Poetry Podcast: Michael Dickman Reads Ellen Bryant Voigt

This month on the Poetry Podcast, Michael Dickman reads “Cow,” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, which juxtaposes the pastoral aspects of farm life with its violent realities:

a girl held out a handful of grass
calling the cow as you would a dog no dice
so what if she recoiled to see me burst from the house with an axe
I held it by the blade I tapped with the handle where the steaks come from

The juxtaposition is heightened by the absence of punctuation, which runs the disparate components of the poem together. Speaking generally about the poetic tradition of omitting punctuation, Dickman says that the technique provides “a way to read the poems in more than one direction.”

Dickman also reads his poem “My Honeybee,” which, like “Cow,” relies on what he calls a series of “electric moments doing their own thing … that then do the work for the whole poem”:

Your yellow-
and-black stingers

A child’s drawing

Some riddle from before we were born that sounds like a river
and spreads on toast

Ellen Bryant Voigt’s most recent collection is “Headwaters: Poems” (W. W. Norton, 2013), and she has served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2003. You can hear Michael Dickman’s reading and conversation with the magazine’s poetry editor, Paul Muldoon, by listening above or by downloading the podcast, for free, from iTunes.