A CONVERSATION WITH ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT

Gregory Donovan: Ellen, last night, you were reading the new poems from your new and selected poems, Messenger, that featured poems that were made up of long sequences of poems. And you were talking a little about that, about the nature of those sequences and what has led you to be involved with them, and I just wanted to ask you a little more about them, about why these sequences have interested you, and what you believe you can accomplish with them that perhaps is different from the short poem.

Ellen Bryant Voigt: I’ ve always been a formalist; not a neo-formalist, but a formalist, which is to say that one of my primary concerns has been the thing made and how it is made. And that may be because I came to poetry from music, so that was sort of my background, and my big interest. And I had written early on—I had written poems that were in sections, but that’ s not the same thing as a sequence. A poem in sections—what it does is that a section break—it’ s sort of a like a triple stanza break to just give you more space. But really the poem itself is ongoing; it’ s a single unit. 

I remember very clearly when I was lucky enough to have a Guggenheim fellowship in 1978. I used the money for childcare and to finish off this room that was what they call a dry attic; it was an empty room over the garage in my house in Vermont. I started writing a poem, and the poem had these two elements in it that I couldn’ t reconcile. It turned out that I could save it and it became a poem that I published then called “Talking the Fire Out.” It had two thrusts to the poem: one was this tradition in the “Southist” superstition or holistic or however you want to believe in it, about people have a gift: if you burn your hand, they can talk the fire out of the hand. So I had that, and then I had snakes. I’ ve always had a lot of snakes in my poems; I grew up with angry snakes and would crawl right in there, and then I had this thing about talking the fire out. 

I realized at the time that earlier in my writing life, I would have divided that into two poems, because of the kind of size of the unit and again because of that formal concern. I could take, you know, the talking the fire out, write one lyric poem that would focus on that, because the advantage of the lyric is really a kind of fierceness or intensity. And that’ s what I would have done. Because I had this grant, because I had this room, I had all day long. And so I thought, I should just really see if I can get these two things in the same poem. And the most practical way to work on that would be to work on these sections but not think of sections in the same way. And to think about sort of braiding these two elements of the poem and what that might require in terms of enough that would be continuous and enough that would be variation, so that if you work in a sequence, then you can vastly change things. You can change the tone incredibly, as though it’ s another poem. And so you can have these different pieces, and then you also have the interest or the pleasure in how you arrange them, you know you can take six pebbles and the sort of order in which you put them, and this continued to that is going to be very different than if you have this other thing that is contingent. And so that’ s really where it started with that one poem. 

I think that that is what ultimately has intrigued me and kept me doing them. I swear off periodically. I say, enough of that, all these poems look alike and they’ ve got all these numbered sections. But I don’ t have a narrative sensibility. I have learned how to use a narrative structure, tell a continuous story that has a beginning, middle, end; that has some sort of movement through time and has actions with consequence. I’ ve taught myself how to do that, but I’ m not drawn to that. I’ m really drawn to those crystallizing moments of greatest intensity of complex emotional feel. 

That’ s what I’ m drawn to; that’ s lyric sensibility. The sequence gave me a way to bring more of the world into any given poem. So I continued to play around with that between the time that I did “Talking the Fire Out”; then my next big project was the narrative one, figuring out how to do that. 

And then, the other thing that sort of happened to me was that after I wrote, [The] Lotus Flowers, and that has all those narratives in it, I had a kind of anti-narrative fit, and for about two and a half years I wrote nothing but fragments. They were lyric fragments; I wrote about eighty-some of them, and they were just middles, they didn’ t have a beginning, middle, and an end—they were just middles! And I came to think of those as études or what painters do when you paint the same haystack every single day; what changes is the light. 

And I thought, what would change for the poet? It probably would be tone, that you could have a single subject, tone would change, and it could just be short. I eventually went back to writing full-length poems. Then there was the question of what I’ d do with these. I wrote some introductory poems, and ran them sort of as variations on a set of themes. It’ s another way of thinking about sequence. Then the next one, the big one, was Kyrie, because what that is is a group of lyric poems that are similar to one another so that any kind of variation or surprise or change has to come in the arrangement from beginning to end, but working with these different pieces.

GD: We’ re having a really interesting conversation about an activity with which many of the people in this room who are listening to you are either fully engaged right now or will be engaged shortly: arranging a book. But you had the unique experience here of going back to other books that you had already spent a great deal of time and effort arranging. And now you had the new task of selecting the poems from the previous books for your New and Selected. And you were chatting with me a little bit about some of the struggles and the surprises you came across in that.

