Former Vermont Poet Laureate Ellen Bryant Voigt, who published six collections of poetry and a book of craft essays, died October 23, the Barre Montpelier Times Argus reported. She was 82. Her collection Shadow of Heaven was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002; Kyrie was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995; and Messenger was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. In 2003, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2015, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Jennifer Grotz, fellow poet and teacher, and director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences, said, "Her poetry is a model for how a poet might develop her gifts and her subject matter over time. She herself also modeled how a poet might teach and support other writers and how to sustain the creative life over the course of a lifetime."
Voigt graduated from Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., then earned an MFA from the University of Iowa. She taught at MIT and Goddard College where, in 1976, she developed and directed the nation's first low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. She also taught in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
"She invented the low-residency MFA Program at Goddard College," said Michael Collier, a poet and former director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. "There was nothing like it at the time. It allowed apprentice writers who had jobs or domestic situations that prevented them from attending full-time, to study at the graduate level. This was particularly helpful for women who were raising children and running a household. The low-residency model has been replicated widely but no other program is as rigorous as the one Ellen began at Goddard."
In a tribute, the Yale Review wrote that Voigt "was a central figure in American poetry for more than five decades. Her work combined formal precision with psychological depth, tracing the intricacies of family life, rural experience, and moral attention."
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Philips observed: "Fierce and ferocious are the words that keep coming up as people remember Ellen. But I'm not sure she'd agree with that. Unless devotion is a form of ferocity, a respect for art and the making of it, an insistence on precision, on not mistaking randomness for intuition, and on remembering that one way to think about art is as intuition coinciding (whether instinctively or as if instinctively) with craft. In which case, yes, she was a fierce poet, a ferocious teacher, and (even at times when I myself swerved a bit, got lost) a swerveless friend."
From her poem "Practice":
Some believe in heaven,
some in rest. We’ll float,
you said. Afterward
we’ll float between two worlds--five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that--until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.