00:22
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Good afternoon.
00:23
I'd like to welcome you to today's medical center hour.
00:27
I'm Marcia Day Childress from the Center
00:29
for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities
00:32
here in the School of Medicine.
00:33
We're delighted to see all of you
00:35
here today for what is actually our final medical center
00:39
of our program of the fall semester.
00:42
Our program is titled Voices in Remembrance
00:45
of the 1918 Influenza: Ellen Bryant Voigt's Kyrie.
00:51
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919
00:55
was a global calamity that brought death
00:57
on an unprecedented scale, and intensified
01:00
the impact of World War I, even as the armistice was signed
01:04
100 years ago this past Sunday.
01:08
Statistics tell the grim tale of this flu in one way,
01:13
science tells it in another.
01:15
But this medical center hour, our third
01:18
marking the pandemics centenary lets poetry
01:22
speak to the human toll exacted by the 1918 H1N1 virus.
01:29
In 1995, the distinguished poet and Virginia native,
01:33
Ellen Bryant Voigt published Kyrie, a collection
01:36
of poems in which small town speakers live
01:40
through the harrowing epidemic and remember defy and mourn.
01:46
Powerfully hauntingly, Kyrie brings the global calamity
01:50
home.
01:52
In this medical center hour, Ellen Bryant Voigt
01:54
on pre-recorded video and on speakerphone
01:58
reads selections from Kyrie.
02:02
She's on speaker phone from St. Paul, Minnesota,
02:05
and she'll be discussing with fellow poet and friend Marianne
02:09
Boruch, and with us the making and meaning
02:12
of her American masterpiece.
02:15
Here in Charlottesville with us seated at the front desk
02:18
is Marianne Boruch, who will guide our engagement
02:21
with Kyrie.
02:22
She's a professor emerita of English
02:24
and creative writing at Purdue University.
02:27
I need to mention that neither of our speakers
02:30
had any conflicts of interest to declare.
02:33
UVA bookstore has copies of Kyrie available in the upstairs
02:37
lobby.
02:38
And let me quickly thank historical collections
02:40
in Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
02:43
whose history of the health sciences lecture this is,
02:46
and the Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry.
02:49
Both have been our partners this fall
02:51
for the mini series, Influenza 1918 to 2018.
02:56
Now please welcome Marianne Boruch and Voices
03:00
in Remembrance of the 1918 Influenza.
03:03
Marianne.
03:03
[APPLAUSE]
03:10
MARIANNE BORUCH: Well, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918
03:15
was the most terrible event that began
03:17
with a medical mystery, an ordinary flu or just pneumonia.
03:23
Why so many stricken in midlife and so quickly?
03:26
In some towns and cities it was a good third
03:28
of families in America to wipe out thousands,
03:32
and it spread worldwide.
03:35
Since then it's been pretty much forgotten.
03:37
What continues?
03:38
Facts and figures.
03:39
And you've been hearing about that in the other presentations
03:43
right in this series.
03:46
But it falls to the poet to find a very human story.
03:50
Ellen Voigt's Kyrie is stunning, heart stopping,
03:52
fierce, immense, and characteristically
03:56
unsentimental, a backdrop to tragedy to what the world never
04:00
wanted and could barely bear.
04:03
Each piece of this book length sonnet sequence
04:06
is a window into that stricken time.
04:09
Each herd spoken by those who survived or did not survive,
04:13
with pieces that soar out and above giving us
04:16
a precise and chilling overview.
04:19
And they are loosely are not written
04:21
as sonnets, our oldest most treasured,
04:23
though often maligned poetic form.
04:26
After a while I wanted them all to be sonnets,
04:29
Ellen has said both for the necessary resistance to pathos
04:34
and also they'd have equal time at the mic,
04:38
and to see how far I could bend the expectations of meter
04:41
rhyme, even the placement of the Volta.
04:44
Why not?
04:44
I figured.
04:47
Do one that put the couplet in the middle.
04:51
The poets gradually obsessed her.
04:54
They got to the point she said where I was writing
04:57
Kyrie poems in my sleep.
05:00
And the book carries what she calls the white hot lyric
05:03
center of influenza, each with different speakers.
05:08
And I would add its person by person, loss by loss
05:11
until we, readers and listeners, are carried, overwhelmed,
05:15
changed.
05:17
Mark this, Kyrie is brilliant.
05:22
An American masterpiece.
05:24
One of the finest, most hypnotic,
05:25
thrilling collections of poems to come out
05:29
of the 20th century.
05:31
This is not hyperbole.
05:33
Unfortunately, as you heard Ellen is in St. Paul, Minnesota
05:37
right now, but I assure you she is here.
05:41
I swear it, listening through speaker phone.
05:45
And last week her most resourceful daughter Dudley
05:48
filmed her reading several pieces from Kyrie for us.