EBV: It is a related question because once you write those long sequences, you’ re kind of stuck with that then. So instead of several reasonably short poems, you now have this long thing. And if you have a bunch of them, this can be problematic. In other books, like in the Two Trees, where I had those three sets of variations, those were little sequences within a given book. So, what happens if you say the Two Trees was, I don’ t know, sixty pages or something like that—so now you’ re going to select from it to have just a kind of sample representation in a Selected Poems, and you’ re going to boil that down to twenty-five pages. So which twenty-five pages do you do? As soon as you say, Oh, well I have to put the sequences in, well, that could be twenty of your twenty-five pages. 

It’ s also a problem if the thing made is a whole book, which I think it should be, so that there’ s some sort of structure or some ordering to it. Let’ s say eighteen pages that exist in sequences before, that was part of sixty pages, and now is part of twenty-fve pages. You see right away how the proportions automatically change. 

So that was one problem that I had to deal with and also then the question of, well, what do you do with a book-long sequence? And I thought for a long time that was going to be the hardest problem; I put it off for last. I really thought probably I’ d have to put the whole thing in there, and I didn’ t like that, because then it’ s way out of proportion to the rest of the book, or not put anything. When Phil Levine did his Selected pretty soon after A Walk with Thomas Jefferson, he didn’ t include it, and I can see why one would just decide not to include it because you’ ve worked very hard to have this thing that’ s fifty-five pages long; you kind of don’ t want to tamper with it. 

But the others, I thought, oh, this’ d be great—go back to that first book, and you only have to save eight pages of it; take eight poems out of the fifty-five pages, great. These I can live with, then everything else can disappear. But you go back and you pick out those 8 poems, and again the context changes the relationship-one to another changes—and sometimes they didn’ t always sit well together. Sometimes, by compressing like that, it was the repetition and obsessiveness of the concerns was too big. With other books, I found that there would be, oh yeah, keep this one, keep this one, and the poem didn’ t fit with all of the others. All of a sudden, there’ s this vastly different poem. How does that hang together as a section? 

I found that so much harder than I thought it was going to be. I thought it’ d be a Greatest Hits, you could ask, you know, five friends. I tried that and they didn’ t agree. And there was no help at all, made it worse. Because I’ d end up with thirty poems; they’ d cut it from fifty to thirty—this doesn’ t help. 

So it took me a long time to get rid of my own a priori notions about what it was going to be and to go back to the thing that I truly believe, which is that when it gets down to it, you’ re really making a very large poem. You’ re making it in a different way, because now all the stanzas have been written, and so you’ re looking to see what is the best relation, one to another. And the thing that is hard is when you do it for 240 pages, and your only experience has been doing it for sixty pages. So just to hold all of that in your mind I found exhausting. But once I realized there was going to be no shortcut, and that was really what I had to do, then there was this sort of excitement on it—to rearrange. 

The first section opens with a poem that was buried in the middle of my first book. I didn’ t know when I first wrote that first book that this was going to be a kind of recurring kind of focus. Now, it opens what has to be this whole 240-page book. The poem that opened my first book is now the last poem in the first section, because I need that to sort of move from this overall concern to a more particular concern. The poem that opens the second section is a long poem, the longest poem in my second book, the longest poem I had ever written, three pages long, and now that opens the second section as a way of declaring something different. 

So it’ s the same kinds of things that you think about in a single poem, even in a short poem, in a sectioned poem, in a sequence when you say what goes first, what goes next, and how is it radically different if you change that. So once I gave myself over to it, it turned out the hardest one to do was The Lotus Flowers, which I thought was going to be the easiest—it was the hardest one, because it seemed that that book was a narrative project, but what I had in the original book, I had other kinds of things. I had a context for it that had shorter poems and other kinds of poems, when I picked out those narratives, like, how many poems can you write about this farm in Virginia? And then what do you do with “Dancing with Poets”? I came this close to leaving “Dancing with Poets” out, because it just did not go well with other things. 

GD: One of your best known poems . . .

EBV: Yeah. But now, it’ s in a different place, and in order to include it, I had to include two other poems that were not on my list to include, because I had to lead up to it, I had to lead away from it. That used to end The Lotus Flowers, that section there from The Lotus Flowers ends with the title poem. So all of that done, then I had saved for the end, it was the easiest one to do. And the reason was it was the easiest one to do was because it had a narrative structure, and so I could just think like a novelist and say, which of these minor characters do I leave out. I had the thing. There was a little bit of tinkering within that you know of flipping a couple of poems, this one will come earlier, this one…to move it along faster. But to make that arc, set of fifty-five pieces, make that arc with thirty-five. 

That was the easiest to do. I have far more poems in this Selected from Shadow of Heaven than I thought I would do. Here’ s the problem with the sequences: That [Shadow of Heaven] has two long sequences in it; one of them fifteen pages, one of them seventeen pages. And I didn’ t want it to be only that because the new poem section opens with a sequence, “The Feeder,” right? So I felt I had to have some short poems before, then I put the two sequences together, unlike the way it is in Shadow of Heaven, and then I just felt I had to end on something else. I had to end on some short poems, so in order to do that, it ended up a longer section. 

