During an evening filled with rhythmic cadences and reflective conversation, Ellen Bryant Voigt, a celebrated poet known for her use of narrative and lyrical techniques, captivated audiences at the latest event in the Lane Lecture Series. Voigt served as Vermont’s poet laureate and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Hosted at the Bechtel Conference Center on Feb. 19, Voigt’s reading and following discussion with fellow poet Jennifer Grotz — Voigt’s former student — offered a deep dive into Voigt’s poetic craft as she shared poems exploring themes of nature, memory, loss, mortality and the complexities of human relationships.

Voigt was introduced by Patrick Phillips, an acclaimed writer, the Eavan Boland Professor of English and Creative Writing and another former student of Voigt’s, who reflected on his first meeting with her. Coming from Georgia, a background far removed from major literary hubs like New York City, he’d felt somewhat intimidated and out of place in the literary world. 

Voigt was Phillip’s conference workshop teacher, and he was “magnetically drawn to Voigt’s vigor,” he said. Under Voigt’s teaching, Phillip was convinced that “real poetry might not be made out of book English” but rather out of the natural character of Voigt’s Southern voice — the same familiar tones and rhythms of his own Southern family. 

Following this reflection on Voigt’s influence as a teacher and literary mentor, Phillips shifted the conversation to Voigt, who began reading selected poems.

Voigt took the time to add humorous remarks before, during and after her poems, infusing the experience with personality and wit. Before she began, Voigt joked that a bigger table was needed to hold the “big fat” book of poems she was to read from. “I thought I was writing slower, but thankfully I wasn’t writing faster,” she teased, garnering a laugh from the audience. 

Voigt began by reading “Tropics,” the first poem of her first book, “Claiming Kin,” which reflects on dreams, desire and impermanence. The poem begins with the quiet intimacy of morning, when the speaker and their partner move together in their sleep. The poem then shifts to the speaker’s dream, full of a tropical, island-like setting marked by stillness and harmony where “the hippo yawns / nods to thick pythons / slack and drowsy who droop down / like untied sashes / from the trees.” This dream is disrupted in the final lines, which move back into the real world and reference the coming shift from summer to autumn. At its heart, the poem suggests intimacy and tranquility are bound to yield to time’s inevitable movement. 

“Tropics” was followed by “The Apology” from Voigt’s “The Forces of Plenty.” Voigt’s reading continued with works spanning five of her nine collections of poetry, including the poems “The Trust,” “Nightshade,” “Redbud,” “Hound,” “Noble Dog,” sections 1, 3 and 5 from “The Art of Distance” and selections from “Kyrie,” a booklet sonnet sequence that centers the 1918-19 flu epidemic. 

After Voigt’s reading, Grotz joined Voigt on stage for a conversation on the craft of poetry and Voigt’s work as a literary teacher. Grotz said Voigt taught her students to distinguish themselves as Apollonian or Dionysiac writers. To be Apollonian is to be characterized by “light and order,” and to be Dionysiac is to be “wild, generating life through orgies,” as Voigt put it. 

Writers should “figure out what [they] are and try to get better at what [they] are not,” said Grotz.

Voigt commented that a good poem combines being structured and spontaneous, balancing the precision of Apollo with the raw, generative energy of Dionysus to create something both refined and alive with emotional intensity. 

When asked how she came to be a writing teacher, Voigt responded, “I think I knew I wanted to be a teacher before I wanted to be a writer.” Voigt came from a family of teachers and was taught to believe that teaching was the highest profession out there. 

Lastly, the floor opened for questions from the audience. When asked about her thoughts and experiences with “metabolizing other people’s poems,” Voigt elicited laughter from the audience by stating, “Oh, I’m sure I’ve stolen plenty of times.” 

Voigt compared writing to painting. Student painters are taught to recreate others’ paintings to develop their own artistic technique. Similarly, Voigt would sometimes instruct her students to pick a poem and try to “copy” the poem’s structure, illustrating her belief that imitation can aid in understanding a poem’s virtues, grasping the mechanics of poetic form and developing one’s unique style. 

After audience questions, the night ended just as it began — with endless praise for Voigt from Patrick Phillips.