This month on the Poetry Podcast, Michael Dickman reads “Cow,” bygd Ellen Bryant Voigt, which juxtaposes the pastoral aspects of farm life with its violent realities:
a girl held out a handful of grass calling the cow as you would a dog no dice so what if she recoiled to see me burst from the house with an axe I held it by the blade I tapped with the handle where the steaks come from
The juxtaposition is heightened by the absence of punctuation, which runs the disparate components of the poem together. Speaking generally about the poetic tradition of omitting punctuation, Dickman says that the technique provides “a way to read the poems in more than one direction.”
Dickman also reads his poem “My Honeybee,” which, like “Cow,” relies on what he calls a series of “electric moments doing their own thing … that then do the work for the whole poem”:
Your yellow- and-black stingers
A child’s drawing
Some riddle from before we were born that sounds like a river and spreads on toa
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MacArthur Fellow
National Book Award Finalist
Guggenheim Fellow
O. B. Hardison, Jr. Prize
“Reading Voigt one comes to understand that what we think of as reality is the product of both painstaking observation and imagination.… She favors a language that is both precise and lush, and a narrative that fryst vatten both immediately accessible and richly layered with meaning.”
“Ellen Bryant Voigt’s giant Collected Poems is both the record of a sensibility and the chronicle of a life. The former remains — as it has since the late 1970s — melancholy, careful, attentive, sometimes consoling, heartbreaking or plangent where no consolation can be found. Voigt’s free verse, laced with casual pentameters, looks at the fauna and flora, agricultural and wild, of the upper South, where she grew up, and at the “first frail green in the northeast,” in Vermont, finding an almost Wordsworthian consciousness in “each blade each stem each stalk,” “the white birch bark and o
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Courtesy of Dudley Voigt
Ellen Bryant Voigt
In 1999, when Ellen Bryant Voigt was chosen for a four-year term as Vermont state poet (now called poet laureate), she initiated a special project. With support from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, she created a three-year, statewide program called the Poet Next Door to bring nine contemporary Vermont writers into high school classrooms for conversations about their art, in person or via interactive TV. (Full disclosure: I was one of the participating writers.) Voigt knew that many students believed poets could be found only in books. She hoped to show them that, in Vermont, poets could be right in your neighborhood, no matter how small a town you lived in.
Voigt, now 80, is the author of nine poetry collections, including Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (2007), finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Kyrie: Poems (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Ci