All of this is to say that, you know, I sat there for days and weeks and did it abstractly and did it with lists, and did it with an oh and this, oh okay, ten pages from the first book, fifteen pages from the second book, twenty pages from the third, no—because I love that kind of thing, I love pattern of those formal arrangements. And form exists apart from what the form serves. But to do that is very dangerous. 

So, my advice to you when you start doing this: first, go through all the poems and, say, make two piles: this I can live with, this goes into the library here at VCU, and in thirty years, I’ ll be embarrassed, but this is where I am right now; and these others, just not. Either you tried something that was Ashberian or something and then you said I’ m not Ashbery; I’ m not going to go in that direction—so you make the two piles. Once you have the first pile, you have to love them all equally. Don’ t do that abstract thing, which is, I should open my manuscript with my strongest poem. And then I’ ll end my manuscript with my other strongest poem. And then have a muddle in the middle. Don’ t do that. Love them all equally, and say these are all my poems. Now, what is the arrangement that will show the poem in its best light, which is to say, allow the reader to come to it without bias, allow the reader to be surprised by it and not think, oh, bird poem, another bird poem? 

I always used for the other books, and I recommend to you, an ironing board, especially since people don’ t iron anymore, because you can put that up and leave it up, and that’ s the way that you can lay out all the poems, so that you constantly see just enough of the poem. If you are looking at a list of your titles, you forget what’ s actually on the page. You line it up with the ironing board, then you really can see first this poem and then that one and then that one and then that one. And what if you rearrange that, just a little bit? You take out that second poem, you try another second poem, what does that do? What kind of arc does that . . . and if you do it on the ironing board, you can leave it up all the time; you don’ t have to clear your dining room table or anything. It’ s just there, and every time you walk by it, then you can think, okay, if I move this one there, it’ s a formal exercise. The difference between doing that and what you’ ve done all along with your poems is just that it’ s all written. So it’ s more like moving around stanzas rather than moving around two stanzas so you can write a third one. And you just have to deal with it whatever is there, very concrete, palpable.

GD: We all are introspective enough when we write in individual poems; that’ s plenty of introspection. I know that it can feel burdensome, sometimes, to return to work. And rather than ask questions about the work, ask questions about yourself. But inevitably, when you’ re putting a book of New and Selected [poems] together, you’ re going to be forced into self-reflection. What kinds of things did you feel like you ran across, comfortable or uncomfortable, as you look back at your first book and came along through the development that you had and ended up in Shadow of Heaven, and then the new poems? Did you notice an arc of development, or anomalous moments in that story, or . . . ?

EBV: Very frequently, a first book is a kind of an anthology: where you’ ve been what you’ ve tried. There are some books that are exceptions to that if you think of something like The Lost Pilot, [by James Tate] that is tightly unified in style, in formal choice, in tone, in everything. Of those two categories, mine was very definitely that kind of anthology thing, because, you know, my first book was published in 1976, so I’ d been writing seriously and working on poems for twelve years. Some of those poems in the first book were poems I wrote in 1968, some of them were poems I’ d written in 1974. I was already kind of a different person by the time I finished that book. 

But the main thing that struck me in going through it: I wish I knew then some of the things that I know now, just in terms of the tools that you need, ways to solve problems, craft. And where that struck me the most was with lineation. That is the most painful thing to see because I’ ve always written off my ear. And so I was always paying a huge amount of attention to lineation, to line breaks and stanza breaks. And I thought I knew what I was doing then; I did not know what I was doing, at all. And so I’ d go back to some of those places and I’ d think, why did you do that? And that’ s where I was very tempted to make changes. And a couple of times I tried that. I wasted a whole lot of time by just thinking, oh, well I can certainly fix that . . . no, the whole thing will unravel in your hands. “The point is it  / falls and falls on trees and houses.” I mean that’ s just egregious, why would you do that? I can move that, I mean, I shouldn’ t have a line break after “it.” This is horrible, I’ m going to change that. I tried changing it, and then I saw that I had very flat lines . . . both of the two lines were very flat, and that was probably why, then, I thought, I’ ll just jazz it up with this severe enjambment. 

So in seeing that kind of thing, I wish now . . . it turned out I found out at a very late date that, for Norton, they wanted it all computerized, so I had to have it scanned in. This made the problem even more, because if I knew enough about computers, I would have told them to just make a, what is it called, PDF?—that thing that you can’ t change. I paid this guy to scan this in so I’ d have it all on the disk, and he said, well do you want PDF? And I said, what’ s PDF? And he said, well do you want to be able to make any changes on it? And I said, of course, yes! What the computer did was to treat it as prose, so I got all of these poems from all the books without lineation. So I had to go through and restore the lineation, or reconsider the lineation. And I thought, okay, here’ s a chance to learn something; let’ s see if you can do it without looking at the books. And that was where I caught it, you see, that’ s where I saw places then I thought well surely this is where I put the line break . . . uh-uh, that was not where I put the line break. But, as I say, the places where I tried to undo it, then the poems just really came apart in my hands. 

