NCTE Verse - Ellen Bryant Voigt

Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!

Poet of the Day: Ellen Bryant Voigt

Ellen Bryant Voigt’s 1995 collection Kyrie was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. The book-length sonnet sequence chronicles how a small town in Vermont is overrun by the twin disasters of the 1918 Spanish Flu and World War I. Some sonnets are letters from boot camp, later from the front; others capture the individual perspectives of townsfolk (like Masters’s Spoon River or Nelson’s My Seneca Village ) as each copes with random, sudden, and pervasive deaths. There is a doctor riding out to visit homes where only one family member has survived; there is the man who builds his own coffin; there are the survivors still marrying and planting crops as well as burying the dead. Both the terrible war and the frightening flu eventually pass over the village, and the poems capture the time and also the time after, with remembrances, losses, and restorations.

Photo found at: https://www.macfound.org/fellows/950/#photos

This poet belongs in our classrooms because . . .

I often heard Ellen Bryant Voigt read her poetry when she visited North Carolina as a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She founded that program (originally at Goddard College) as a low-residency program, in part to make it possible for teachers to attend. For ten days every winter and summer an astonishing group of poets and fiction writers gather to teach and learn from each another and more: at the 35th year celebration, the motto for the commemorative tote was "Write. Revise. Dance. Repeat." Voigt served as poet laureate of Vermont for four years and was a 2015 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow. Voigt’s poetic range and experimentations with form are notable: to me her voice combines the austerity of the northeast with the gentility of the south, each word precise and evocative of a particular image, a specific epiphany.

A Poem by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Practice

To weep unbidden, to wake

at night in order to weep, to wait

for the whisker on the face of the clock

to twitch again, moving

the dumb day forward—

is this merely practice?

Some believe in heaven,

some in rest. We’ll float,

you said. Afterward

we’ll float between two worlds—

five bronze beetles

stacked like spoons in one

peony blossom, drugged by lust:

if I came back as a bird

I’d remember that—

until everyone we love

is safe is what you said.

" Practice ", from Messenger: New and Selected Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Collections by Ellen Bryant Voigt include:

Headwaters: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2013)

Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W. W. Norton, 2007)

Shadow of Heaven (W. W. Norton, 2002)

Kyrie (W. W. Norton, 1995)

Two Trees (W. W. Norton, 1992)

The Lotus Flowers (W. W. Norton, 1987)

The Forces of Plenty (Carnegie Mellon University Press,1983)

Claiming Kin (Wesleyan University Press, 1976)

Teaching Ideas

Students used to analyzing isolated poems can find the Kyrie sequence powerful. They will recognize the parallels to books written in single-narrator verses like Reynolds’s Long Way Down and Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming. To emphasize the changing if unnamed narrators, I like to teach two of Voigt’s Kyrie sonnets in conversation. The constraints of her chosen form are almost hidden by the narrative and yet thought-provoking in analysis. The first sonnet is a letter from a lover who has left for WWl, beginning, "Dear Mattie, You’re sweet to write me every day." Students marvel at the compressed information about the requirements of soldiering. They recognize the sober reminder of the military response to the pandemic even as it trains up the men for the European conflict. The letter-writer confides — or reassures — that "In the drills they keep us 20 feet apart/On account of sickness in the camp." Students also grin at that sonnet’s volta and the narrator’s cheerier closing, a promise in a couplet: “"In case you think to send more pie, send two/ I’ll try to bring you back some French perfume."

Some fourteen sonnets later in the sequence, a teacher describes the paralyzing fear of contagion as the flu begins to kill the community. This poem begins, "All day, one room: me, and the cherubim." Not to make light of that terrible time, but every teacher who stocks tissues and hand-sanitizer will relate. The verse continues, "they coughed/and snuffed in their double desks, facing me—/they sneezed and spit on books we passed around and on the boots I tied, retied, barely/out of school myself." In fourteen lines Voigt has the reader experience vulnerability and fear in the close quarters of the schoolroom.

A selection of eight of the untitled sonnets (including the two referenced here) are available online.

The full text includes a closing short essay on the pandemic and its consequences.

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Laura Turchi teaches curriculum theory and English language arts methods at the University of Houston. She coedits the "Teaching Shakespeare" column for English Journal with Ann Christensen and coauthored Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach with Ayanna Thompson . For years she chaired the education department at Warren Wilson College, in Asheville, North Carolina, and was inspired by readings by poets (and fiction writers) in the MFA Program for Writers there. She began her career teaching secondary English language arts in Tucson, Arizona, and Naperville, Illinois, and learning how high school students make sense of institutionalized racism through literature as well as history.