Messenger
BY Ellen Bryant Voigt
(W.W. Norton, 2008)

In your book, Messenger, New and Selected Poems, there is a wonderful poem entitled “Redbud.” You write, if only I could be, or want to be, more like/that boy: ignorant, stunned, human. The “ignorant boy” is Acteon, who was caught watching Artemis, and because of that, his own hounds tore him apart. What is the implication in the poem?

Ignorance is extremely dangerous — it doesn’t enhance a life but restricts it. At the same time, knowledge is also dangerous; it leads us to overlook things, to assume things, to fall in love with categories and systems. The poem is actually about power, whatever its source (and knowledge is indeed a power), and its limitations.

You’re known for reading poems well. How do you feel about the performance aspect of poetry?

One can certainly perform poems, just as one performs a role in a play, seeking to enhance what’s on the page with an individual presence and voice. I have zero skills in that regard and no interest in it for my own poems. At the same time, almost all poems have some inherent aural component, and I have always been immensely concerned with the sounds of poems. If I’ve known for “reading poems well,” I suspect it’s only because I myself compose largely by ear, and for me the page is very much like a musical score: if I’ve done my job, another human voice could duplicate the sounds of the poem, and certainly I try as hard as I can, when it’s my own human voice, to be faithful and attentive to the score.

What was it about the cultural conditions in 1976 which made it seem right for starting a low-residency program for writers?

I wasn’t looking at the culture at the time but at my adult undergraduates — including some wonderful writers — who didn’t happen to live close to a residential graduate program but wanted to continue their passionate studies. By 1976, there were quite a few of those programs around, but they all had the same workshop model essentially created by Paul Engle at Iowa. And it seemed to me there should be some alternatives, some other sorts of apprenticeship, some structural (and economic) models that might swap all-of-us-teach-each-other for greater individual response from an experienced mentor. Certainly that was something I wished for, and needed, when I’d been at Iowa a dozen years before.

It’s fair to say, though, the sixties and the seventies were a time when conventional assumptions about education were being reconsidered and new consideration given to the importance of an individually-tailored curriculum. And also a time when there was a zeal among young writer-teachers who wanted the next generation to have more opportunities than what we had, and believed passionately in teaching itself. Believed, that is, that the writing of poetry can be taught, the way dance or composition or painting are taught — not to think one can supplant talent and instinct but to nurture and compliment talent and instinct. The other big sea-change, then, was to create those occasions for both active teaching and active learning, beyond putting a group of nascent writers into the same room once a week with one writer of national reputation who may or may not have an deep interest in their work or any of the skills great teaching requires.

We called it “low-residency” because of the semester-long independent projects: this was the current term for some early experiments with BA students. But in our program, the residency periods are very high intensity, providing what the fully residential model cannot: team-teaching, an opportunity for faculty to hear one another’s lectures and classes, a high level of discourse about the art of writing, and a much greater number and range of available faculty mentors.

Someone else might point to an increased number of voices being heard at that time — more women and minorities being published, more writers who’d been exposed to contemporary work through Poets In The Schools and other curriculum changes, certainly a broader aesthetic range in American letters — if you’re suggesting there were many more writers who wanted to do graduate work in creative writing, I think you’re right. I just don’t want to suggest that we were aware of it when we embarked on this adventure.