And this also happened when I was trying to solve some problems with the structure of the individual sections. Then I would say to myself, okay, you weren’ t going to use x poem because you hate that middle stanza in there, it feels clumpy to you, so just fix that stanza. This didn’ t always work either. There ended up being three of the old poems—enough that you would say, oh yeah, I see that she revised that one; otherwise, no. 

GD: You know, you mentioned that snakes came into your poems. For me, that happens most notably in “The Lotus Flowers.” It’ s a poem that I teach often and use it as emblematic of a number of different things. One of them is you handle the most powerful and frightening moment of the poem almost offhandedly, which is, I think, is quite studied, and actually, is part of your character, as a person and as a writer. But also, it reminds me of the way Flannery O’ Connor handles violence in her stories. We all know no writer would dare to be more violent than Flannery O’ Connor can sometimes be. But when people show up with guns in her stories, she just says, they all had guns. That reticence and care and stringency in your work is something that I think goes way back in you; I mean I think it comes out of your origins as a poet. I wondered if you would comment about that. Because the moment that I’ m talking about, of course, is the moment when the girl goes to fetch water, puts her hand in the water, and notices, almost offhandedly, the curl near her hand is a snake in the water.

EBV: I think that one thing . . . again, that that is a poem that I wrote when I was trying to learn how to do a narrative structure. And this was learned; this was willfully learned, that you’ ve got to move through time, and you have to have actions, actions that have consequence. I had no interest in those things; if I’ m going to move it through time, and the importance of those actions, I have got to get the person from here over to here. I don’ t like doing that. And one of the reasons I don’ t like it, first of all I don’ t care about it, I don’ t notice enough detail about it, it doesn’ t seem to matter to me how they got there—I don’ t care. I want to get to the next, sort of charged, moment. 

And I also don’ t like it because one of the things I that learned in trying to write narrative is that you have to use a whole lot of prepositions. And every time you use a preposition, you are writing an anapest, at least. You’ re throwing into your line an extra unstressed syllable. I would rather have the overloaded line, where, if you’ ve got ten syllables, let’ s make six of them stresses, let’ s make seven of them stresses—that’ s a way to intensify. So if you’ ve got, you know, a ten-syllable line, and you only got three stresses, it’ s flat. So one of the things in writing a narrative, I had to write a longer line, because you chop that up into short lines, man, you are really in trouble. So then, “James went down the street, and into the coffeeshop and sat on the stool” is about as boring as it can get. So the best you can do is put it all in one line so you have the momentum of the line: “James went down the street and into the coffeeshop and sat on top of the stool.” You get at least that kind of movement in it. It seems to me that I was always looking at places when that could be elided, when any of that could be elided. 

One of the things that you can use, is you can use the “camera eye.” You set up the point of view of this speaker girl who goes then to get water, so you have to do that, right? So there she goes, leaving the other ones behind, blah blah blah blah, go down, take bucket, boring! This bores me. This is the work of it, to try to do that and keep that crisp. But then once you get there, you’ ve set up the “camera eye,” you can just roll the camera. So, she puts her hand in the water; she looks at the hand; then she can look at the next thing; then she can look at the next thing. I think that that’ s just a lyrical impulse. If what the eye sees is something violent or if it’ s something ugly or if it’ s something whatever; it’ s what the camera sees. 

But, in going back to the poems and looking at them, the thing that struck me about The Lotus Flowers that I had never seen before, until I took these poems out, and I was looking at the handful of them to put together, is that eight of the ten narratives that I had planned to use used the past perfect participle: “Having been the farmer’ s daughter, she didn’ t want to be . . . ” There it is, right in the first line. “Feast Day”: “Having killed the hog, having hung it up by the heels”….having done all this, having—there, it’ s a whole catalog on the past tense. The one where the father poisons the dog: “The dog lay under the house, having crawled back beyond.” It was in every one of those narratives. Now, I can explain that, you know, kind of semi-logically and say that these poems, in an effort to write narrative, was really an effort to write elegy. That’ s what that is; it was going back to a previous time, writing out of that previous time that’ s gone. But this is a problem when you put them all together. I tried to take some of them out . . . well, can’ t I just drop that one, can’ t I just use something else? Couldn’ t I just open the poem: “a farmer’ s daughter, she didn’ t want to be a farmer’ s wife.” No, no . . . it had to be “having been”—that was all of that past and the weight of the past. The danger is the reader catches on—so here it is, you’ re doing it again. So then each subsequent poem becomes a pallet, you know, pulling it off of the presses after the other one. Did I really answer your question? I don’ t think I answered your question. We got way away from snakes.

