On Wednesday, September 24th, the acclaimed poet and lyric essayist Lisa Olstein read her recent work for the first installment in the Poetry at Bennington series in Tishman Lecture Hall. She read excerpts from her collection Dream Apartment and her newest work, titled Distinguished Office of Echoes.
An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by Dumanis. Additionally, students were invited to attend two additional events featuring Olstein: first, a Q&A about poetry facilitated by Dumanis at 12:30pm in CAPA Symposium on Thursday, September 25 and second, a craft talk titled “Chords, Nets, and Time Mechanics” at 2:30 pm in Cricket Hill Barn on the same day.
Olstein is the author of six books with Copper Canyon Press. She is a former John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, as well as the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Hayden Carruth Award, Writers League of Texas Discovery Book Award, and Sustainable Arts Foundation award. She currently works as a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs.
Olstein describes the poems in Dream Apartment as being inhabited by a “dream logic” and “dream architecture.” Some are a sort of Jacob’s ladder, a cascading, gentler movement, while others are “nautilistic and epic.” The style is repetitive and full of enjambment, which aids in creating the strange dream-feel used to articulate feelings of grief and ecological despair.
Distinguished Office of Echoes is a mixed-media collection of collage and blackout poetry. It is quite a shift from her other material, though it follows the same intuitive, organic form as her other work. Poems deal with themes such as death, loss, and illness, all while examining outdated texts with a new, feminist lens. She used vastly different materials, from 1865 studies on marine invertebrates to Greek textbooks from the ’30s.
A college-wide email sent by professor and Director of Poetry at the College, Michael Dumanis mentions: “A collection of three collage-cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together…Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts—their taxonomies and lexicons, assumptions and elisions—casting a feminist gaze on outdated histories while discovering new intimacies in their midst. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration.”
Olstein’s commitment to following her intuition was then reiterated through a brief Q&A. She outlined her process for the creation of Distinguished Office of Echoes. Over a span of 16 years, she collected the books, all with the knowledge that she would need an extended period of time to immerse herself in the project. Over a 9-month span in the height of the pandemic, she found that she could finally assemble them into a cohesive collection. To retain her voice throughout the process, she created a few procedural restraints. She challenged herself to find images and words within a single page. Once she started, she didn’t allow herself to revise. The process was one of thread-following, not editorializing. The reading was followed by book signing. Copies of Distinguished Office of Echoes and Dream Apartment were sold in Tishman (and are now available at the College bookstore). The next installment in the Poetry at Bennington series is a reading from poets Vievee Francis and Matthew Olzmann on October 1st.
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