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  • A Conversation with Ellen Bryant Voigt
  • Candice Baxter (bio) and Wendy Sumner Winters (bio)

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Photograph by Barry Goldstein

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First trained in music conservatory as a pianist, Ellen Bryant Voigt makes poems from her appetite for sound. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Claiming Kin, Lotus Flowers, Shadow of Heaven and Kyrie. Her most recent book, Messenger: New and Selected Works 1976–2006, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She has received such grants and awards as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writing Fellowship and a fellowship from the National [End Page 71] Endowment for the Arts. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was recently inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 1976, Voigt developed and directed the nation’s first low-residency MFA. program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. She currently teaches writing at Warren Wilson College.

Over two days in September 2008, Voigt spent time with students at the University of Memphis talking about her work and her works. With fierce wit and a professorial disposition, Voigt discussed the difference between narrative poetry and prose, the impulse behind what she calls the Age of Oprah and “that something out there shimmering.”

INTERVIEWERS: After more than thirty years of publishing poetry, how did you decide which poems to include in Messenger, your new and selected works?

EBV: I learned a lot by the selection process. I guess I was pretty naive about it because I thought, “You just go back to the previous six books and pick a couple of poems you’d be willing to stand by and take them out.” It sounded pretty easy. I had my comeuppance because once I’d managed to make the selections, I found that the poems from the previous books didn’t make a whole that was larger than the sum of its parts. Each of my previous books had a tightly crafted arc, and I had already spent a lot of time with the ordering so each one was a little constellation.

Ultimately, I had to disregard the previous order. The first poem in Messenger was not at all the first poem in my first book. It was somewhere in the middle. I had to make myself read the way a reader would, which was difficult because anyone coming only to this book wouldn’t know this poem was the fourth in a set of narratives. It was plopped down in there by itself, which gave me a new way of looking at what might be connecting tissue.

INTERVIEWERS: Certain images, like birds and trees, seem to recur within your work. Do they have some special meaning for you?

EBV: When I finished my third book I thought, “Okay, Ellen, no more trees. Just not another single tree.” Flannery O’Connor said regarding fiction that anyone who has lived until the age of ten has enough material to write for a lifetime. Stanley Kunitz says a similar thing about poetry. He talks about images which are what he calls “totemic,” meaning resonant and full of power, and also full of mystery. But a writer doesn’t know he is haunted by these things or why they keep coming back. They thrust themselves up into [End Page 72] vision, and it may take a lifetime of making poems in order to understand those things. It may be that those totemic images are behind every single thing we write. Sometimes we’re aware of it and sometimes not. I can say, “Okay, I’m going to write a persona poem. I’m going to pretend to be a monk in the fifteenth century.” Once again it turns out to be some obsession with a tree. Those are the things that drive our work.

Poetry is a lens onto the world. If a writer keeps going with what he knows, he will no longer see new things. The great exhilaration is that writers can change the lens. They can put themselves in a position to write other kinds of poems...

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