GD: You did great. I’ m also interested in, I suppose, I was talking a little bit about origins of that reticence to be showy. A poet who is so strongly interested in what I would call lush musical effects, you have in your poems constantly a tension between that beauty and intensity and luxuriousness and the standards you seem to be holding yourself to that I would guess, I’ ll just take a stab at it, and say for me they come out of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, poets who refused always to be trashy. They never allowed themselves to be obvious or exaggerated or willfully emphasizing the dramatic moment in excess. They never did that, and that’ s something I never find in your poems. Is there an origin of that?

EBV: I think it really comes from music. If you’ re going to play Chopin, let’ s say, have you seen performers, and they lift their hands up like this over the keyboard—very dramatic gesture, isn’ t it? It’ s very dangerous to take your hands off of the keys. And also, technique is there always to serve something else, and then something else in music is expressiveness. That’ s what it’ s for. You don’ t go out and say, look at me and how I can do arpeggios. You practice those arpeggios over and over and over and over again so that when you get to a passage of arpeggios when you’ re playing Chopin, you’ re not thinking arpeggios, your fingers know it. It’ s like Larry Bird—go out and take a thousand foul shots, every day, so that when you actually get up to the line to take the foul shot, you’ re not thinking, what is my technique, how do I do this? You put it in the muscle. That’ s really more where it comes from. 

If, as a reader, you see the hand of the poet that means the materials of the poem cannot work on you. And I want them to work on you. I want to pick your pocket. I want you to see what I saw; I want you to feel what I felt. And if you’ re constantly aware, you won’ t. And I think I have a greater chance at recreating or fixing the world if all of that stuff is serving some other purpose. Although, certainly then, when I started writing poems, I was very drawn to poets who did that. I was very drawn to that kind of restraint, starting with [Donald] Justice, I would say, Bishop, you know, and a number of other people, rather than the more sort of forthcoming poets whom I’ ve also come to love. You find your tribe. It’ s not that you want to emulate them; you just go, I belong to that tribe.

David Wojahn: I just had a question about Kyrie. And, it’ s a question about how you go about researching a poem or a sequence such as that. And maybe, you know, what the dangers of research are. Where do you stop? And I’ ve noticed increasingly over the past few years that maybe it’ s because of the internet, and, you know, wanting to write a poem about alchemy, you just call it up on your computer and you have all the information you need about alchemy; you don’ t even have to go to a library. And how did you go about trying to think about the historical period?

EBV: First of all, this was not a designed product. I did not set out to write a sonnet sequence, I did not set out to write a sequence about the influenza. I was interested after what happened with Two Trees with those tonal variations.  When I put the book together and I saved about two dozen out of the eighty-eight and put them together, I noticed that, here I was, doing this project two and a half years, you know, writing nothing fragments;  tone was going to change; there was a tone missing; there was no irony. It seemed to me, a fifty-year-old woman who has no irony in her makeup, that this was very unseemly. I was much too earnest, and I thought, this is the next thing you need to learn to do: an ironic view which really says there is no truth to be found, that says two things are there in equal weight to be seen. 

So I thought, okay, let me see if I can write a persona poem from the point of view of someone whose circumstance is so that, if they didn’ t have an ironic view, they would shoot themselves. And what popped into my head was this country doctor that my father used to tell stories about, the person who delivered him and for whom he was named. And so he used to always tell this story about Dr. Gilmore Reynolds and how he came around during the epidemic, came around on his horse. There was nothing he could do, he had no way to treat it, and that was true of most things, nothing to do. So he would come in, and he would tell you what you had, and that was about all he could do. And I thought, now that guy, he would have to have an ironic view of the world. So, that was my interest in the epidemic; it was an interest in tone. What tone, how would he approach the world, how would he think about it? So I wrote a longish—I don’ t know—it was about fifty lines—poem from his point of view, and that was it. I had no interest in the flu, none. 

Then the next thing that I happened to write—I had been wanting to write for a little while—my father’ s mother died in 1914 in childbirth, before the epidemic. The epidemic started in 1917, 1918, right in there, so it was all before that. He was the oldest of five, and he was eight. What happened then was that my grandfather farmed them all out to relatives. My father went to live with his aunt and uncle who were nineteen and eighteen. He lived with them until he was twelve while my grandfather looked for a maiden lady to marry, and he married my father’ s stepmother, Miss Sally. And then in the fall of 1918, they brought them all back together except the baby. They left the baby where she was, and they brought all the other children back. 