05:52
So we will see those readings.
05:54
We'll stop them now and then to allow
05:56
her to tell us about their making,
05:58
and toward the end of the hour you will
05:59
be able to ask her questions.
06:04
First, a crucial early poem from the book.
06:10
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: To be brought from the Bronx school
06:12
yard into the house, to stand by her bed
06:16
like an animal stunned in the pen,
06:20
against the grid of the quilt her hand seems stitched
06:24
to the cup of its sleeve.
06:27
Although he wants most urgently the hand to stroke his head,
06:33
although he thinks he could kneel down
06:35
that it would need to travel only inches to brush
06:39
like a breath his flushed cheek.
06:43
He doesn't stir.
06:45
All his resolve, all his resources
06:49
go to watching her mouth, her hair,
06:53
a pillow of black and ferns.
06:56
He means to match her stillness bone for bone.
07:01
Nearby he hears the younger children cry and his aunts
07:07
like careless thieves out in the kitchen.
07:14
MARIANNE BORUCH: So Ellen, are you there?
07:17
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
07:18
MARIANNE BORUCH: OK.
07:21
You once wrote me that this particular piece
07:24
was the triggering poem for the entire collection.
07:29
And we know that the Spanish influenza not just
07:31
an American calamity, but it spread worldwide.
07:34
Still for a poet, especially a lyric poet,
07:36
personal private entry is crucial.
07:41
Will you tell us about the origin of this small narrative
07:43
the boy and his stricken mother's bedside?
07:47
Who was that boy outside of the poem?
07:49
This is a family story, isn't it?
07:53
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
07:55
That was actually my father.
07:58
And his mother did not die in the epidemic,
08:04
but died in stillbirth.
08:09
When he was only eight, and this was the facts that we knew,
08:16
we always have remembered that piece of information.
08:21
But it did not not occur to me until my own son was eight,
08:27
exactly how young he was when he was sent away
08:32
to live with the cousins, and the cousins
08:35
were only age 19 and age 20.
08:40
So yes, it did seem to me when I thought about it.
08:46
But at this particular epidemic, it
08:49
caused a whole generation of orphans.
08:53
And his story was not the only one.
08:57
And I grew up in a very small town in Virginia
09:03
where there were other local people.
09:07
And in fact the doctor he was referred to
09:12
is one who delivered my father.
09:16
My father is named after him.
09:19
So yes, that is the very beginning
09:23
of the whole sequence.
09:27
MARIANNE BORUCH: And that doctor who delivered your father, he's
09:33
a very important speaker in the book
09:35
as well, and right from the start.
09:40
And so those were family stories that you heard as a child
09:46
I think we need to hear some poems from the doctors
09:52
point of view so we can hear what
09:55
it's like to be a village doctor at that time
09:57
during this epidemic.
10:01
So we're going to play those right now, Ellen.
10:05
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Circuit rider, magic leather credential
10:09
at my feet with this little vials of morphine
10:13
and digitalis.
10:15
I made my rounds four days at a stretch
10:19
out from the village in and out of their houses,
10:23
and in between in sunlight, moonlight,
10:28
nodding on the hard plank of the buggy.
10:31
It didn't matter which turned the old horse took,
10:35
illness flourished everywhere in the county.
10:39
At the foxes the farmhouse doors were barred by snow.
10:45
They prized a board from a window to let me in.
10:48
At one, one adult already dead, the other too sick
10:54
to haul the body out.
11:00
When it was time to move, he didn't move.
11:05
He lay athwart his mother.
11:08
She pushed and pushed.
11:10
She'd had a stone before.
11:13
She wanted a child.
11:16
Reaching in, I turned him like a calf.
11:20
Rob gave her a piece of kindling wood.
11:23
She bit right through.
11:25
I turned him twice.
11:28
Her sisters were all in the house,
11:31
her brother home again on leave.
11:34
In the months to come there in the cities,
11:38
there would be families reported their terminals and fled.
11:43
Volunteers would have to hunt the dying door to door.
11:49
It started here with too many breech and stillborn,
11:54
women who looked 50, not 32.
11:58
I marked it child bed fever in my log.
12:06
Deep in the lungs a cloudiness not clearing vertigo, nausea,
12:13
slowed heart, thick green catarrh,
12:18
nosebleeds spewing blood across the room
12:22
as if it had conscripted all disease.
12:25
Once finding a jug of homemade corn
12:29
beneath the bed where a fevered family lay
12:33
head to foot in their own and the others filth,
12:37
I took a draft and split the rest among them.
12:41
Even the children, these the very children named for me
12:47
who had pulled them into the world.
12:50
It was the fourth day and my bag was empty.
12:54
Small black bag I carried like a Bible.
13:01
MARIANNE BORUCH: Well, I love these poems.
