In October, Vermont lost three of its boldest and most prolific poets and prose writers: David Huddle of Burlington, Ellen Bryant Voigt of Cabot and Baron Wormser of Montpelier.
Seven Days has published obituaries for each of them, providing biographical milestones and accolades. What I’d like to offer here is a more personal reflection from a Vermonter who studied writing with all three and hosted them for readings in the Strafford Town House Forum series, at Bookstock in Woodstock and at the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H., where I was the director. I also edited their work for the New England Review when I was coeditor. More recently, for Tupelo Press, I edited Baron’s Legends of the Slow Explosion, a teeming book of portraits of 20th-century iconoclasts, and edited David’s magisterial final four novels: Nothing Can Make Me Do This (2011), The Faulkes Chronicle (2014), My Immaculate Assassin (2016) and Hazel (2019).
All three were particularly effective teachers, as I witnessed firsthand. I was a graduate student in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where both David and Ellen taught fiction and poetry workshops; with Baron, I codirected the Frost Place’s Conference on Poetry and Teaching, where elementary and high school teachers learned techniques for bringing students to this mercurial art. For a couple of years, I was Baron’s guest presenter for the annual Advanced Placement Institute he led at St. Johnsbury Academy for teachers of English literature.
Among the great fortunes of my life has been knowing these three writers as their reader, first and foremost, and as their student and friend. Their deaths came as one blow after another: David and Baron died on the same day, October 7. Ellen died on October 23.
David was born in 1942 in southern Virginia, served in Vietnam and moved to Vermont in 1971 to join the University of Vermont’s English department, where he taught for 38 years. My first encounter with his writing was a quietly and intensely powerful family story called “Poison Oak,” published in New England Review in 1979. David had a Chekhovian way of revealing character through gestures and tics, and he knew how to build up pressure beneath the sensuously descriptive surface of a narrative, like a volcano that rumbles and trembles but doesn’t explode. In all of his writings, there’s a weathered courtliness. The man himself was kindly and gracious, and he always seemed at least slightly amused. As I picture him, his mouth is on the verge of a grin.
You can “hear” David’s pedagogical voice — exacting and encouraging — in “Let’s Say You Wrote Badly This Morning,” a widely shared essay he first published in the New York Times Book Review that compares writing to athletic training. “An instinctive response to painful experience is to avoid the behavior that produced the pain. To function at the level of excellence required for survival, writers like athletes must go against instinct, must absorb their failures and become stronger, must endlessly repeat the behavior that produced the pain.”
Ellen, too, was born in Virginia, in 1943, and was raised on a farm in the central Piedmont region. Her poetry is grounded in the fecundity of plant and animal life, even as its steadfast focus has been the drama of complicated human existence. As a child and youth, she trained as a pianist, and her lines are sinuous with musical cadences. Never formulaic, her poems have a sculptural formality, even as she changed her method with each successive book. Case in point: Having become one of American poetry’s most skillful composers of shapely verse sentences, in her 2013 collection Headwaters she omitted all punctuation, requiring the reader to follow the phrasing with the closest kind of “listening.”
Ellen and her husband, Fran Voigt, moved to Vermont in 1969, and in 1976 she cofounded at Goddard College the nation’s first low-residency MFA program, a model now adopted across the country. Ellen and Fran also cofounded the New England Culinary Institute. She was a brilliant architect of new forms of adult education, and in 1982, when the Goddard MFA program moved to Warren Wilson College, Ellen ensured its continuity. That was her academic home for almost 50 years, and I was lucky to be her student there, apprentice to a virtuoso.
Ellen was the most challenging teacher I ever had. I’ve described her voice as “honeyed but sharpened with ginger.” She had no patience for writing that took the easier route, either in technique or emotional penetration. But as stern as she could be, she was also supportive: During her term as Vermont’s poet laureate, from 1999 to 2002, she created a program called the Poet Next Door, which brought Vermont poets into classrooms around the state and provided each student with books they could keep. When she invited me to be a visiting poet, I felt lifted into a new role in the community — maybe not as indispensable as a firefighter, but useful, with a genuine civic responsibility.
