Ellen Bryant Voigt's readings are intimate affairs. She makes eye contact with the audience and she washes the crowd with the warmth of her still-Southern accent, mellowed by her years in Vermont. The Abernethy Room is particularly conducive to her style of reading — the small space, warm wood and oriental carpets — with one exception: the room seems to demand silence. Voigt, however, demands that the listener respond to her work in whatever way they see fit. Despite the austere portrait of Abernethy himself Voigt advised, "Poetry's actually quite subversive, so anytime you want to giggle or laugh or make a rude noise ..." She let the sentence hang, the silence having been broken.
Voigt chose to read from two of her six collections of poetry, "The Lotus Flowers" and "Shadow of Heaven." She has, throughout her career, continued to experiment with voice and style, form and rhythm, and her reading ran the gamut of all, from the highly structured to the more free-flowing. She opened with "Stone Pond" from "Lotus Flowers," noting "if it feels like it's sort of suspended then that's what it is," and calling it a very "Vermont" poem.
"Field Trip" from the same volume is another "Vermont" poem, this time dealing with the momentary transcendence of a troubled youth while standing on a precipice (both literal and figurative) between being grounded and free-falling.
One of the aspects of Voigt's poetry that is instantly recognizable is the fact that she shies away from nothing. Whether it be the devastation of losing a child or the sutures holding together a rend in a dog's side, Voigt treats her subject matter with tenderness without dampening the sometimes horrific sense of reality she creates. Her poetry feels organic and seems to beat with the rhythms of life, both wonderful and terrible.
She followed "Field Trip" with two poems she said she "often thought of as companion pieces" though they aren't after one another in the book. Both "The Farmer" and "Amarillis" deal with rural living, and are what Voigt termed "quasi-narrative" in style. In "The Farmer," a farmer goes to collect honey without protection and comes very close to dying from bee stings. The poem ends, "What saved him / were the years of smaller doses — / like minor disappointments, / instructive poison, something he could use." However, the wife in "Amaryllis" is not one for whom "instructive poison" is a benefit, trapped as she is in a life of purely pragmatic consideration. Her husband, however, finds his instruction in the bloated belly of a cow, dead because, as he says, "too full … of sweet clover."
Voigt is a very erudite poet without being stuffy or overbearing. She welcomed others into her scope of knowledge, explained references only as a matter of better understanding her poetry and chatted of her past experiences, both in writing and in life, in between reading her poems.
After giving a little background, she started into poems from "Shadow of Heaven," calling them "edgy," explaining that they were the first poems she had ever written without cigarettes. Among this selection she read "The Lesson," which is perhaps one of the most tenderly honest poems about the relationship between mother and daughter of the 20th century. In it she deftly changes tone between light humor tinged with a little of the feeling that comes with having a mother who always knows best to the gentle generosity of the small sacrifices we make when one we love is hurting. Again, Voigt wields a bold pen, not flinching, even though her reader might, at the stitches on the mother's breast after her mastectomy, not at the daughter's willingness to become whatever it was her mother needed her to be at that moment.
Voigt finished up the evening with a selection from her sequence "The Art of Distance," in which she mediates on the idea that "to see a thing, one has to push it away." Further clarifying this point after finishing the reading, Voigt elaborated on the active nature of poetry and the arts in general, stating "it's not a passive thing."
Active is clearly the correct term in describing Voigt's art, both her poetry and the energy she exudes in person. Currently the Poet Laureate of Vermont, the reading was not Voigt's first exposure at the Middlebury.
This past summer, members of the college and local communities were able to catch her at Bread Loaf, where she was a faculty member.
Written by KATE DEFOREST