13:04
So the doctor keeps recurring throughout the book,
13:09
and he has a grounding voice in sequence, and emotionally
13:16
and narratively he runs out of medicines and so on.
13:20
And I remember you told me at one time
13:23
that you wanted a figure in the book,
13:27
was ironic, that irony was a really hard thing for you,
13:31
as you said, because I'm such an earnest person.
13:37
But you wanted a figure and I remember
13:38
you wrote in a letter whose life circumstances were such
13:44
that irony was imperative to survival, to coping,
13:47
to keep being sane.
13:49
And I think now as surely the flu epidemic, especially
13:51
for a physician, was the most horrendous circumstance.
13:58
And I'm wondering what you think about that now.
14:01
Like that notion of irony, but also in these three poems
14:06
the sort of sample poems from the doctor,
14:08
were there images that really keep haunting you?
14:13
I mean, I think about that last one, the moonshine,
14:20
the homemade corn liquor, just there's no medicine,
14:24
so even the kids are drinking it.
14:28
It's a strange sort of toast in the middle of an epidemic.
14:32
But were there certain images that really haunted you?
14:37
Or you can talk about that notion of irony
14:41
in someone like the doctor.
14:44
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
14:45
Well, you also asked about the [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]..
14:53
And yes, of course you have physical reference.
15:00
There's nothing real, I guess.
15:05
But it is real in that I did not imagine it.
15:10
I imagined that this is what could have happened.
15:18
I thought about the sequence with another person who
15:25
might have survived that time.
15:28
And some of those, the shiny, swollen, shiny green-back,
15:35
green-eyed flies get through the screen to the window
15:41
and carry off the sickness.
15:43
I got [INAUDIBLE].
15:47
MARIANNE BORUCH: Right.
15:48
Yeah.
15:49
Yeah.
15:51
And those are other do it yourself
15:55
medications, right, and social custom, cultural customs
16:00
to treat disease at the time.
16:05
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
16:06
MARIANNE BORUCH: Right.
16:07
Well, maybe we should hear those too.
16:09
There's two of them like that that talk about home cures
16:16
beyond the doctor, to stuff people did for themselves.
16:21
And that would be--
16:23
yeah.
16:29
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: "You wiped a fever brow.
16:30
You burned the cloth.
16:33
You scrubbed a sick room floor.
16:35
You burned the mop.
16:37
What wouldn't burn, you boiled like applesauce
16:41
out beside the shed in the copper pot.
16:44
Apple, light wood, linen, feather bed.
16:50
It was the smell of that time, that neighborhood.
16:54
All night the pyre smoldered in the yard.
16:58
Your job, to obliterate what had been soiled.
17:03
But the bidden heart no longer cares for risk.
17:07
The Orthodox still passed from lip
17:10
to lip the blessed relic and the ritual cup.
17:14
To see in the pile the delicate pillow slip
17:18
she'd worked by hand, roses and bluettes as if hope
17:24
could be fed by giving up."
17:33
"How we survived.
17:35
We locked the doors and let nobody in.
17:39
Each night we sang, ate only bread and a bowl of buttermilk,
17:45
boiled the drinking water from the well,
17:48
clipped our hair to the scalp, slept in steam,
17:52
rubbed our chests with camphor, backs
17:56
with mustard, legs and thighs with fatback,
18:00
and buried the rind.
18:03
Since we had no lambs, I cut the cat's throat, X'ed the door,
18:09
and put the carcass out to draw the flies.
18:12
I raised an upstairs window and watched
18:15
them go, swollen, shiny black, green-backed, green-eyed,
18:22
fleeing the house, taking the sickness with them."
18:27
MARIANNE BORUCH: Yeah.
18:28
And there's your flies that you mentioned a little earlier,
18:31
right?
18:32
The flies taking the sickness with them
18:34
in that long stretch of swollen, shiny, green-black, green-eyed
18:40
flies somehow lifting the sickness from the house.
18:47
That clearly haunts you, and certainly haunts
18:51
many of us who read that, I think, or who know that poem.
18:55
So you did a lot of research, I know, for this book
18:58
about the flu epidemic.
19:01
So could you talk about that a little bit?
19:02
Like that thing about the flies, or about the blood,
19:07
sort of biblical reference there to the lamb's blood
19:09
on the doorway so the angel of death passes by.
19:13
But you don't have a lamb so you did the cat.
19:16
Poor cat.
19:18
So can you talk about that?
19:21
You did research for this in a way
19:24
that mostly we poets don't do research for a poem.
19:27
We write essays and so on.
19:29
But we don't usually research poems.
19:31
Can you talk about your research for this work,
19:34
and did these directives come out
19:36
of that research in some way?
19:38
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
19:39
Well, I did research because my wonderful editor, Ed Norton,
19:50
was the one who encouraged me to continue to write about this.
