anthologies of the 1980s, Voigt prefers that it be done not by pointing to common themes, subjects, or styles, but by drawing attention to a possible shared "feminine psychology." I would have loved to question her on this subject, but Voigt was unreachable for this article, in part because she was spending time at Bread Loaf (home of exactly one pay phone and zero cell phone coverage) where she also teaches. But without wishing to "conscript" her as a writer, I believe many her poems to be of particular interest to women.
One, for example, "Eurydice," speaks from the perspective of that mythological woman on the irony of her own story. In the myth, Orpheus bravely descends to the underworld to argue for the return of his wife, Eurydice having died only a short time after their marriage. Charmed by his music, the rulers of the underworld grant him the right to lead her back up to the land of the living as long as he walks in front of her and never looks back. Of course, he can't help but look back, in some versions out of doubt that she is still following him, in others to hand her through the last passage up to earth. Inconsolable at his loss, he spends the rest of his life playing his lyre and charming all around him. Eurydice is heard from no more.
In Voigt's poem, Eurydice is angry. Speaking from her eternal doom in the underworld, she demands bitterly,
How could you think it,
that I would choose to stay, or break
under the journey back? Like a dog
I had followed your unraveling
skein of sound--
Orpheus,
standing
between me and the iridescent earth,
you turned to verify the hell
I was thrown to, and got
what you needed for your songs.
Greatest irony of all, those songs "do not penetrate the grave," so she can't hear them. But even in the midst of her bitterness, she cannot help but forgive Orpheus "over and over," even "against my will." The pain of separation is the one thing they share, embodied in the impersonal distance of the last line's image: his "shocked mouth calling 'Wife, wife' / as you let me go."
Another poem, or rather sequence of poems called "The Garden, the Spring, the Hawk" (Shadow of Heaven), concerns the question of how women come to want marriage. Dedicated "from Baton Rouge to my sister in Virginia," where Voigt grew up, the poem's speaker wonders first at her own tendency to see the spring in the "Deep South" as "coy" and "feminine" with its "slutty blossoming of shrubs." Then, pursuit scenes involving squirrels, cats, hawks, and finally a mechanical cat (Darwinist instinct or an automaton's lack of awareness?) are interspersed with musings on her sister's marriage, like that time
[...] when you were twelve, thirteen.
Time to be groomed for the breathless hunt-and-run,
purse and title at the finish line.
And:
Like an unsheathed falcon to the falconer
you flew, at eighteen, to his outstretched arm.
[...] Why so eager for received idea?
And, finally:
How many generations did it take to cultivate, in us,
the marriage gene?
"Eurydice" and "The Garden, the Spring, the Hawk" are selections, however, from among Voigt's widely observant poems. Her work ranges from a very personal elegy to her dead father and an unforgettable poem about her mother's mastectomy to Kyrie, a book-length series of short poems on the 1918 worldwide influenza epidemic. "In one year," she writes of this forgotten epidemic, "one quarter of the total U.S. population contracted influenza; one out of five never recovered. Nevertheless, the national memory bears little trace." Like a scholar bent on reversing Ireland's cultural amnesia about the Great Famine, Voigt's Kyrie poems speak the era's shock and grief in the voices of its victims and survivors: the country doctor, the farmer, the coroner, the teacher, a soldier who writes home from Europe periodically, not yet aware that, in leaving the war behind, he will come home to a new and far more terrible battle.
Perhaps the best way to come to Voigt's poetry is to hear her read it, hear the cadence she brings to her own lyric--and lyrical--lines. Fortunately for us, Voigt will be reading her poems at the upcoming Burlington Book Festival on Friday, September 15 at 7:30 p.m. at the Lake and College building. Then we can meet this extraordinary woman poet who is, more significantly, a captivating writer who happens to be a woman.
Amy Lilly is Associate Editor of Vermont Woman and lives in Burlington.
