Ellen bryant voigt biography of michael

  • Ellen Bryant Voigt is one of the most deservedly revered figures in contemporary American poetry, a former Chancellor of the Academy of.
  • Voigt is a seasoned poet in full confident stride.
  • This month on the Poetry Podcast, Michael Dickman reads “Cow,” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, which juxtaposes the pastoral aspects of farm life.

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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 planerat arbete . 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

  • ellen bryant voigt biography of michael

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    Voigt, Ellen Bryant 1943–

    PERSONAL:

    Born May 9, 1943, in Danville, VA; daughter of Lloyd Gilmore (a farmer) and Missouri Eleanor (an elementary school teacher) Bryant; married Francis George Wilhelm Voigt (an educator, administrator, and corporate executive), September 5, 1965; children: Julia Dudley, William Bryant. Education: Converse College, B.A., 1964; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1966.

    ADDRESSES:

    Home—Marshfield, VT.

    CAREER:

    University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, technical writer for College of Pharmacy, 1965-66; Iowa Wesleyan College, Mount Pleasant, IA, instructor in English, 1966-69; Goddard College, Plainfield, VT, teacher of literature and writing, 1970-78, director of writing program, 1975-79; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, associate professor of creative writing, 1979-82; Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, NC, visiting faculty member in Master's of Fine Arts program for writers, beginning 1981. Professional pianist. Teacher at writers' confer