19:56
And I was very concerned.
20:00
I thought, well, nobody wants to read that.
20:04
Somebody gets sick and they either die or they don't die.
20:08
That's that.
20:10
So he was the one who encouraged me,
20:14
and it's the Kyrie poems includes
20:23
cover art which shows the Sunday evening, and the eclipse.
20:39
MARIANNE BORUCH: Yeah.
20:40
And of course your own experience in Vermont
20:44
and also in Virginia, you know a great deal
20:47
about the natural world growing up on a farm
20:51
and living out in the country in Vermont for so many years.
20:55
So I assume that all that came into the book too.
20:58
You were drawing from that.
21:03
So I think just to step back a bit,
21:07
maybe we should hear you read more about misery.
21:21
Human suffering is a great subject here.
21:23
And I won't ask you any questions about it,
21:25
but if we could hear 22 and 68.
21:30
That'd be great.
21:34
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: "Nothing would
21:35
do but that he dig her grave under the willow
21:39
oak on high ground beside the little graves.
21:44
And in the rain, a hard rain and wind,
21:49
enough to tear a limb from the limber tree.
21:54
His talk was wild.
21:56
His eyes were polished stone.
21:59
All of him bent laboring to breathe.
22:03
Even iron bends.
22:06
His face ash by the time he came inside.
22:11
Within the hour, the awful cough began.
22:15
Gurgling between the coughs, and the fever
22:18
spiked as his wife's had done.
22:22
Before a new day rinsed the windowpane,
22:26
he had swooned, was blue."
22:36
"He stands by the bed.
22:38
He sits beside the bed.
22:41
He lays his unfledged body on the bed where she had laid him.
22:46
If he'd had the right words in his prayer,
22:49
if he'd stayed awake all night, if he'd been good, been wise,
22:54
perhaps he could have brought her back
22:58
the way she drew him out of his dark moods, guitar in her lap.
23:03
Her hair lace and shadow on her cheek.
23:07
In the hardback book propped open by the lamp,
23:11
the shape notes swarmed like minnows on the page.
23:16
She had said their lives were scripted there.
23:20
Nearby someone feeds the treasonous baby.
23:24
"She lied" is the first verse of his new life."
23:34
MARIANNE BORUCH: That really brings home the whole notion
23:36
that you were saying before about the stillbirths
23:39
and how they increased during this period
23:42
and the great tragedy of that.
23:49
I want to think about, draw you into thoughts
23:52
about narrative and lyric again, and the whole narrative thing.
23:58
The doctor supplies a narrative.
24:02
And there came a point, I know, that you've told me
24:06
that you had so many details and so many speakers,
24:09
and yet it was too much variation.
24:12
And so you wanted to--
24:14
you said, that's when I invented--
24:16
how you put it--
24:17
that's why I invented the soldier and the letters.
24:21
And so throughout this book there
24:25
are letters from the front, from Price
24:27
who is engaged to Mattie, who is the school teacher.
24:37
So that supplies a narrative thread in these lyric poems.
24:41
So this is a structural idea, but it also
24:46
brings such humanity to the book.
24:49
We're going to hear a couple of poems.
24:51
First the Mattie poem.
24:53
She's cast here as a schoolteacher,
24:56
I think third grade.
24:57
And then one of the letters from the front, from Price
25:01
who writes to her.
25:02
And we can hear that.
25:10
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: "All day, one room, me and the cherubim
25:14
with their wet kisses.
25:17
Without quarantines who knew what was happening at home?
25:21
Was someone put to bed?
25:23
Had someone died?
25:26
The paper said how dangerous.
25:28
They coughed and snuffed in their double desks facing me.
25:34
They sneeze and spit on books we passed around, and on the boots
25:40
I tied, retied.
25:42
Barely out of school myself, Price at the front.
25:47
They smeared their lunch.
25:49
They had no handkerchiefs, no fresh water to wash my hands.
25:54
When the youngest started to cry, flushed and scared,
26:00
I just couldn't touch her.
26:01
I let her cry.
26:03
Their teacher, and I let them cry."
26:11
"Dear Mattie, though you don't tell of troubles there,
26:16
meaning to buy me peace, I would suppose,
26:20
dreadful word goes around.
26:22
Families perished or scattered.
26:26
I remind myself Pug's mother died from having him,
26:32
and he thought orphans saved themselves some time
26:36
in the scheme of things.
26:39
Won't a future happiness be ransomed but present woe?
26:44
Dear Mattie, it's you I think of when I say my prayers,
26:49
your face.
26:51
It's you I want when I get back from this, just like the night
26:55
that I said "Marry me" and you said "Yes"
26:59
and the moon came out from behind the cloud
27:02
as I had wished it to.
27:04
And I kissed your mouth and then your chestnut hair."
