A poetry reading featuring the 2006 Emily Dickinson Lecturer and Poet-in-Residence, Ellen Bryant Voigt, will be held tonight in the Palmer Museum of Art.

The reading, which will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium, is the conclusion of Voigt's weeklong stay here in Happy Valley. She has been visiting undergraduate creative writing classes since Wednesday and meeting individually with Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate students to personally review their work with them.

This is the third year of the poet-in-residence program sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts, the English department and an endowment established by George and Barbara Kelly.

Voigt encourages students not to be intimidated by a poetry reading, which most people think will be too contemporary or obtuse for the ordinary person to follow.

"I think that these aren't characteristics of poetry readings. One always hopes that people will not be afraid of it," she said.

On Wednesday afternoon, she delivered a lecture titled "Syntax In Poetry: The Song Within the Language" in Foster Auditorium to a crowd of about 50 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty.

During her lecture, Voigt discussed the different styles of Faulkner, Hemingway, Whitman and Dickinson.

She encouraged the audience to think more about a creative structure when writing poetry, rather than following the standards of prose. "There's no reason in the world for your sentences to be boring," she said. "You do yourself a tremendous disservice if you believe that is the only way to be clear."

Voigt has six collections of poetry published that collectively have won many awards. A native Virginian, she teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and lives in Cabot, Vt.