For an immersion in Ellen’s teaching methods, seek out her two invaluable books about poetic composition: The Flexible Lyric (1999) and The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (2009).
I knew Baron, born in 1948 in Baltimore, when he lived in Maine. His family homesteaded there for many years, and from 2001 to 2005 he was the state poet laureate. Baron and his wife, artist Janet Wormser, moved to Vermont in 2007, first to Marshfield, then to Montpelier.
Baron’s work is saturated with history, which he sifted and weighed to grasp today’s countless crises more firmly. In poems and prose, he could be fierce and satirical but also tender, fascinated by how we, as individuals, make our way through the tumult of society, knocked about but mostly not — or not always — knocked down. In person, he could seem aloof, but friends knew he was rapt in thought — one of those people who actually thought before speaking.
His lithe and searching 2006 memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring, about his family’s decades of living off the grid, was recently rereleased, its lessons and provocations as fresh as ever.
While in his writing he was able to achieve a detachment like that of an ancient Chinese poet-sage, he was never disengaged. Until his death, he contributed literary and topical essays to magazines across the country; to his Substack, the Exciting Nightmare; and to the online journal Vox Populi.
During his Maine years, Baron was a librarian. By the time he came to Vermont, he’d become one of the nation’s preeminent instructors in teaching poetry. You can find Baron’s pedagogical verve in two superb guides he cowrote for classroom teachers: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (2000) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day (2004).
A poet’s work survives in readers’ minds and lives — by being read, read again, read aloud and passed along to others.
The poems on this page are from our three recently departed Vermont bards, each addressing the eventuality of death in an intrepid and inventive way.
“Storm” by Ellen Bryant Voigt
one minute a slender pine indistinguishable from the others
the next its trunk horizontal still green the jagged stump
a nest for the flickers
one minute high wind and rain the skies
lit up the next a few bright winking stars the lashing of the brook
one minute an exaltation in the apple trees the shadblow trees
the next white trash on the ground new birds
or the same birds crowding the feeder
one minute the children were sleeping in their beds
you got sick you got well you got sick
the lilac bush we planted is a tree the cat creeps past
with something in her mouth she’s hurrying down to where
the culvert overflowed one minute bright yellow
marsh marigolds springing up the next
the farmer sweeps them into his bales of hay
From Headwaters: Poems. © 2013 Ellen Bryant Voigt. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
“Two for the Reaper” by David Huddle
1.
When spring finally arrives,
what we like to do just at dusk
on the first warm day is drive slowly
through the big Catholic graveyard
between Willard and Prospect,
Lindsey and Bess and Molly and I reading
from our rolled-down car windows
what we can make out from the gravestones,
our voices saying aloud the words,
our voices sounding out the names.
2.
As before you arrived,
the teenagers who became
your mother and father,
before they even met each other,
in the most private moments
of their separate lives
imagined you,
so may it be after you’ve gone,
your son smiling over
how you pronounced a word,
your granddaughter remembering
your secret, that you liked
to walk through the house naked
after your bath.
From Glory River (Louisiana State University Press, 2008). All rights reserved.
“Leaving” by Baron Wormser
Not to be here anymore, not to hear
The cat’s fat purring, not to smell
Wood smoke, wet dog, cheap cologne, good cologne,
Not to see the sun and the stars, oaks
And asters, snow and rain, every form
I take mostly for granted, makes me sad
But pleased to be writing down these words,
Pleased to have been one more who got the chance
To participate, who raised his hand although
He didn’t know the answer or understand
The question. No matter. The leaving makes me sad;
So much was offered, so freely and completely.
From Unidentified Sighing Objects (CavanKerry Press, 2015). All rights reserved.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Last Words | A writer reflects on the loss of a trio of Vermont’s major poetic and prose voices this year”
This article appears in The Reading Issue 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!