27:13
MARIANNE BORUCH: Oh, boy.
27:15
So great.
27:19
So these letters, back to the letters
27:25
that go on throughout this book.
27:30
I'm wondering about when, in that same note to me
27:33
about those letters, you said that that long sequence forced
27:41
you to start thinking, quote, "like a novelist."
27:45
Which is to say back up before the crisis
27:48
and extend past the crisis.
27:51
And you needed a recurring character
27:53
and a retrievable timeline.
27:59
And as I suggested before, you said
28:01
too many voices, too much variation might
28:04
be a problem without this.
28:06
Can you talk a little bit about the necessity
28:10
for a bit of narrative for a lyric poet?
28:12
I mean, a lot of lyric poems are like no, no,
28:16
keep narrative away from me.
28:19
That is so old-fashioned.
28:22
But I'm just wondering about that mix.
28:24
And you have talked a lot in your life, in your essays,
28:28
about the necessity of both song and story.
28:32
And so can you, I don't know--
28:36
it really came to life, I think, those issues in this sequence.
28:41
Can you talk a bit about that?
28:44
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
28:47
I think I'm essentially a lyric poet.
28:51
Just to say I write that down.
28:55
I write off my ear.
29:00
But what I have in mind about lyric
29:04
has to deal with the intensity of feeling.
29:09
It seems to me that intensity of feeling is what unites us all,
29:16
and anybody's message is different.
29:22
Anybody's own personal life story is how we are different.
29:28
But that kind of intensity can--
29:33
is hard to maintain.
29:38
So we have song and story both at the same time.
29:45
So it seemed important that this particular sequence
29:50
to give it a try and not make it representative
29:55
of something else.
29:57
I knew right away that I didn't want
30:01
this to be just these various stories, these speakers, to be
30:09
variants of metaphor.
30:12
And even though I'm sure that the AIDs epidemic had a lot
30:17
to do with this particular sequence.
30:21
And I'm also sure that I have elegies
30:24
to write for my parents.
30:27
And so this was a way to do that.
30:31
But it seemed really important to make sure
30:36
that these stories were grounded not as this is like something
30:43
else, or not as--
30:46
this is really about the HIV crisis, but instead
30:52
this similar experience.
30:56
MARIANNE BORUCH: Right.
30:57
That individuality, you mean, in the stories, and the fact
31:01
that this particular story recurs.
31:04
We follow it over time.
31:06
It really deepens that whole effect, I think.
31:10
But you know, you mentioned the song part,
31:13
or how the ear is so important for you.
31:16
You were, of course, trained as a musician,
31:18
as a pianist when you were young.
31:21
And you still play.
31:26
What's another sound experiment in the book, I think,
31:34
are where you take various popular forms and adapt them.
31:40
And so we're going to hear the prayer, the nursery rhyme,
31:44
various things like that.
31:48
So let's hear a couple of those, and you guys
31:53
will recognize the mother ship form here, I think,
31:59
of these two.
32:04
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: "The barber, the teacher, the plumber,
32:06
the preacher, the man in a bowler, man in a cap,
32:11
the banker, the baker, the cabinet maker, the fireman,
32:15
postman, clerk in the shop.
32:18
Soldier and sailor, teamster and tailor, man shoveling snow
32:25
or sweeping his step, carpenter, cobbler, liar, lawyer,
32:31
laid them down and never got up.
32:34
Oh, oh, the world wouldn't stop.
32:37
The neighborhood grocer, the neighborhood cop.
32:41
Laid them down and never did rise.
32:44
And some of their children and some of their wives
32:48
fell into bed and never got up, fell into bed
32:51
and never got up."
32:58
"This is the double bed where she'd
32:59
been born, the bed of her mother's marriage and decline,
33:04
the bed her sisters also ripened in,
33:08
bed that drew her husband to her side.
33:11
Bed of the one child lost and five delivered.
33:16
Bed indifferent to the many bodies, bed around which all
33:21
of them were gathered, watery shapes
33:24
in the shadows of the room.
33:26
And the bed frail abroad the violent ocean,
33:30
the frightened beast so clumsy and pathetic
33:34
breathing their wet breath against her neck.
33:37
She threw off the pile of quilts, white face like a moon,
33:42
and then entered straightway into heaven."
33:50
MARIANNE BORUCH: Yeah.
33:51
These are two I love as well.
33:52
I mean, of course that first one, "they all fall down"
33:56
echo there from the--
33:58
that I guess was part of the Black Plague,
34:01
in reference to that, that kids would play endlessly after.
34:06
And so it takes the flu epidemic and puts it
34:08
in a more playful mode, kind of grimly so.
34:12
And so you get that tension.
34:15
And the wonderful bed poem with the imprint
34:16
of all those bodies over many generations
34:20
is, again, you're master of the image, truly.
