Summer 2016 EditionAlumni & Friends Magazine
To find new words, employ the senses
“English is a magpie,” drawled poet Ellen Bryant Voigt in her deep Southern accent, lecturing to an attentive audience about the roots English has in other languages.
By Ellee Achten, BS '14, MA '17 | June 9, 2016
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Ellen Bryant Voigt, a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, read numerous verses from her celebrated output on April 8. Photo by Ellee Achten, BS ’14, MA ’17
The 2015 MacArthur Fellow stood onstage in Ohio University’s Baker Center Ballroom, a pair of thin-rimmed glasses perched at the end of her nose, and spoke about the musicality and rhythmic pattern-making of poetry.
In early April, Voigt and fiction writers Kelly Link and Stuart Dybek, poet Kevin Prufer, and nonfiction author Phillip Lopate visited OHIO’s Athens Campus to share their work with an eager audience of would-be and already-are writers, and literature lovers, at the Spring Literary Festival , fondly referred to as “Lit Fest.” Hosted by the Creative Writing Department, Lit Fest is an annual celebration of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
This year’s guest writers—all celebrated, as has always been the case at Lit Fest—encouraged the audience to employ innovation with language and explore words through sound, image, and meaning. “There are all these tools out there,” explained Lopate, his tall stature leaning forward over the podium. “You don’t have to just do the conventional.”
Each evening reading showcased what the Lit Fest has meant to those interested in new and innovative work since the first fest in 1986: a place to get fresh perspective and insight on literary offerings by some of the best writers in the world—like Dybek, who offered his own perspective on writing craft.
“What I’m after is to write a story smarter than me,” he said.
