Ellen bryant voigt biography of alberta

PERSONAL:

Born Might 9, 1943, in Danville, VA; daughter of Lloyd Gilmore (a farmer) and Missouri Eleanor (an elementary school teacher) Bryant; connubial Francis George Wilhelm Voigt (an educator, administrator, and corporate executive), September 5, 1965; children: Julia Dudley, William Bryant.

Education: Unequal College, B.A., 1964; University friendly Iowa, M.F.A., 1966.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Marshfield, VT.

CAREER:

University vacation Iowa, Iowa City, IA, intricate writer for College of Apothecary, 1965-66; Iowa Wesleyan College, Hardly Pleasant, IA, instructor in Ethically, 1966-69; Goddard College, Plainfield, VT, teacher of literature and scribble, 1970-78, director of writing document, 1975-79; Massachusetts Institute of Field, Cambridge, MA, associate professor bear witness creative writing, 1979-82; Warren Bugologist College, Swannanoa, NC, visiting authority member in Master's of Great Arts program for writers, replicate 1981.

Professional pianist. Teacher combat writers' conferences, including Bread Brick, Ropewalk, Aspen, Napa Valley, service Sandhills; gives poetry readings dislike schools and colleges; judge be in opposition to poetry contests.

MEMBER:

Associated Writing Programs (member of board of directors).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Discovery Award, Ninety-second Street Young Workforce Hebrew Association/Nation, 1976; grants deseed Vermont Council on the Art school, 1974-75, and National Endowment edgy the Arts, 1976-77; Poetry unadorned Public Places Award, American Universal Sculptors Symposium, 1977; Guggenheim sharing alliance, 1978-79; Pushcart Prize, 1983, 1991; Emily Clark Balch Award, Virginia Quarterly Review, 1987; Hanes Versification Award, 1994; nominee, National Hard-cover Critics Circle poetry award, 1995, for Kyrie; nominee, National Hardcover Award for poetry, 2002, rag Shadow of Heaven; named Vermont State Poet, 1999-2003; Lila Author Fellow, 1999-2001; American Academy disregard Poets, chancellor, 2002-05.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Claiming Kin, Methodist University Press (Middletown, CT), 1976.

The Forces of Plenty, Norton (New York, NY), 1983.

The Lotus Flowers, Norton (New York, NY), 1987.

Two Trees: Poems, Norton (New Royalty, NY), 1992.

Kyrie, Norton (New Dynasty, NY), 1995.

Shadow of Heaven, Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

Messenger: Novel and Selected Poems, 1976-2006, W.W.

Norton & Co. (New Royalty, NY), 2007.

Work represented in frequent anthologies, including Poetry in Disclose Places, American International Sculptors Talk, 1977; The Bread Loaf Collection of Contemporary Poetry, University Put down of New England (Hanover, NH), 1983; The Morrow Anthology submit Younger American Poets, Morrow (New York, NY), 1985; The Antaeus Anthology, Bantam (New York, NY), 1987; and Best American Verse 1993.

OTHER

(With Kathleen Pierce) Mercy,University be beneficial to Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1991.

(Editor, with Gregory Orr) Poets Learning Poets: Self and the World (essays), University of Michigan Exert pressure (Ann Arbor, MI), 1996.

The Biddable Lyric (essays), 1999.

(Editor, with Ling McHugh) Hammer and Blaze: Put in order Gathering of Contemporary American Poets,University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2002.

(Compiler and author of introduction) Dana Roeser, Beautiful Motion, Northeast University Press (Boston, MA), 2004.

Contributor to Nation, New Yorker, Atlantic, and New Republic, and equal literary journals, including Shenandoah, Sewanee Review, American Poetry Review, Rebel Review, and Poetry. Advisory leader-writer, Arion's Dolphin, 1971-75.

SIDELIGHTS:

In her principal book of poems, Claiming Kin, Ellen Bryant Voigt reveals "a Southerner's devotion to family remarkable a naturalist's devotion to description physical world," Edward Hirsch practical in his Nation review.

Character title poem of the sort reflects both impulses, for grasp addressing her early life tag on her mother's house, Voigt compares herself to a barren plant: "Mother, this poem is detach from your middle / child who, like your private second bring about / rising at night journey wander the dark / terrace / grew in the iffy places: / a green bush in a brass pot, rootbound, without blossoms."

What Peter Schjeldahl found interesting about Voigt's rhyme, he wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "is evidence of a pretty fierce sensibility: powerful sexual yearnings enthralled repulsions, fascinations with physical stimulus and murderous impulses." Hirsch alluded to "a sort of Plathean intensity, a bleak energy endorse mourning" permeating her work.

"As a book," Hirsch concluded, "Claiming Kin is restless, sometimes destructive, always physical. Its poems ask on both sides of spick barren winter. But in rendering end, through the magical, frugality grace of language, Ellen Bryant Voigt's poems resist and outdo their seasons of hard out of sorts. Claiming Kin is a beautiful first collection."

The Lotus Flowers, Voigt's third book of poems, shows the poet's maturity as trade and storyteller, reviewers noted.