34:25
That notion of finding the image and letting
34:28
that direct the poem, and the power of simple repetition.
34:36
So can you tell us about these forms?
34:37
Because they don't have the--
34:42
they have the individuality, but it
34:44
seems like their aim is something
34:45
different than a lot of the other poems that are directly
34:49
tied to a speaker.
34:52
How do you see them working in the book?
34:58
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
34:59
I think that it's mainly ironic--
35:02
it's right, not as a picture of style at all.
35:08
That it's a way of coping.
35:13
MARIANNE BORUCH: Right, yeah.
35:14
They are ironic.
35:15
They have that edge, that playful edge to them.
35:18
And that is a way of coping, a distancing at the same time.
35:24
That notion of sound, and your background as a musician.
35:30
Let's hear another one, because this brings up
35:32
a really interesting point that I heard you say once.
35:38
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: "Oh, yes.
35:40
I used to pray.
35:42
I prayed for the baby.
35:44
I prayed for my mortal soul as it contracted.
35:48
I prayed a gun would happen into my hand.
35:52
I prayed the way our nearest neighbors prayed, head down,
35:57
hands wrung, knees on the hard floor.
36:01
They all were sick and prayed to the merciful Father
36:05
to send an angel, and my Henry came.
36:10
"The least of these my brethren," Henry said.
36:14
"Wherefore by my fruits?"
36:16
Henry said.
36:18
All of them survived.
36:19
Do you think they are still praying "Thank you Lord,
36:23
for Henry?"
36:25
She was so tiny, we kept her in a shoe box
36:29
on the cook stove like a kitten."
36:36
MARIANNE BORUCH: And I remember you said that often lines
36:41
come to you-- or at least in this case,
36:42
it did-- out of the blue.
36:44
You heard that line "Oh, yes.
36:46
I used to pray."
36:48
And it leaped onto the page and demanded
36:53
that you write the poem.
36:54
But you heard it.
36:56
And then you said I would hear such a thing,
36:58
and then I would figure out who said that.
37:01
So the voice came first.
37:04
And I thought that was really fascinating.
37:06
And I wonder, does it happen to you a lot
37:08
where your imagination is first kicked in by sound?
37:15
You hear something and you follow it?
37:18
And do you think that has something
37:22
to do with your origin, I guess, as a musician,
37:27
playing the piano all those years?
37:30
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: I'm sure it does.
37:33
But I don't have that experience frequently enough, alas.
37:41
I write very, very slowly.
37:44
So it takes me a long time.
37:48
So in this particular case, I had the sonnet form to help me.
37:59
It was a little bit barred against sentimentality,
38:05
and it was also generative, highly generative.
38:15
MARIANNE BORUCH: Yeah.
38:16
And of course you played with the sonnet form.
38:18
And as you said, sometimes what the hell?
38:20
Put the volta in the middle.
38:21
You know, the volta being the turn,
38:24
the famous turn in the sonnet at the end of the sonnet.
38:29
But you took great liberties in these pieces, right?
38:34
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
38:36
Well, when I was the state poet in Vermont,
38:43
I had a wonderful opportunity to be
38:48
part of a commission to the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.
38:55
MARIANNE BORUCH: Right.
38:56
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: And the director at that time
39:03
was Jaime Laredo, who is a fantastic musician.
39:08
He's a world class violinist himself.
39:12
And the commission was done by a guy I worked
39:19
with who does calm music.
39:23
So really he was stuck with now having to do narration.
39:29
I helped him choose some poems.
39:32
But you know, I had to be like Peter and the wolf
39:36
so that there would be themes recurring.
39:40
And I had one that I picked out and wanted to use.
39:47
It was one sonnet about what happened
39:50
toward the end of the pandemic when the various soldiers came
39:58
back and re-infected populations.
40:04
And in that poem, it says after the pall withdraws,
40:12
the world hums again, making it so damn happy.
40:17
And so what Laredo told the orchestra to do was simply hum.
40:24
After they finished playing, they just all hummed.
40:29
It was extraordinary.
40:31
An extraordinary gift to hear that.
40:35
MARIANNE BORUCH: So that was the thing
40:37
that really surprised you about that adaptation of your poems,
40:43
right?
40:43
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
40:44
It was.
40:45
It was completely haunting.
40:48
And it also turns out that I hadn't realized when I went out
40:56
to music school, I wrote another piece
41:02
that was called Kyrie because it had an optional--
41:08
I could do a divided line four against three.
41:13
So Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.
41:20
That use of the seven beat lines.
41:25
So who knows?
41:26
I might have ended up staying a composer
41:31
if I'd been in a school that focused more on composition.
41:34
MARIANNE BORUCH: Yeah.
41:36
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Less on performance.