So when my son turned eight, I had this moment of astonishment when I looked at him on his birthday. Now, you all have this. You have data from your family that you’ ve just known, I mean, you’ ve just known forever. We’ d go by that grave every Sunday; my father would go out, and he would stand by the grave, and he would weep—you know, his mother’ s grave. So you know that, that’ s just a given thing. But it has not registered on you what the feeling/experience of that would be. That was my case, and when I had a child—this was my second child; the first one was a girl. When I had a boy, and he turned eight, and I looked at him and I thought, Jesus Christ. This was the age my father lost his mother and when he was sent away to live with teenagers for four years. And I was stunned by understanding what that was, and how that,of course, shaped all the rest of his life, everything that he was. 

So sometime after that, then—my son was born in 1976, he turned eight, then, in 1984. In 1992, then, I sat down to write this poem from the point of view of a boy standing by the bed when his mother’ s dying. And I thought to myself, you need some real constriction on this; you need something that’ s going to keep this thing from, like, blowing out of the water. So I thought I would write a sonnet, so I did. I wrote a sonnet. Point of view: boy is standing there looking at the mother. Mother is dying. I wasn’ t going to write a sonnet sequence, I was just going to write the one sonnet. 

Then because I write very slowly, some time goes by before I write anything else, and I had this kind of aha! moment, which was the realization that, during the epidemic, that that was the time when my father’ s experience was repeated over and over and over. So then I had in mind to write one of my little shorter experiences, which is about six or seven sonnets. And I thought, okay, this would be good to have the form, and if I could have seven of these—where it is the same experience over and over and over, and I have seven different speakers who speak it in the same form—I got a little sequence. So I wrote that; I thought I was done. I had no—again, I had no interest in the epidemic; I thought I had no interest in the epidemic. Turns out that I had written a lot of poems that deal, in one way or another, with impingement of the individual on community, and community on the individual. You can define community however way you want to: family, larger than that. But that has been something that I have always been drawn to. And this was kind of the perfect dramatic situation for looking at that. 

Time goes by. My editor keeps saying, I really like those poems where everybody’ s coughing and dying, why don’ t you write some more of those, and I was saying, who wants more of those? Again, the possibility to see, okay, how far can you extend the sequence? How many of these can you have, not looking at variation, looking at alike, alike, alike, alike, alike? How intense can you get that way before your reader runs screaming from the room or before the poems become imitations of one another? So I got up to about fifteen, and then I thought I truly was done—truly done. And they were all completely lyric in that they were at that moment of the worst of the epidemic. Everybody, in extremis. Absolutely, fourteen lines, in extremis, that’ s what they were—fifteen. 

I went up to Idaho to do a week in Idaho—Moscow, Idaho. Not a lot to do there, so I was staying in this motel, and I was doing a class every day, and they have a very nice library there. And I live out in the country, and this was before the internet stuff, right? So, I thought, hmm, I’ ll go to the library, I probably should find out something about this epidemic before I publish these fifteen poems, you know, and say, this is what the experience was. I better go do some research. So I went over to their library and did this big search. 

And I found out that there wasn’ t anything. There was one article from the National Geographic that was published in the fifties, and it had some pictures of everyone wearing masks in San Francisco, and there was one book by Alfred Crosby, historian. So, that kind of intrigued me then. Then I had another kind of level of interest, which was, why didn’ t people talk about this? So then I really got the kind of research bug, and I thought, let’ s go investigate. So I read a lot of World War I history, because I had enough, just enough information from Crosby. For instance, twice as many American soldiers died of flu as died of war wounds. 

There, you know, go look at, you know, descriptions of the battles. They don’ t mention the flu; it’ s just not in there! Well, what about this great flowering of American letters in the twenties? All those people lived through it, right? So I go and look there . . . not there. Even the great memoirs, Goodbye to All That? He got it, he was sent back from the front—[Robert] Graves was sent back from the front with influenza—one paragraph. Mary McCarthy? Her parents put her and her brother on the train in Seattle because of the dangers of the flu, sent them, they were, I think, six and eight, sent them cross country to maiden aunts in Minneapolis. Then the parents got it and died, and she was brought up by these maiden aunts in Minneapolis. Now, this is kind of life-shaping, hmm? Two paragraphs. 

That is when I got intrigued about the actual event, and the worse thing that happened to me for awhile was the Crosby book, because then I had information, and I wrote some dreadful poems. I wrote a dozen of the worst—because they were so encumbered by information. That was when I thought I was going to be this historian, and nobody else talked about [it] so I was going to talk about it. And they were horrible—things like “Thirty Million Dead,” and “Black Jack Pershing Crosses the Sea!” So I saw that they were awful, and I first thought it was a sign that the whole sequence was done, and I said okay. 

But I thought what could be useful would be just to read a lot of fiction that was written in the twenties, to help me with some notion of idiom, because I really wanted these speakers to believable. And I thought, okay, I can continue to do kind of secret research, to see if anyone refers to it, and then at least I’ ll sort of have in my ear the syntax and what the idiom was. That was my helpful research, was reading a lot, a lot, a lot of fiction of the time, going back and rereading Ford Madox Ford and Willa Cather, and you know, all those people, to have some sense of the syntax. 