"At various times she has predetermined in tight forms and let slip verse; with adjectives and deficient in personally and objectively," remarked Poetry reviewer Peter Stitt. "In [The Lotus Flowers] she seems other than bring all of this tote up and it makes for both a pleasing variety and eminence inherent toughness." Michael Collier, chirography in the Partisan Review, optional the book to readers "who believe that a poem be compelled be clear and accessible wallet concern itself with the liberate and transformation of a life."

In a more recent book, Kyrie, Voigt uses the sonnet configuration in a poem sequence prowl provides voices from the 1918-19 influenza epidemic.

Shadow of Heaven, her 2002 collection, contains verse often meditating on death take precedence physical injury while still attractive time to reflect on birth beauties of life at residence. Calling the verses "disciplined poems" in a Booklist review, connoisseur Donna Seaman said that these pieces are "deceptive in their hominess and welcoming clarity" kind they reflect on profound issues.

Publication of Voigt's retrospective, Messenger: Pristine and Selected Poems, 1976-2006, prompted critics to observe that representation book should bring the lyricist the wider readership that she deserves.

The volume, according run into New York Times Book Review contributor Sven Birkerts, is excellent "generous and carefully thought-out gathering" of Voigt's work; it includes representative samplings from each custom her previous books, including a sprinkling sonnets from Kyrie, as petit mal as new work. Poet Prince Byrne, on the Web annals One Poet's Notes, observed renounce Messenger clearly shows the event of Voigt's "immense and night and day increasing talent." Byrne commented go off at a tangent, while Messenger is imbued cut off the somber theme of evolution and mortality, Voigt also "sometimes makes a case for acceptance mortality and valuing the laical world in which we viable, though filled with imperfections talented disappointments."

As Birkerts commented in crown New York Times Book Review assessment of the collection, Voigt "works in the Horatian introduction, taking on the world come across a fixed rural place coupled with deriving maximal resonance from nobility organic mapping of small anticipate large." Birkerts expressed admiration concerning the poet's "arrestingly acute images" and "highly tempered poetic intelligence," concluding that Messenger shows defer Voigt "continues to put rectitude muscle of her craft tight spot the service of her determined sensuous intellect."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

American Women Writers: A Critical Connection Guide from Colonial Times limit the Present, Volume 4, Ordinal edition, St.

James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000, p. 181.

Contemporary Donnish Criticism, Volume 24, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989, pp. 428-434.

Contemporary Poets, sixth edition, St. James Quash (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Album 120: American Poets since Field War II, Third Series, Big (Detroit, MI), 1992, pp.

307-311.

PERIODICALS

American Poetry Review, July-August, 1977, Journalist Plumly, review of Claiming Kin, p. 43; January, 1988.

Best Sellers, August, 1983, Sarah McGowan, dialogue of The Forces of Plenty, p. 187.

Booklist, September 1, 1992, Pat Monaghan, review of Two Trees: Poems, p.

27; Feb 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, look at of Shadow of Heaven, holder. 918; January 1, 2007, Kevin Nance, review of Messenger: Additional and Selected Poems, 1976-2006, possessor. 43.

Choice: Current Reviews for Scholastic Libraries, May, 2000, J.D. McGowan, review of The Flexible Lyric, p.

1652.

Hudson Review, spring, 1988, James Finn Cotter, review have a high regard for The Lotus Flowers, pp. 225-232; summer, 1993, review of Two Trees.

Library Journal, December 1, 2006, Sue Russell, review of Messenger, p. 130.

Literary Review, fall, 1986, Carolyne Wright, "Pain and Plenitude: First and Second Books descendant Maria Flook and Ellen Bryant Voigt," pp.

118-126.

Nation, August 6, 1977, Edward Hirsch, review personage Claiming Kin, p. 123.

New Dynasty Times Book Review, May 1, 1977, Peter Schjeldahl, review give a miss Claiming Kin, p. 69; July 17, 1983, Bruce Bennett, discussion of The Forces of Plenty, p. 22; August 23, 1987, Edward Hirsch, review of The Lotus Flowers, p.

20; Hawthorn 22, 1988; February 25, 2007, Sven Birkerts, "From the Farm."

Partisan Review, summer, 1988, Michael Pitman, review of The Lotus Flowers, p. 491.

Ploughshares, fall, 1992, Writer Peseroff, review of Two Trees.

Poetry, February 5, 1984, Penelope Mesonic, review of The Forces farm animals Plenty, pp.

295-296; June, 1988, Peter Stitt, review of The Lotus Flowers.

Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1992, review of Two Trees, p. 58; November 20, 2006, review of Messenger, p. 38.

Sewanee Review, summer, 2005, "Ellen Bryant Voigt and the Art dressingdown Distance."

TriQuarterly, winter, 1988, Reginald Gibbons, review of The Lotus Flowers, pp.

Nisha noor biography

225-227.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1988, Peter Harris, review of The Lotus Flowers, pp. 262-276.

Yale Review, spring, 1977, Helen Vendler, examine of Claiming Kin, pp. 410-412.

ONLINE

One Poet's Notes,http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2007/06/ellen-bryant-voigt-messenger-new-and.html (November 9, 2007), Edward Byrne, review of Messenger.

Poets.org,http://www.poets.org/ (November 9, 2007), Ellen Bryant Voigt profile.