41:38
MARIANNE BORUCH: Yeah, that's a fascinating thought.
41:41
But you've never written music as such?
41:45
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: No.
41:47
No.
41:48
I've only written the music that is commanded on page.
41:59
MARIANNE BORUCH: Right.
42:00
Right.
42:00
And I know you have a wonderful grand piano in your house.
42:08
That humming is curious, isn't it?
42:12
That he brought that to life like that.
42:14
I just love that story.
42:18
And humming is so close to silence in a way, isn't it?
42:21
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
42:22
MARIANNE BORUCH: So it was a way to really pause the orchestra.
42:27
Well, let's hear two last poems here
42:30
before we head into the Q&A from the audience here.
42:38
So we'll do these two.
42:45
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: "What I remember
42:46
best is my cousin's crow.
42:49
He found it, fed it, splinted its damaged wing,
42:55
and it came when he whistled it down.
42:57
Ate from his hand.
42:59
Said like a slow child what he had said.
43:04
Emmett never used a leash or cage.
43:09
For a year it hulked in the big pine by the door
43:14
or in the windmill's metal scaffold,
43:17
descending for apple, a little grain, a little show.
43:24
Once God gave out free will, I bet he was sorry.
43:29
So much had been invested in the bird.
43:32
The bird, not understanding gratitude.
43:36
Well again, it turned up in the yard from time
43:39
to time, no longer smart or amusing.
43:43
No longer his, just another crow."
43:57
"Who said the worst was past?
43:59
Who knew such a thing?
44:02
Someone writing history.
44:04
Someone looking down on us from the clouds.
44:07
Down here, snow and wind, cold blew through the clabbers.
44:13
Our spring was frozen in the frozen ground.
44:17
Like the beasts in their holes, no one stirred.
44:21
If not sick, exhausted or afraid.
44:25
In the village, the doctor's own wife
44:29
died in the night of the 19th, 1919.
44:34
But it was true.
44:36
At the window, every afternoon toward the horizon
44:41
a little more light before the darkness fell."
44:48
MARIANNE BORUCH: You know, some of those lines,
44:50
I just feel this chill.
44:52
You feel that?
44:53
She's so wonderful.
44:55
OK, Ellen.
44:58
So now I'm really going to holler.
45:00
No, I'm joking.
45:03
OK, so we're going to ask the audience
45:05
if they have questions.
45:06
And John, how are we going to do this exactly?
45:09
Oh, [INAUDIBLE].
45:10
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: With microphones.
45:11
MARIANNE BORUCH: You're going to take that around?
45:15
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: So we're going to--
45:17
I have a mic, and we'll move through the audience
45:20
to capture their comments and questions.
45:23
And just before we start, I would
45:25
like to thank you, Marianne, and you,
45:28
Ellen, for a wonderful combined presentation.
45:34
And I want to say, Ellen, you have written music.
45:38
You've written a beautiful requiem for the 1918 flu.
45:43
MARIANNE BORUCH: Nicely-- yeah.
45:45
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: So we will turn now to questions
45:47
and comments from the audience.
45:50
And Ellen is with us, as you know, on speakerphone.
45:53
You can direct your question to her.
45:55
You can also direct it to Marianne, or both of them
45:59
can answer.
46:01
And please identify yourself before you ask your question
46:05
or offer your comment.
46:09
DANNY BECKER: Hi, Ellen.
46:10
This is Danny Becker, one of your former students
46:14
from Warren Wilson from 18 years ago.
46:17
Over the years, I've probably given Kyrie to about 10,
46:23
20 of my students, usually during flu season.
46:27
Can you tell us about Kyrie, the title?
46:30
Where did that come from?
46:36
MARIANNE BORUCH: Did you hear that, Ellen?
46:38
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yes.
46:41
The title is part of the Mass, the Catholic mass.
46:48
And if you're a musician, you know
46:53
that it's a reference to that part of the movement.
47:00
And it's "Kyrie eleison."
47:06
It actually comes from the Greek.
47:09
And it's evocative.
47:11
It is a way of saying, "God have mercy.
47:16
Christ have mercy.
47:18
Oh, God have mercy."
47:20
That's really the direct sensation.
47:23
So "Kyrie, eleison.
47:26
Christe, eleison."
47:30
That's what it comes from.
47:32
And my wonderful editor [INAUDIBLE]
47:36
that she thought that that should be explained somewhere,
47:40
and I just resisted.
47:44
I thought, no, no.
47:46
People will know.
47:48
But in fact people didn't know, unless they
47:51
were Catholics or musicians.
47:55
So that's where it comes from.
47:59
MARIANNE BORUCH: Yeah.
48:00
That's the only bit of Greek in the Latin mass.
48:03
I mean, I remember that from my childhood.
48:05
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Yeah.
48:09
MARIANNE BORUCH: Other questions?