I know that that’ s a very long answer, but I guess some of it depends on, you have to know your own temperament. My temperament is very didactic, and dogged. So for me, the worst thing: information that I have to instruct people on, because then, that is what I would try to get the poems to honor. And I find this a lot in young people’ s work that I see; they do the same thing. If you come to the conclusion before you have the discovery of the poem, you ought to be writing an essay. It’ ll kill a poem. No matter how intriguing this information is that you have discovered, I would say, try to imagine it first. Then you can go back and say, well, I imagined something that couldn’ t possibly be. I had plastic flowers in a poem, and they didn’ t invent plastic ‘til the forties. But I think that all of it ultimately has to be imagined. If you are of a temperament that you can look up something on the internet and that will start you thinking about something and spur something—terrific, go do it. But then, let go of whatever it was that you found. Your job is not to convey information to the world. There are other forms of that that are much more efficient than poems. It isn’ t what poems do. 

Gary Sange: What I hear . . . what you just said . . . is the influence of your father, and what must have been his isolation, estrangement, what it was like with his involvement with his mother that just kept pressing . . .

EBV: When he had died, it was all about Dr. Reynolds and how Dr. Reynolds came and gave them all corn liquor. He loved to tell the story because his little moral to the story was, “And we all survived. We didn’ t need high-tech Western medicine.” He was a very superstitious man. But the facts of it, the fact that they were brought back after the four years, lodged in his memory because it was so charged. That’ s that lyrical power again. It was charged. I didn’ t know why it was charged. I had not made that connection in any kind of way, but it was charged, the story that came down. He’ d love to tell that story. He had other stories he would tell, like how somebody cured their sore throat by putting their finger in an open socket: you put your finger in the socket and then you put your other hand on your throat, and then the electricity comes down and just zaps it right out of there. 

Tarfia Faizullah: You were saying that poems don’ t convey, or poems aren’ t the best source of conveying information. So what, in your opinion, do poems do?

EBV: What do poems do? They set truth to music. My hope is that somebody would read Kyrie and have some sense of what it must have been like, given that we’ re in our own epidemic. That’ s been a kind of interesting thing to see. Because in 1995—well, I first started reading them I guess around 1993, 1994—whenever I read them, I would have to give like a five-minute thing ahead of time because nobody in the room had ever heard of it. There was a pandemic, and at that time they thought it had killed thirty million people. Now, they figure it’ s over a hundred million people, but people haven’ t heard about it. The reason you heard about it is because of the other viruses. You have a motivation to think about what it might have been like. 

Defoe wrote the Journal of the Plague Year, not during the plague; this is when they thought the plague was coming back to London. That’ s when he wrote it. 

What a poem can do that Alfred Crosby could not do was to take a person and elicit from them some imagined felt experience about it. His book is fabulous if you have any interest in that period. It’ s just great, and it’ s full of statistics. And it’ s like with the Holocaust—you cannot get your soul to incorporate the figures. You can do that rationally. But to feel that, to incorporate it into your being, into your soul; that’ s the great thing that literature does. It makes us incorporate into our souls experience that is beyond our own little restricted whatever-it-is. Isn’ t that why we read? Isn’ t that why we love it? You can feel your own being stretch; because of that you’ ve been able to enter through the discipline of the art and through the imagination that is at work there. Then that is your little wormhole. So you go through that little wormhole into this larger experience. Those are the memorable poems; those are the great poems. 

You know, these things go in waves and the particular wave that we’ re in right now puts a very high premium on being clever. And there’ s a lot of work that I see in magazines, I see everywhere that is terribly clever. You know, you drop out all the nouns, or you take a sentence and you chop it up, throw it all around the page. So, I’ ve already passed that fork in the road. Everything else drives us to shut down, to defend, to be narrow, to be self-interested—everything else in the world. 

GS: With all the reading and writing I’ ve done over these years, the hunger I believe has increased. And when I read Moby Dick again, after having taught it way back in ’ 67, and see all those notes, what that guy knew or didn’ t know—I can read pretty well, and that ability I want to take advantage of, as well as the urgency to know more soon. 

GD: The books you read again, after years away from them, they’ re just completely different books.

DW: Ellen, I’ ve got a question about—you’ re a poet who’ s just so steeped in the tradition of American poetry and poetry in the English tradition too. And in The Flexible Lyric you have a wonderful piece where you talk about a [Nazim] Hikmet poem. And I just wondered what you get as a writer from world poetry and translation, from writers who don’ t come from our tradition—which of those people have influenced you and have meant something to you?