48:10
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Other questions?
48:13
It won't go on the video, no.
48:21
SUSIE: Hi, I'm Susie.
48:23
I am curious to know how you decided
48:27
that you were done with this subject matter
48:28
after writing so many poems?
48:31
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: That's an excellent question.
48:40
Once it was fixed in time, once I had the letters,
48:44
I had the soldiers coming back, then
48:54
my challenge became to stop writing sonnets
49:02
and get those out of my head.
49:05
I had to move to something else.
49:07
Otherwise we move to mannerism.
49:11
Then you're just writing the same kind of poem
49:14
that you know you can write.
49:16
So what you want to try to do is not do that,
49:21
but to force yourself to learn something new.
49:26
I mean, poetry is an intelligence.
49:30
It's just like [? time ?].
49:32
It gives you a way of understanding the world.
49:35
And so it's as close as I've come to any kind of [? side ?]
49:42
writing.
49:43
That it must be like that [INAUDIBLE]
49:49
and it's a perfect self-forgetfulness.
49:54
So that's when you stop.
50:00
It's also the other thing about the use
50:06
of the poem is that it's embedded enough already.
50:14
There are some other instances that's not the case.
50:20
I don't know if you bake bread.
50:24
But if you've ever made homemade bread,
50:27
then you know there comes a time when the dough simply
50:33
will not take any more flour.
50:35
It just shakes it off in flakes.
50:38
Won't take it.
50:40
And so you have to stop kneading.
50:43
That's the end of that procedure.
50:46
And if you've done it with a sourdough starter,
50:50
that's one way you can do it.
50:53
And that's what the final sequence essentially was.
50:58
But it's very interesting to me that once
51:01
I started reading some of these--
51:03
and Marianne actually was among the first people
51:07
to hear me read them--
51:10
once I started reading them, various people came up to me
51:16
and said, oh, yes.
51:19
I do remember that.
51:20
I remember uncle so-and-so talking about it.
51:27
And one person said, I remember when
51:32
we had to meet the plane to bring all the bodies back.
51:37
And we brought them back in big baskets.
51:41
And he said, you had to wait in line for all the hearses.
51:46
And so he recalled it.
51:48
And then he said this amazing sentence.
51:52
This is a novel right here.
51:55
His sentence was, "Oh, yes.
51:58
I know about that epidemic.
52:01
The woman who was supposed to be my mother died in it."
52:06
Doesn't that tell you everything?
52:08
The woman who was supposed to be my mother.
52:12
I thought that that was remarkable.
52:20
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: And you did create out of this, and out
52:23
of those memories that these poems evoke,
52:26
it does give rise to a chorus of memories.
52:29
And we're now at 100 years.
52:33
Close to losing a lot of those live voices,
52:37
even of the generation that lost parents.
52:42
So the book is a real gift in this way,
52:45
and creates an ongoing chorus as we all hum along.
52:51
Marianne, any comments you have on that?
52:53
MARIANNE BORUCH: No.
52:54
It's just a privilege to read this book
52:58
and to talk to you today, Ellen, about it
53:01
and have you read to us.
53:03
We really appreciate you making those recordings.
53:06
This has just been amazing.
53:08
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: Thank you, Marianne?
53:10
MARIANNE BORUCH: Could you--
53:10
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: You're a great friend.
53:12
It's great to be talking with you.
53:15
And also just a reminder to everybody
53:20
that Marianne's magnificent book, her Speak, Cadaver.
53:31
MARIANNE BORUCH: Well, I'm hoping
53:33
you'll read one more poem, and I think
53:35
we can crank it up here from the treasure
53:37
trove you sent us to sort of finish off
53:40
the presentation here.
53:43
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: We're going
53:44
to close with one last poem that also serves quite wonderfully
53:49
and perfectly as a close to our trio of programs about the 1918
53:55
influenza, answers the question that people often asked us
54:01
about why do this series?
54:06
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT: "Why did you have
54:08
to go back, go back to that awful time,
54:12
upstream scavenging the human wreckage?
54:16
What happened or what we did or failed to do.
54:20
Why drag us back to the ditch?
54:23
Have you no regard for oblivion?
54:26
History is organic, a great tree along the starched corduroy
54:33
of its bark the healed scars, the seasonal losses
54:38
so asymmetrical, so common.
54:42
Why should you set out to count?
54:45
Don't you people have sufficient woe?"
54:52
[APPLAUSE]
54:58
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: So thank you all for being here.
55:01
Thank you, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dudley Voigt,
55:04
who's been there helping, Marianne Boruch.
55:08
And I again remind you this is the last Medical Center
55:12
Hour of the fall semester.
55:14
Our programs resume on the 23rd of January--
55:18
yikes-- 2019.
55:20
See you then.
55:21
Thank you.