EBV: For the same reason, it expands our view, you know, of what the world is, what human experience is. It’ s very difficult for me because I do love the music of poems so much. That to read in translation—I don’ t care how good the translator is. For instance, I think [Cesare] Pavese survives in even bad translations. I think that he survives because of that sort of character-driven nature of those poems is something that can come to you even if you don’ t have the language that it’ s in. And also because, if you compare translations, then that’ s another real clue that this might be somebody that you could really study and learn from even if you don’ t have Italian because of similarity in the translations—in his case, you know, an attempt to try to have a kind of plain style that makes it possible. 

Also as other things get translated, you may not be able really to take in all the poems by Rilke. I can’ t; I don’ t have German. But at this point, now that we have really fantastic translations, you take the Stephen Mitchell, you take the [Edward] Snow—start there, those are the biggest. Then you can also find individual poems that have been translated by a whole lot of different people. So you can take, like, “Washing the Corpse,” you’ ve got a Randall Jarrell translation, and you toss that in there. And you look at all the places where it’ s slightly different. And it’ s a fantastic way—it’ s like memorizing a poem. It’ s a way to get deep inside the poem. So you might just end up, as I say, not having the whole body of the work, but just having particular poems that are really important to you. Rilke has always been very, very important to me, starting with—I first read Rilke in those Herter Norton translations, which are flowery and rhetorical, and all these kind of like big gestures. It’ s only like twenty years later and I read the Stephen Mitchell and I go, that was Herter Norton, that wasn’ t Rilke, just as a way to start, you know, a way in. I’ d say Rilke, I’ d say Pavese.

GD: I’ ve been at work on a translation of The Duino Elegies for a number of years and when I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, there was a woman there, a photographer from Vienna. And so I asked her to come and visit my studio so we could discuss the poem. And there was one passage in one of the elegies that was translated wildly differently between all of the translators. And they did not meet each other; it was just an explosion of variety in this passage. So I asked her if she would do me the kindness of reading some passage of Rilke to me aloud so that I could hear the sound. And then when I got to the end of that, I had craftily chosen that very passage so that I could say, “Well, what do you think that means?” And she looked at me and she said, “This is Rilke!”

GS: I had the experience last weekend of reading one of my poems in English and in Greek in front of the Greek Orthodox Church, and I’ m putting together a book of poems about this little village on the isle of Lesbos. And I was wondering whether, if you have ever had the experience of reading an Ellen Voigt poem in another language?

EBV: Yeah, I’ ve had some. They were not happy experiences. Well, I shouldn’ t say that. There was one experience which was really interesting and one that was excruciating. The one that was excruciating was in Germany, and I had a German translator. We had decided on the poems ahead of time, so I would do the poem in English, and then she would do her translation in German. And I know a little bit of German. I know enough—it was really off, or it was really reductive. The one that I remember was from the Two Trees: “but with other women,/moths on the screen,” sometimes he hears—that. And there’ s a reference in there to “the fox/shrieks in the field,” and what she translated was not that; it was not that. And so I asked her about it later. I said, “You know, my German is really not very good, but how did you translate that?” And she said, “Well, here, you know, we think of foxes barking, and so this was the word to get the bark of the fox.” And I said, “Yeah, I mean, it’ s metaphor, right? It’ s about a relationship, it’ s about a man’ s attitude towards women, so shriek is important. That carries a different sound.” And she said, “Yes, I know, but our foxes bark.” And I said, “Well, our foxes don’ t shriek either. I mean, it doesn’ t sound like that it’ s shrieking.” So it seemed to me so reductive and at such a literal level that I found it excruciating. 

The other time was really kind of interesting—when William Meredith was the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, which became the laureateship, right. When he was there, everybody that he invited to come and read, he had a signer, he had a translator from Gallaudet College, who stood beside you and did it in sign while you were talking, so it was immediate and it was in sign. And I thought that was fabulous, but I couldn’ t see it. But to know that it was there—that was really vastly interesting to me. And the other thing was, the Gallaudet theater group, for each one of us that gave a reading, they did one poem that they performed. I thought that that too would feel sort of reductive, but I found that quite wonderful, because that was a translation to another genre. 

GD: I had a student in a class . . . at one time I taught “Creative Writing Pedagogy.” This student taught deaf students. It is an impediment to being a poet to be deaf. There’ s no way around that. However, what she did was videotape her students performing their poems, and it was a revelation about the nature of what percentage of what we do is performance. Of course, we’ re doing performance on the page and in sound, and when you take over another element into it, which is visual, an actual visual presentation, that becomes an equally important ingredient. And those poems were extremely effective, and they were genuine poems, but they required that you see them performed. 

EBV: Right. It’ s a different form, a different genre entirely. But, as is the case with drama to begin with. You read a Shakespeare play on the page, it’ s one thing, but then to have it enacted in front of you is a different experience. So that’ s as close as I ever came. I never tried to translate my own poem.

GD: Thank you very much Ellen. 

EBV: Thanks for coming.  

   Contributor’s notes

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